I am talking about the time some four five hundred years back when the renaissance had started spreading its’ wings in Europe. Every adventurer was busy planning their travel route mast and adjusting the sails with a vision to discover the world and establish new trade links. Perhaps history was witnessing the greatest change till then, the geographies were changing and new maps were replacing the old ones.
The fourteenth century to sixteenth century was termed as age of discoveries. The adventures of Marco Polo, Columbus, Captain Cook, Bartholomew Diaz, Vasco Da Gama have been well recorded, studied and are part of folklore.
Along with them, there are stories of failures, ship-wrecks, and defeats in sea wars, and natural calamities that would have brought down thousands of ships to the bottom of the sea floor.
The ships were destined to sink and rest in peace on the ocean floor, only to be resided by sea animals and decorated by sea weeds, shells, and planktons.
But few lighter objects were having a different fate. Lighter objects sail on sea. They flow with the current of the ocean and reach different destinations. Before the discovery of wireless in the twentieth century, sailors of wrecked ships used to write S.O.S messages and pack it in a wine bottle. They used to cork those and float numerous such bottles for others to know their whereabouts, current locations, how the ship was damaged, messages to their friends and family members and may be pirates or traders could divulge even information about their hidden treasures. From rescue pleas, farewell messages to random information, all have found their place.
A message in a bottle is a form of communication whereby a message is sealed in a container or a bottle and released into the ocean. This was prevalent before the advent of wireless communication.
Bottles containing such messages do not always start moving in the ocean. They require strong ocean current to leave their location. Such messages seldom used to reach the intended readers. In most of cases, the bottles must be carrying on with their fate of floating forever. Even if one goes on a spree to spot such messages, the transparent bottles are submerged in the sea water and difficult to find. Looking at the vast spread of the oceans, the only possibility of finding such messages is the coincidence of the bottle being struck at any shore or island. Many of them are found by fishermen and sea hunters.
Ancient Greek Philosopher Theophrastus is believed to be first to release such messages in around 310 B.C. He tried it to test if Atlantic Ocean was pouring its waters into the Mediterranean Sea.
During the age of discoveries in 16th Century, Queen Elizabeth I had even created a position “Uncorker of the Ocean bottles”. Anyone else opening such bottles could face death penalty. It was widely believed that bottles contained information by British spies.
There are various researches institutes across the world interested in research of such lost properties. California based Scripps Institute of Oceanography has shown a greater interest in such research. The information shared via bottled messages helps them know about many tragic ship wrecks. This also gives a clue or two about the ocean currents. Drift bottles gave oceanographers at the start of the last century important information that allowed them to create pictures of the patterns of water circulation in the seas around the world.
It has always been a question of debate about which bottled message is the oldest floated. The records keep breaking as new bottles get discovered. So inspired was Jules Verne by the bottled messages that they formed a key element in the plot of his novel “In search of Castaways.”
Let me share with you some of the tit-bits & interesting incidents about such bottles that I have collected over the years reading on this top.
1. When you start discussing on bottled messages, this incident is among the most famous ones. The event dates back to some hundred years back, in 1916. A British sailor observed a bottle while sailing in the North Atlantic Ocean, when he saw a floating bottle. He picked the bottle and read the message. It was from a passenger from the British passenger steamer ‘Lusitania’, which was torpedoed by German submarine on May 7, 1915, near Ireland. World War had started in 1914, and half the world was in its clutches. A hapless passenger from the steamer carrying 1198 passengers had written the message during the last minutes of his life. “Still on deck with a few people. The last boats have left. We are sinking fast. Some men near me are praying with a priest. The end is near. Maybe this note will—” the message was incomplete. The piece of information was historic. The steamer had 128 US citizens, which provoked the US to enter the Great War leading to the downfall of the Axis invasion.
2. A steamer named ‘Kent’, belonging to the East India Company began its journey from England to Kolkata on February 19, 1825. But soon it caught fire. A British army officer Major Duncan McGregor was travelling in the steamer. He quickly wrote a message using a pencil and floated it, “We are all drowning. This is my last message to my wife and my relatives.- Major Duncan McGregor.”. It was his great luck that somehow McGregor survived, and got settled in Barbados, West Indies. Once his servant found a bottled message on the shore which he presented to his master. McGregor could not believe his luck. It was the same message that he had floated nine years back on that fateful day when Kent was gulfed by fire. That is how the ocean currents flow. The site of the tragedy of Kent is 8000 Kms away from Barbados. It is indeed a great coincidence that the message returned safely to the owner.
3. Another of the believe-it-or-not incident is about a Japanese Treasure hunter Chunosuke Matsuyama. In 1784, he set out in search of treasures looted by Chinese pirates when his ship was damaged by sea currents near a barren island. Chunosuke was destined to die starving. But he sculpted a message asking help on a piece of wood & put it in a bottle, which kept floating in the sea before it reached the shores of the village where Chunosuke lived. However the piece of wood was found in 1935, some 150 years later that the date it was posted.
4. This will indeed blow your mind. An American citizen got hold of a bottled message that was floated by Diasy Alexander in 1939 giving half of her property worth 12 Million Dollars. The beneficiary was working as a dish washer in a dingy restaurant.
5. During the First World War, in 1914, A British soldier Private Thomas Hughes floated a message to his wife inside a green coloured ginger beer bottle in the English Channel. He became a martyr a couple of days latter while fighting in France against the German forces. . In 1999, fisherman Steve Gowan found the bottle in the River Thames. The intended recipient, Mrs. Hughes had died in 1979. It was delivered in 1999 to Private Hughes' 86-year old daughter living in New Zealand.
6. There are many incidents of people getting responses via floated messages, even developing relationships, becoming pen friends which usually do not gather much limelight. Harold Hackett's hobby, tossing messages in a bottle into the ocean, proves that even the most outdated and unreliable form of 'social networking' can still work in our booking the face, twittering the tweet world. He sent 4,800 messages via the Atlantic and received over 3,000 messages back from all over the world.
7. A Swedish sailor, Ake Viking found his lady love via oceanogram, long before social media revolutionized the world. He floated a message in 1956, “To Someone Beautiful and Far Away,” was corked in a bottle and dispatched into the ocean. He received a reply two years later. “I am not beautiful, but it seems so miraculous that this little bottle should have traveled so far and long to reach me that I must send you an answer,” she replied. The two began a correspondence that ended in Viking’s move to Sicily to marry his match made by the sea.
8. The world record holder is the one which spent 98 years in the wavy waters. A message in a bottle that was lost at sea for nearly a century has claimed a new world record, according to Guinness officials. The 97-year-old letter, discovered just off the Shetland isles, claims the title for the longest time a bottle has been adrift at sea. It was discovered by Scottish skipper Andrew Leaper as he hauled in his fishing nets. He compared the astonishing find to "winning the lottery." Coincidentally, the 43-year-old was skippering the same boat which had set the previous record, the Shetland-based vessel Copious. Previous record holder Mark Anderson was also on board when the bottle was found. Released in June, 1914 by Captain CH Brown of the Glasgow School of Navigation, it contained a postcard promising a reward of six pence to the finder.
So, I guess this off beat topic could review your interests in bottled messaged. Cheers to the spirit of Bottled messages.
The fourteenth century to sixteenth century was termed as age of discoveries. The adventures of Marco Polo, Columbus, Captain Cook, Bartholomew Diaz, Vasco Da Gama have been well recorded, studied and are part of folklore.
Along with them, there are stories of failures, ship-wrecks, and defeats in sea wars, and natural calamities that would have brought down thousands of ships to the bottom of the sea floor.
The ships were destined to sink and rest in peace on the ocean floor, only to be resided by sea animals and decorated by sea weeds, shells, and planktons.
But few lighter objects were having a different fate. Lighter objects sail on sea. They flow with the current of the ocean and reach different destinations. Before the discovery of wireless in the twentieth century, sailors of wrecked ships used to write S.O.S messages and pack it in a wine bottle. They used to cork those and float numerous such bottles for others to know their whereabouts, current locations, how the ship was damaged, messages to their friends and family members and may be pirates or traders could divulge even information about their hidden treasures. From rescue pleas, farewell messages to random information, all have found their place.
A message in a bottle is a form of communication whereby a message is sealed in a container or a bottle and released into the ocean. This was prevalent before the advent of wireless communication.
Bottles containing such messages do not always start moving in the ocean. They require strong ocean current to leave their location. Such messages seldom used to reach the intended readers. In most of cases, the bottles must be carrying on with their fate of floating forever. Even if one goes on a spree to spot such messages, the transparent bottles are submerged in the sea water and difficult to find. Looking at the vast spread of the oceans, the only possibility of finding such messages is the coincidence of the bottle being struck at any shore or island. Many of them are found by fishermen and sea hunters.
Ancient Greek Philosopher Theophrastus is believed to be first to release such messages in around 310 B.C. He tried it to test if Atlantic Ocean was pouring its waters into the Mediterranean Sea.
During the age of discoveries in 16th Century, Queen Elizabeth I had even created a position “Uncorker of the Ocean bottles”. Anyone else opening such bottles could face death penalty. It was widely believed that bottles contained information by British spies.
There are various researches institutes across the world interested in research of such lost properties. California based Scripps Institute of Oceanography has shown a greater interest in such research. The information shared via bottled messages helps them know about many tragic ship wrecks. This also gives a clue or two about the ocean currents. Drift bottles gave oceanographers at the start of the last century important information that allowed them to create pictures of the patterns of water circulation in the seas around the world.
It has always been a question of debate about which bottled message is the oldest floated. The records keep breaking as new bottles get discovered. So inspired was Jules Verne by the bottled messages that they formed a key element in the plot of his novel “In search of Castaways.”
Let me share with you some of the tit-bits & interesting incidents about such bottles that I have collected over the years reading on this top.
1. When you start discussing on bottled messages, this incident is among the most famous ones. The event dates back to some hundred years back, in 1916. A British sailor observed a bottle while sailing in the North Atlantic Ocean, when he saw a floating bottle. He picked the bottle and read the message. It was from a passenger from the British passenger steamer ‘Lusitania’, which was torpedoed by German submarine on May 7, 1915, near Ireland. World War had started in 1914, and half the world was in its clutches. A hapless passenger from the steamer carrying 1198 passengers had written the message during the last minutes of his life. “Still on deck with a few people. The last boats have left. We are sinking fast. Some men near me are praying with a priest. The end is near. Maybe this note will—” the message was incomplete. The piece of information was historic. The steamer had 128 US citizens, which provoked the US to enter the Great War leading to the downfall of the Axis invasion.
2. A steamer named ‘Kent’, belonging to the East India Company began its journey from England to Kolkata on February 19, 1825. But soon it caught fire. A British army officer Major Duncan McGregor was travelling in the steamer. He quickly wrote a message using a pencil and floated it, “We are all drowning. This is my last message to my wife and my relatives.- Major Duncan McGregor.”. It was his great luck that somehow McGregor survived, and got settled in Barbados, West Indies. Once his servant found a bottled message on the shore which he presented to his master. McGregor could not believe his luck. It was the same message that he had floated nine years back on that fateful day when Kent was gulfed by fire. That is how the ocean currents flow. The site of the tragedy of Kent is 8000 Kms away from Barbados. It is indeed a great coincidence that the message returned safely to the owner.
3. Another of the believe-it-or-not incident is about a Japanese Treasure hunter Chunosuke Matsuyama. In 1784, he set out in search of treasures looted by Chinese pirates when his ship was damaged by sea currents near a barren island. Chunosuke was destined to die starving. But he sculpted a message asking help on a piece of wood & put it in a bottle, which kept floating in the sea before it reached the shores of the village where Chunosuke lived. However the piece of wood was found in 1935, some 150 years later that the date it was posted.
4. This will indeed blow your mind. An American citizen got hold of a bottled message that was floated by Diasy Alexander in 1939 giving half of her property worth 12 Million Dollars. The beneficiary was working as a dish washer in a dingy restaurant.
5. During the First World War, in 1914, A British soldier Private Thomas Hughes floated a message to his wife inside a green coloured ginger beer bottle in the English Channel. He became a martyr a couple of days latter while fighting in France against the German forces. . In 1999, fisherman Steve Gowan found the bottle in the River Thames. The intended recipient, Mrs. Hughes had died in 1979. It was delivered in 1999 to Private Hughes' 86-year old daughter living in New Zealand.
6. There are many incidents of people getting responses via floated messages, even developing relationships, becoming pen friends which usually do not gather much limelight. Harold Hackett's hobby, tossing messages in a bottle into the ocean, proves that even the most outdated and unreliable form of 'social networking' can still work in our booking the face, twittering the tweet world. He sent 4,800 messages via the Atlantic and received over 3,000 messages back from all over the world.
7. A Swedish sailor, Ake Viking found his lady love via oceanogram, long before social media revolutionized the world. He floated a message in 1956, “To Someone Beautiful and Far Away,” was corked in a bottle and dispatched into the ocean. He received a reply two years later. “I am not beautiful, but it seems so miraculous that this little bottle should have traveled so far and long to reach me that I must send you an answer,” she replied. The two began a correspondence that ended in Viking’s move to Sicily to marry his match made by the sea.
8. The world record holder is the one which spent 98 years in the wavy waters. A message in a bottle that was lost at sea for nearly a century has claimed a new world record, according to Guinness officials. The 97-year-old letter, discovered just off the Shetland isles, claims the title for the longest time a bottle has been adrift at sea. It was discovered by Scottish skipper Andrew Leaper as he hauled in his fishing nets. He compared the astonishing find to "winning the lottery." Coincidentally, the 43-year-old was skippering the same boat which had set the previous record, the Shetland-based vessel Copious. Previous record holder Mark Anderson was also on board when the bottle was found. Released in June, 1914 by Captain CH Brown of the Glasgow School of Navigation, it contained a postcard promising a reward of six pence to the finder.
So, I guess this off beat topic could review your interests in bottled messaged. Cheers to the spirit of Bottled messages.
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