World’s oldest message in bottle found on beach

THE world’s oldest known message in a bottle – thrown off a German ship on June 12 1886 – has been found by a family on a remote beach in Australia.

The message was written in German on paper which was bound and tied with string and kept in a 19th-century Dutch gin bottle.

It was thrown off the sailing barque Paula, about 600 nautical miles off the coast of Western Australia.

Fast forward 132 years to when it was found by Tonya Illman, who spotted an object sticking out of the sand while walking with her family near Wedge Island, 160km north of Perth.

“It just looked like a lovely old bottle, so I picked it up thinking it might look good in my bookcase,” she said.

“My son’s girlfriend discovered the note when she went to tip the sand out.

“When we opened it, we saw it [had] very faint German handwriting on it.”

Maritime archaeologist Ross Anderson, of the Western Australian Museum, confirmed that the bottle and paper were authentic, while colleagues in Germany and the Netherlands tracked down handwriting samples from the captain’s entries in the ship’s journal.

“Incredibly, there was an entry for June 12 1886, made by the captain, recording a drift bottle having been thrown overboard,” Anderson said.