It’s the break of day in a small European
village circa 1650. Amid the sound of chickens clucking and the
distant moos of cows, a blacksmith’s hammer can be heard. A woman carries a pail of milk across the
road, and as she stops to wipe the sweat from her face, she sees in the distance an approaching
mass of ragged-looking men. Soon after, people are dragged screaming from
their homes. Children’s cries fill the village. The marauders, savages without a modicum of
morality, tie one man down to a wooden board. His mouth is pulled open and a wedge is forced
between his teeth. He’s asked one time to tell them where the
money is hidden. The marauders hold a bucket of human waste
over his head, a noxious mixture of urine and excrement. He’s about to taste the lethal Swedish Drink. You can only imagine what it would be like
to be forced to swallow a bucket of pee and poop, but it seems that wasn’t the only
thing used in this terrible punishment. If no human sewage was on hand, the drink
might well have been boiling hot water or liquid manure. Whatever the case, as you’ll soon see, if
enough of any mixture is force-fed to a human, the results can be horrifying. But before we get into the physical side of
things, let’s have a look at where this particularly disgusting punishment came from. It’s called the “Swedish Drink”, so
it looks as though we can blame the Swedes for this one. This is apparently how it came to life. From 1618 to 1648 there was something called
the “Thirty Years' War” in Europe, which while you might not have heard of it, was
one of the deadliest wars in European history. It’s thought that as many as eight million
people lost their lives, but the war itself is not something we’re going to discuss
in detail today. All you need to know is that much of the war
was fought in Germany, and for all manner of reasons, including commercial rivalries,
religion, and territory, many countries were at each other’s throats. After it finished the map of Europe looked
significantly different, with many nations gaining or having to concede territory. Ok, so now the floor is set, you need to know
that Sweden was one of the main countries involved. It amassed an army, but it also hired regular
citizens as mercenaries. They weren’t exactly paid a lot, so part
of the deal was that they got to raid villages and keep the spoils. They did so all over Germany, and at times
used the method of torture talked about today to get what they wanted. The drink was actually given a German name,
“Schwedentrunk” since it was German victims that suffered the ordeal and Swedish mercenaries
that handed it out. The problem was, often the most valuable things
in a town or village were hidden, so the mercenaries invented this torture to get people to speak. Why they concocted the Swedish Drink and didn’t
just chop off a few fingers we’ll never know…perhaps the drink put the fear of God
in people, or the mercenaries just enjoyed the process. It’s more likely it just worked very well
in extracting confessions. It was indeed horrific, so it was something
you’d think would get people talking before the first bits of the drink were administered. What was in the drink would change, but it
was usually anything awful the mercenaries could get their hands on. That was human excrement, animal feces, sludge,
urine, and generally anything else you wouldn’t want in your stomach. It goes without saying that swallowing a load
of this stuff would not have been pleasant, but then there were bacterial infections to
think about on top of the nasty experience itself. You also have to think about what would happen
if they just kept pouring? Would a person internally explode? Before we get to that you need to know that
word on the street says once the person was significantly bloated, the mercenaries would
then start doing things like walking over the victims’ distended bellies. They’d be prodded with sticks, punched,
and according to some sources, have their stomach pressed at each side with wooden boards. The pain of that was of course excruciating,
but it’s best we don’t go any further until we hear some real-life accounts of the
Swedish Drink. Oh, and so as not to upset our Swedish viewers,
while the torture is eponymous with Sweden, it seems many different armies and their mercenaries
did it. One man that was around in those days was
the German writer, Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen. This is how he described a working model of
the Swedish Drink: “They laid the servant tied on the ground,
stuck a plywood in his mouth, and poured a milk bucket full of nasty dung-pool water
into his body, which they called a Swedish trunk.” Then there was a man named Peter Thiele – no
relation to the investor. He described an event in the German town of
Beelitz in which a man was tortured this way. It went like this. “The robbers and murderers took hold of
the poor people by their throats, stirred water, then poured it in, and yes, probably
people’s feces. The people were miserably tormented for money,
like the one citizen in Beelitz, called David Örtel, and soon he died of it.” It was these few accounts that made the Swedish
Drink a talking point in Europe, but you have to wonder just how common it was. Remember that punishments of the past were
sometimes exaggerated as a means to make the other side look like savages, less than human,
which has always been a go-to kind of propaganda. Nonetheless, it’s very likely there was
such a thing as the Swedish Drink and it’s very likely people died from it. We say that because there’s lots of evidence
of a punishment called the “Water Cure.” It was similar, but different. As for the word ‘cure’, that was American
forces being ironic, since it was far from being a cure. This time the drink in some cases might have
just been water, not the worst thing someone could drink. Although the punishment would consist of forcing
a person’s mouth open and via a funnel, pouring in large amounts of water. The person would fill up, which was painful
enough if not deadly, and if they puked, it would begin again. We now have to look at something that was
called the “Amboyna massacre.” It happened on the Ambon Island in Indonesia
in 1623. The victims were English East India Company
employees, as well as Japanese and Portuguese traders. The perpetrators were people working for the
Dutch East India Company. It seems there was a conspiracy between the
English, Japanese and Portuguese to take out the Dutch so once they were captured they
were tortured. This is how the torture was described:
“They poured the water softly upon his head until the cloth was full, up to the mouth
and nostrils, and somewhat higher; so that he could not draw breath, but he must suck
in the water: which being still continued to be poured in softly, forced all his inward
parts, come out of his nose, ears, eyes, and often as it was stifling and choking him,
at length took away his breath, and brought him to a swoon or fainting.” This action was repeated several times. It sounds a lot like extreme waterboarding,
although the person was pretty much filled up rather than given the occasional break. According to that same writer, the victim
was two or three times bigger in the belly when the torturers were done. Over in France at around the same time the
English were being waterboarded by the Dutch, the French had a torture method called “The
Questioning.” This basically meant having eight pints of
water (3.6 liters) forced by way of a funnel into a person’s mouth. If that didn’t work to make the person spill
the beans, the French had the “Extraordinary Question” which was exactly double the amount
of water. As you’ll soon see, this could be lethal
for many reasons. The inquisitors of Spain weren’t averse
to using water as a kind of punishment, either. We know this because a Scottish guy named
William Lithgow wrote about his experience in a book published in 1632. He said the inquisitors wedged an iron prong
into his mouth. The Spanish called this a “bostezo.” Lithgow had also been starved first. His description was this:
“My hunger-clunged belly waxing great, grew drum-like imbolstered: for it being a suffocating
pain…my throat with a struggling force; it strangled and swallowed up my breath from
yowling and groaning.” Yeah, the language is a bit dated, but you
get the point. Then came the American military, which was
a proponent of the water cure during the Philippine–American War. President Theodore Roosevelt once called it
a “mild torture”, but quickly changed his mind after a fact-finding mission. He then court-martialed an American general
who refused to comply with his order to end the torture. There was also an official report that said,
“A soldier who was with General Funston had stated that he helped to administer the
water cure to one hundred and sixty natives, all but twenty-six of whom died.” It could hardly have been mild. It was also written about in detail by Lieutenant
Grover Flint. He said a Filipino prisoner would be forced
on his back and held down by a bunch of men. His jaw was then held wide open and secured,
after which water was poured down his throat until he became unconscious. In a book written by US author and activist
Sidney Lens, he said that a reporter from the New York Evening Post saw such torture. He said that water just kept being poured
until the man’s body was “an object frightful to contemplate.” The victim was then jumped on until the water
made its way out, and there was a rinse and repeat routine until the person either talked
or died. The question is, whether just water or a bucket
of watery poop, just how much would kill a person? A US pathologist noted in one article that
the average human stomach is good with about one and a half liters of water, and three
liters is a pretty big fill. However, six liters of water could rupture
the stomach. Most people of course wouldn’t even try
to drink that much, but when you’re tied to a piece of wood and have a wedge in your
mouth you don’t really have much choice. The pathologist said that the walls of the
stomach in such a torture would be under so much pressure that the tissue would get weaker
until it tore. The content of the stomach would then enter
parts of the body, causing incredible pain and probably infection. This is likely the point of no return. There’s also another great risk of being
forced to drink lots of water. It’s called water intoxication, and it has
killed many people who drank a lot of water of their own accord. It happened to a 28-year-old California woman
in 2007 after she drank six liters of water in a competition to win a Nintendo game console. She threw up, got a searing headache later,
and then died. It happened in 2005, too, also in the US. A student at California State University was
involved in some kind of hazing ritual which involved him drinking lots and lots of water. It even famously happened to a British raver
back in the day because she’d heard you could get dehydrated after taking ecstasy. She died from excessive water consumption
after downing seven liters. The tabloids demonized the E, but it was the
drink that did it. People have also died from drinking too much
after exercising. In all, water isn’t toxic, but it can be
if you go overboard with drinking it. We don’t mean to scare anyone away from
drinking water. You really have to drink ridiculous amounts
of the stuff in a short period of time. In laymen’s terms, drinking that much will
prevent the kidneys from working as they should and the person’s body for all intents and
purposes will become waterlogged. The cells swell, and as they can’t really
do that too much in the brain, the next step could be seizure, followed by coma, with death
around the corner. In conclusion, whether you’re being filled
with liquid cow dung and human pee-pee, or whether you are being filled with good ole
tap water, the result would be very painful, and if you kept being filled the outcome could
easily be death. Now you need to watch, “WORST Punishments
Kids Received From Their Parents.” Or, for the full story about the Nintendo
console winner, “ What If You Drank Too Much Water? A Woman Did Just That - See What Happened
To Her.”
