Message In A Bottle
8/22/2006 2:59:55 PM by Stacy Wynn
The history of one of the most welcomed finds at sea is filled with stories and fantasy. Let us help you distinguish fact from fiction - and inspire you to throw a bottle or two into the current.
Photo by Skip O’Donnell
The idea of sending or receiving a “message in a bottle” has had a nautical élan for centuries. Theophrastus, a Greek philosopher, is credited with throwing the first sealed bottles into the Mediterranean waters around 310 BC. It was reported that he had no responses. In more modern times, the rock band The Police sang about “Sending out an SOS,” while Hollywood immortalized concept in the film Message in a Bottle, where Robin Wright Penn discovers a poetic and heartrending letter in a bottle that sets her off in search of the letter’s author, played by Kevin Costner.
On a much more practical bent, for more than a decade, oceanographer Curt Ebbesmeyer has been keeping an eye on 29,000 rubber ducky, turtle, beaver, and frog bath toys that went accidentally overboard the Pacific from a containership in January 1992. Winds and currents routed thousands of ducks to Alaska, where many washed ashore. Others traveled the Bering Straight and are now frozen in an Arctic icepack. Yet more were discovered, many years later, bobbing off the coast from Maine all the way to Massachusetts. These ducks are carrying a romantic message of their own - that of scientific data.
In perhaps the shortest bottle journey of all, a local Fort Lauderdale man proposed to his fiancé by tossing a bottle that contained his written proposal into the surf, expecting it to wash back ashore for his girlfriend to find. Ironically, the first bottle was caught in a rip current and taken out to sea, so he had to repeat the plan the following evening. This time he did not toss the bottle so far into the surf. She said yes.
As a class project in Lancashire, England, young students tossed bottles into the sea. Alesha Johnson, 4, tossed her plastic Coca-Cola bottle with all her might but it landed just a few feet in front of her and everyone assumed it would later wash back onto the shore. How wrong they were. Instead, the bottle and message were recovered at a boatyard in Perth, Australia. The most probable journey took the missive into the Atlantic, then towards the Southern Hemisphere via the west coast of Africa, then across the wild waters of the Indian Ocean.
What is perhaps the oddest message/bottle combination of all time is that of a Post-It in an aspirin bottle that led Steve Hartman, a CBS News correspondent, from Waikiki Beach in Hawaii to Ona, West Virginia. The bottle was cracked from rough treatment in the ocean and contained a battered note that Hartman had to reconstruct. The short letter was written as a memorial from Lorretta Cooper, who was later in a CBS News segment, to her late sister Clara Chapman.
Sending out an S.O.S. can, and does, occasionally work. Such was the case for a grateful boatload full of teenagers from Ecuador and Peru who were rescued from their disabled vessel after three days of drifting aimlessly off of Cocos Island, a nature reserve 372 miles off the Costa Rican coast. The simple “Please Help Us” message they tossed overboard was found by a local fisherman who alerted park wardens.
Messages in bottles reached a peak during the 16th century. In fact, Queen Elizabeth I of England even created the official position of “Uncorker of Ocean Bottles.” This was mainly because the British fleet sent messages about enemy movement to those ashore in bottles. As a result, there was a hefty fine for a lay person who opened a sea bottle. Spies of that era also used this seagoing method of communication.
Perhaps the most macabre message in a bottle, and one that sounds like it’s straight out of a Stephen King novel, was from a on board the torpedoed Lusitania. The message, which was retrieved much later, reportedly said: “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 fervor for the swashbuckling drama associated with a message in a bottle hasn’t waned. The internet contains a variety of websites on how to properly address, package, and toss a bottle to increase your chances of a return message, and it’s estimated that thousands of bottles are tossed into waterways and oceans each year. Now if that doesn’t inspire you to write your own message in a bottle, we don’t know what will.
Quick Splash
Now you can write a message and put it into a “virtual” bottle to cast adrift on the Internet Sea, where it will be found by another user anywhere from a week to six months later.
Go to conwasa.demon.co.uk/gis.htm to find out how.