A message in a bottle found after 132 years

Tweet

Making the news a few days ago in Perth, Western Australia, was the story of the family who found an old Dutch gin bottle on a beach 180 kilometres north of Perth. When they shook the sand out of the bottle they also shook out a message on a rolled-up piece of paper. To cut a long story short, the bottle came from the German barque, Paula. Between 1864 and 1933, thousands of such bottles were thrown overboard from German ships. Inside each was a form with the date, the ship’s coordinates and details of its passage. Anyone finding a bottle was asked to return it together with details of where it was found. In this way, the German Naval Observatory hoped to better understand global ocean currents. Upon contacting the German authorities it was discovered that an entry in the Paula’s meteorological journal made mention of a bottle being thrown overboard on June 12, 1886. The dates and coordinates match those on the form found in the bottle. At 132 years old, this is now the oldest-known message in a bottle in the world. It’s on loan to the WA Museum for the next two years. The photo is of a pretty little boat seen recently in the town of Denmark, Western Australia.