And I complain about slow internet!

Even in 2023, it still seems incredible to me that I'm able to send a message from the middle of the Pacific Ocean that can be read anywhere in the world literally seconds later! It’s especially amazing when we consider some ways messages were sent in years past. Today’s Currents newsletter included an article “Mysterious Message in a Bottle” that I found interesting so I will share it here on my blog. The stories are from a 1976 Reader’s Digest.

 

much slower than the internet!

 

The longest bottle voyage is thought to have been made by a bottle known as the Flying Dutchman. It was launched by a German scientific expedition in 1929 in the southern Indian Ocean. Inside was a message which could be read without breaking the bottle, asking the finder to report where he found it and throw it back into the sea. It apparently caught an east going current which carried it to the southern tip of South America. There it was found, reported and thrown back again several times. Eventually, it moved out into the Atlantic, then again into the Indian Ocean, passing roughly the spot where it had been dropped and was cast ashore on the west coast of Australia in 1935. It had covered 16,000 miles in 2,447 days (a little over 6.5 years) – a respectable average of more than six nautical miles a day.

It is impossible to predict the direction a bottle will take. Of two bottles dropped together off the Brazilian coast, one drifted east for 130 days and was found on a beach in Africa; the other floated northwest for 190 days, reaching Nicaragua.

In 1953 a bottle was found in Tasmania – 37 years after it had been dropped overboard by two Australian soldiers on their way to France in a troopship. The mother of one of the soldiers recognized the handwriting of her son who had been killed in action in 1918.

A message found on a beach in Maine in 1944 read: ‘Our ship is sinking. SOS didn’t do any good. Think it’s the end. Maybe this message will get to the U.S. some day.’ It was identified as coming from the USS Beatty, a destroyer torpedoed with heavy loss of life somewhere off Gibraltar on November 6, 1943.

Speed is also bound to vary according to wind and current. A bottle might be completely becalmed or, if caught up by the Gulf Steam at its raciest, might travel along at four knots and cover as many as 100 miles a day. Fragile as it is, a well-sealed bottle is one of the world’s most seaworthy objects. It will bob safely through hurricanes that can sink great ships. And for most practical purposes glass lasts forever. In 1954, 18 bottles were salvaged from a ship sunk 250 years before off the English coast. The liquor in them was unrecognizable, but the bottles were good as new.