I suppose we have all hoped to find a real message in a bottle, a note from some far away land just waiting to be discovered.  

On January 21, 2018, Tonya and Kym Illman, were walking along the beach’s sand dunes at Wedge Island on the west coast of Australia about 100 miles north of Perth.  Their original plan had been to drive along the beach and take in the sites, but they drove a little too close to the water and the car bogged down in the sand.  While waiting for help to arrive, Tonya and Kym walked along the beach.  As they walked, Tonya saw something glimmer in the sand.  She walked to the source of the glimmer and found a gin bottle which was three inches wide and almost nine inches tall with Daniel Visser and Zonen Schiedam stamped on it.  Tonya saw that something was inside the bottle and removed the stopper.  The paper inside contained a printed message which appeared to be a form letter in German with spaces that had been filled in.  Neither Tonya nor Kym could read German, so they took the bottle to the Western Australia Museum to see if it was historically significant or a hoax.

Experts at the museum deciphered the German message and learned that the message had been set adrift at the orders of the captain of a German ship called “Paula.”  The message in a bottle was a part of an experiment on ocean drift patterns implemented by German scientist George von Neumayer.  In the experiment, ship captains filled in the details on one side of the pre-printed slips before setting the bottle adrift, and the person who found the bottle was asked to fill out the back portion and return it to the German Naval Observatory in Hamburg or the nearest German Consulate.  Thousands of bottles containing pre-printed message slips had been set adrift in the experiment which lasted nearly seven decades, but only 661 had ever been returned.  Tonya’s find brought the number up to 662.

According to the coordinates printed on the message (32.49 South, 105.25 East), Tonya and Kym found the bottle less than 600 miles from where the bottle was set adrift in the Indian Ocean.  The distance in miles that the message traveled is not particularly impressive.  Messages in bottles have traveled much further before being found.  What is impressive is the distance in time that the bottle traveled.  In the year that the bottle was set adrift, Robert Louis Stevenson published his novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Karl Benz patented the first successful gasoline-driven automobile, Dr. John Pemberton invented Coca-Cola, President Grover Cleveland married Frances Folsom in the White House, (he is the only president to marry in the executive mansion), President Cleveland dedicated the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, and German inventor Friedrich Soennecken invented the office tool we know as the hole puncher.  The date on the message in the bottle was June 12, 1886, which meant the bottle was found after 131 years and 223 days.  According to the Guinness World Records, it is the oldest message in a bottle ever found.  

Sources:

1. Chicago Tribune, March 11, 2018, p.29.
2. “Oldest Message in a Bottle,” Guinness World Records, March 8, 2018, https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/oldest-message-in-a-bottle.