Tyler Ivanoff took his family on a boat trip to a remote beach in western Alaska. While his children plucked salmon-berries on a hillside, Ivanoff looked for driftwood to light a camp-fire. A green bottle in the sand caught his eye. He noticed a curled up piece of paper inside it. He uncorked the bottle, pulled out the paper. It had words, faded but legible, and Ivanoff recognised the language – Russian.
That night, he posted a picture of the note on his Facebook page. “Can anyone out there translate this Russian note?” he wrote. Many did. They note said, “Sincere greetings! From the Russian Far East Fleet mother ship VRXF Sulak. I greet you who finds the bottle and request that you respond to the address Viadivostok – 43 BRXF Sulak to the whole crew. We wish you good health and long years of life and happy sailing. 20 June 1969.”
Russian reporters who read the story tracked down its author: Captain Anatoly Botsanenko , 86, living in Crimea. They took the note to him. The captain cried as he recognised his handwriting. He said he had tossed his message into the sea when he was 36 and serving abroad the Sulak, a ship he had helped construct and then sailed on until 1970.
Ivanoff was thrilled that he writer of the note was traced. He hopes to meet the Captain one day.
Messages have been sent in bottles for centuries for various reasons. Some seek help, others send love, and a few did it to satisfy their curiosity. Bottles messages have bobbed in the sea to collect data on ocean currents, for fun, or hoaxes or simply for “timepass.”
The need to connect
Sending a message in a bottle satisfies a basic need: to connect with another human being. The thrill of this activity is its uncertainty: will it ever be picked up? When? Delivering a message by sea and expecting it to reach someone who will retrieve it is like believing in magic!
How did it begin?
A popular story about how the practice started is this: Theophrastus, an ancient Greek philosopher and scientist, sent the first messages in bottles around 300 B.C. But there is no evidence is that the first messages in bottles were sent by ocean scientists in the 18th and 19th centuries. Some of these bottles are still being found today.
In those years, “drift bottles” were considered the best means to study ocean currents. People wanted to know how water moved around the ocean. This knowledge would help plan shipping times and naval operations. As populations grew, it became necessary to understand how waste discharged from the shore and from vessels at sea would move around and impact human and marine life. So, one could say that the need to study ocean currents started the practice of sending messages in bottles.
For a bit of drama
Over the years, pushing a note into a bottle and tossing it into the sea became a dramatic method to connect with someone. It also became part of pop culture. Nicholas Spark wrote about it; Sting sang about it. Edgar Allen Poe and Charles Dickens described how they connected with people in strange ways. “These impulses – to connect, to love, to memorialize – are so deeply human that they are in each of us. Far from being a flippant gesture, sending or finding a message in a bottle can be one of the most significant experiments of a person’s life,” said a blogger.
A century later
Fisherman Konrad Fischer found a bottle 101 years after Richard Platz tossed it into the Baltic while on a hike on the German coast. Though Platz died in 1946, a genealogist traced his lineage and found his granddaughter, Angela Erdmann. Platz had died six years before Erdmann was born, so the delivery of the bottle helped connect the granddaughter with a grandfather she had not known.
From a lab
In January 2019, while walking along the Padre Island National Seashore in Texas, Jim and Candy Duke noticed a glass bottle entangled with tree limbs. The bottle looked almost brand new. They could read its message: “BREAK BOTTLE.” They tried to open it but couldn’t because the rubber stopper had swollen into the neck of the bottle. Finally they broke the bottle. The paper inside was a postcard with instructions to fill out the date and location the bottle was retrieved, mail it back to the Galveston Laboratory of the U.S. Bureau of Commercial Fisheries and receive a 50-cent reward. From February 1962 to December 1963, the laboratory released 7,863 bottles into the Gulf of Mexico to study water currents and its role in young shrimps’ movements from spawning grounds to nursery grounds. The Dukes mailed the postcard back but asked the lab not to send them the reward.
A tragic end
In 1794, a Japanese seaman named Chunosuke Matsuyama and his 43 companies were caught in a storm and shipwrecked on a South Pacific island. Without supplies, all of the crew eventually died. But before that happened, Matsuyama carved the news if their misfortune in coconut wood and slipped it into a bottle. People came to know of the fate of the crew when the bottle was discovered 150 years later in the Japanese village of Hiraturemura.
From the Titanic
Jeremiah Burke, 19, from Glanmire in Cork and his cousin Nora Hegarty, 18, boarded the ill-fated Titanic to go to Boston. Before they set sail, Burke’s mother gave him a bottle of holy water. As the Titanic began to sick, Burke managed to write. “From Titanic, goodbye all, Burke of Glanmire, Cork,” and insert it in the holy water bottle. The cousins died in the tragedy. A year later, the bottle washed ashore a few miles from Burke’s family home. After a century, the bottle and the paper were donated to the Cobh Heritage Centre.
A message from war
In 1914, British World War I soldier, Pvt. Thomas Hughes, wrote a letter to his wife, sealed it in a ginger ale bottle, and tossed it into the English Channel. He died two days later fighting in France. In 1999 a fisherman found the bottle in the River Thames. Mrs. Hughes had died in 1979, but the message was delivered to Hughes’ 86-year-old daughter in New Zealand. She was a one-year old when her father had died.
Picture Credit : Google