The oldest message in a bottle thrown into the sea contained no cry for help, but included a German experiment to map ocean currents. That was over 135 years ago.
In 2018, while swimming about fifty meters from the shore near Wedge Island, Western Australia, Tonya Illman came across an old gin bottle with a rolled up sheet of paper inside. She returns to the beach to examine her relic. The cork is missing, but surprisingly the bottle and its contents appear to be in good condition. So what did this message contain?
It was not a cry for help, but a testimony to an old German experiment aimed at map ocean currents.
Between 1864 and 1933, thousands of bottles were thrown overboard, each containing a piece of paper bearing the date, the exact coordinates of the ship when the bottle was dropped, the name of the ship, its port of origin. tether and the route he was taking.
On the back of this piece of paper was a questionnaire. Whoever found the bottle had to note when and where the bottle was found, then return the note either to the German Naval Observatory in Hamburg or to the nearest German consulate.
950 km and 132 ans
For the case that interests us today, Tonya’s husband, Kym Illman, was able to make out a date (June 12, 1886), as well as the coordinates, the route (Cardiff to Makassar) and the name of the ship (Paula ). Experts from the Western Australian Museum then gained access to the message and quickly confirmed that the bottle and paper were from the correct period. A boat named Paula had also indeed traveled the route specified in 1886.
A search of archives in Germany also allowed researchers to get their hands on Paula’s original weather diary. And, indeed, the captain of the ship had recorded “a bottle adrift” on June 12, 1886.
« The date and contact details correspond exactly to those visible on the message“, underlined Ross Anderson, curator at the WA Museum, in 2018. “ A comparison of the handwriting of the captain’s signed message and Paula’s Meteorological Journal shows that the writing is identical in terms of cursive style, slant, font, spacing, line emphasis, capitalization and numbering style« .
According to this information, the bottle and its message would have sailed in the middle of the Indian Ocean for 132 years before being discovered in almost 950 kilometers from the place where they had been thrown. Naturally, this isn’t the first bottle to be found. On the other hand, it is indeed the oldest. Before her, the oldest bottle had been found 108 years and 138 days after its launch at sea. It was part of a similar experience carried out in Great Britain.
These kinds of fascinating discoveries raise questions about the traces left by humanity in the oceans. These messages, witnesses to scientific experiments or simple life stories, also remind us that our seas still conceal many mysteries. Between testimonies of the past and objects drifting with the currents, each bottle found is a time capsule that allows us to better understand the interactions between man and his environment, while captivating the collective imagination.
