I was thinking about the scene in the movie Master and Commander where Hollom kills himself by holding a cannonball or something and jumping into the Ocean. Now I’m not sure how much the object weighed exactly but let us assume it weighed 50 or so pounds, how far below the surface could a person actually get before they died or succombed to unconsciousness?
My WAG: We would have to calculate how deep a 200lb man clutching a 50lb cannonball would sink in say 50 degree seawater in about 90 seconds which is (IMO) the duration that an average person can hold their breath before losing conciousness.
Someone else will have to run those numbers.
You know what the problem with this is? Wouldn’t he let go of the cannonball as he lost conciousness? It would make more sense if he had put the cannonball in his coat pocket, or something.
For that matter I think he might reflexively let go of it and start swimming for the surface, regardless of how depressed he was when he jumped in.
Could a person even commit suicide this way?
Well for the hypotetical just assume it is handcuffed to him or in some way attached so that he can’t let go of the object.
So, is that a cannonball in your pocket, or are you unhappy to see me?
By that point, it would be pretty hypothetical. I mean, what would they do - turn the ship around?
Well, in the movie I don’t think the ship was underway. In fact they were becalmed.
But I get your point, it wouldn’t be easy to locate someone in the water in the dark with the technology available to them.
If he got deeper than he could get to the surface (conscious or unconscious) before he had to breathe, he’d drown anyway.
[ nitpick ] The cannonball was no more than 12 pounds (although waterlogged uniform (and boots?) would have increased the ultimate weight) and Hollom looked to be no more than 150 lbs.
A direct plunge from a deck about eight feet above the water holding a weight and making no effort to extend one’s arms to slow the plunge should take a person down quite a ways. (In Boy Scouts, we used to dive on a ten pound block and it was an effort to bring it back up to the surface.) If, at about the time that his will to die gave out, he also lost the ability to hold his breath, he could easily have expelled his breath and lost consciousness, dropping the ball. However, with empty lungs, sodden clothes, and water filled boots, his body might stop descending, but would not necessarily spring back to the surface, even if it eventually did float.
Even with today’s tech, it can be hard to locate something so small as a floating body, even under optimum conditions… The ocean is BIG, and a human is small.
Even with EPIRBs, survival suits, strobes, whistles, and the like, if you go over the side in the middle of the ocean, you are in serious jeopardy.
To pick your nit, (sorry I always wanted to say that,) the cannonball could have been 32 pounds.
Besides the hazards of not being able to hold your breath any longer, is there any additional danger of being deep enough for pressure effects to cause death? I’ve also heard, but am not sure the truth of, that past a certain depth, the pressure cancels out the natural floatation tendencies of the human body and you would have to expend effort in swimming to get to a point closer to the surface where you would start to float again.
o/ It's a great big oce-a-n and we're all really puny, just a tiny little speck about the size of Mickey Rooney... o/
If your determined enough to hold on to that cannon ball until you lose conciousness, you’d be far underwater when you pass out, then drown. Not too complicated.
I’m about 150 pounds, and checking my handy-dandy dive log, I needed ten pounds of weights when I dove without a wetsuit in the Caribbean. I still had positively bouyant equipment, but I’d imagine a 12-pounder would be sufficient to sink a 150 pound man wearing period clothing.
The world record for male free-diving with a weighted assist is 140 meters. That’s a trained athlete who could hold his breath for many minutes, but obviously he also had to conserve enough air to make it back to the surface again. I think it took him about 2 1/2 minutes to reach that depth.
I doubt an ordinary person could get past 40-50 meters without blacking out.
I think you’re overestimating a bit:
“The United States ordnance manual of 1861 lists 12-, 18-, 24-, 32-, and 42-pounder guns.”
This was for large ships (like the one in this movie). Smaller ships would have 3-, 6-, or 9-pounder cannonballs.
Yeah I didn’t really think about how much even a mere 20 pounds feels underwater, so maybe between 24 and 32 would be a better hypothetical weight.
Didn’t some gal poet do it?
In one of the other novels
While being chased, Jack loses way by letting the sails loose to stop the ship and put a boat over to rescue a child who falls off.
In the original novel, before the movie concatenated multiple novels together, Audrey’s French adversary was a light frigate, but Audrey had only a brig-rigged sloop-of-war with no guns larger than 12 pounders.
It had been a while since I saw the film and forgot that the movie had uprated his ship to a small frigate.