Back in January, on a beach in Western Australia, Tonya Illman found the worlds oldest message in a bottle. Whilst on a beachwalk, she decided to collect some rubbish and came across the bottle thinking it would “look good on the bookshelf”.
When she opened the bottle she found a piece of paper that looked like a rolled up cigarette. It was too fragile to open so they took it home and put it in the oven to soak up some of the moisture. When they first opened up the piece of paper they couldn’t read the handwriting but were able to make out a message saying that if the letter was found they were to contact the German Consulate. Afterwards they noted that the letter had the date of June 12th 1886 and was from the ship, Paula. Tonya and her husband Kym Illman couldn’t quite believe the date so contacted experts at the Western Australian Museum.
Later it was found that the bottle was 132-years-old and had been one of thousands of bottles thrown overboard as part of a 69-year-experiment to track ocean currents. The details reported by the couple have matched up to the Paula maritime records and the handwriting had been compared with other examples of the captain of the ships writing.
The bottle had been thrown from ship in 1886 and travelled over the Indian ocean, 950 km from the Australian coast.
The previous record for the oldest message found in a bottle was 108-years-old.
Ross Anderson, the museum’s assistant curator of maritime archaeology, that amazingly there had been an entry by the ship’s captain mentioning a bottle being thrown overboard.
Of the thousands of other bottles thrown overboard, 662 others have been found from the same German experiment with the latest discovery being found back in 1934.
Sources:
BBC News
The Guardian
