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Bottled up
Did you catch that item a couple of weeks ago about a couple from Western Australia who found a message in a bottle washed up on the beach—just like in the stories. The message, somehow intact, was written in German, and contained an excerpt from a sea captain’s log, together with the coordinates of his ship in the Indian Ocean when the bottle was thrown overboard. The message explained that the bottle was part of an experiment to discover faster shipping routes by analyzing where the currents took bottles.
The couple had the authenticity of the paper, the bottle and the shipping records analyzed and everything checked out. A ship, the Paula, had travelled in the right area on the same route that the note indicated— in 1886, making it the oldest message in a bottle ever found. Researchers think the bottle probably washed up within a year and had been covered by sand that was in turn uncovered by a storm.
This bottle discovery eclipses a previous ocean currents study bottle record, clocked at 98 years and found off the coast of Scotland. That one travelled only nine nautical miles. The oldest message in a bottle found at sea appears to be a 101-year-old bottle tossed into the Baltic Sea in 1913 and recovered in 2014.
Messages found in bottles almost always invite or complete a story. For example, an Australian woman wrote the following from a cruise ship in Indonesia in 2009: “We’re sitting in our balcony pondering. Is it better to love or be loved? Your answer will be appreciated. Call us or write to us.” Over a year later, she got a call from a woman in South Africa, who told her: “I found your bottle. It’s better to be loved. But to be loved you must love.”
A letter in a bottle tossed from a ship travelling from England to Australia in 1936 was found on a beach in New Zealand in 2012. The sender indicated his Australian address, so the finders followed up and discovered he had died in the 1940s, but they were able to contact his grandson, who said “The only connection I have with Grandfather is now that bottle. That’s about all. So, it’s a fascinating story.”
Some stories are tragedies. In 2002, an English woman found a lock of hair and some clothes in a bottle together with a note addressed to the writer’s recently deceased 13-year-old son. “Forgive me for being so angry at your disappearance,” the letter went. “I still think there’s been some mistake, and I keep waiting for God to fix it … Forgive me for not having known how to protect you from death. Forgive me for not having been able to find the words at that terrible moment when you slipped through my fingers.” Initial efforts to find the author failed, until a book was written about the finding and a French woman came forward.
In 2001, a 10-year-old child wrote a note saying “be excellent to yourself, dude” and slipped it into a bottle off Long Island. It was found 11 years later by workers cleaning up after Hurricane Sandy. In the interval, the child had met an accidental death. Her mother, on receving the bottle said “It felt like discovering buried treasure. It was a beautiful message for a mother to get.”
And some bottle stories just read like movie scripts. On Christmas Day in 1945, an American soldier tossed a bottle from a troop carrier. Eight months later, it was found by a milkmaid in Dingle, Ireland; She contacted the American, and they kept up a seven-year correspondence, by which time she had saved enough money to travel to the US. Despite the best efforts of the media, they were unable to make the relationship stick.
In 1979, a US couple on a cruise in Hawaii dropped off champagne bottles with notes asking the recipents to contact them. In 1983, a former Vietnamese soldier on the run from that country’s communist regime found the bottle off the coast of Thailand. The soldier asked the couple for help relocating to the US. The effort was successful and the familes met in Los Angeles in 1985.
So don’t keep your story bottled up: put it in a bottle and cast it to sea. You never know: someone may find it, and the circumstances of its discovery may make the story even better. It could even wind up on the Internet
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