Message in a bottle found after 132 years
AUSTRALIA: It looked like a rolled-up cigarette, damp and covered in sand, nestling in an old bottle half buried on the beach. The Illmans, from Perth in Australia, took it home and popped it into the oven for five minutes to dry it out.
‘‘Then we unrolled it and saw printed writing,’’ Kym Illman said. ‘‘We could not see the handwritten ink at that point, but saw a printed message that asked the reader to contact the German consulate when they found the note.’’
The Illmans had discovered the world’s oldest known message in a bottle, nearly 132 years after it was tossed from a German ship. The bottle was found on a beach near Wedge Island, about 160 kilometres north of Perth, and had been thrown into the Indian Ocean from the German sailing barque Paula in 1886.
It was jettisoned as part of a
69-year experiment in which thousands of bottles were used to help research ocean currents and faster shipping routes.
‘‘It just looked like a lovely old bottle, so I picked it up thinking it might look good in my bookcase,’’ Tonya Illman said.
The message, dated June 12,
1886, said the bottle was thrown from the Paula 950km from the West Australian coast.
The previous record for a message in a bottle is 108 years, four months and 18 days.
After conducting some research, the Illmans concluded that they had either made a historically significant discovery or were the victims of a hoax.
From 1864 until 1933, thousands of bottles were thrown into the sea from German ships, each containing a form showing the date it was jettisoned, the co-ordinates, the ship’s name, home port and route.
The finder was asked to write when and where the bottle had been found and return it either to the German Naval Observatory in Hamburg or the nearest German consulate. The Illmans took the bottle to the Western Australian Museum, where Ross Anderson, the assistant curator of maritime archaeology, identified it as a midto-late 19th century Dutch gin bottle.
His colleagues in the Netherlands and Germany compared the handwriting with entries in the Paula’s meteorological journal.
‘‘Incredibly, there was an entry for June 12, 1886, made by the captain, recording a drift bottle having been thrown overboard,’’ Anderson said.
The bottle was given to the Western Australian Museum for display. -