Some studies suggest that the recovery rate for a message sealed in a bottle and tossed into the sea is less than 3 percent. That means any official evaluation or scientific study must release thousands of bottles, hoping to improve the odds. A discovery in Australia in January 2018 seems to confirm that hypothesis, with one small detail: the message was written in June 1886, as part of an experiment the German Naval Laboratory had started 22 years earlier.
The Curious World of Bottled Messages
When you start gathering information about messages in bottles, you find some very interesting details. For example, author Robert Kraske, in his book "The Twelve Million-Dollar Note", indicates (with references to the Scripps Institute of Oceanography) that some marine organisms start growing on the bottle, causing it to sink within 8 to 10 months.
There are also cases where someone finds a bottle but decides not to announce the discovery, either because it isn't very important, or because they prefer to keep it as a souvenir. However, the message we'll look at below wasn't only presented to the world, but it's also the oldest ever found.
A Message From 1886
The bottle was discovered by Tonya Illman on January 21, 2018, on an Australian beach north of Wedge Island (about 160 kilometers from the city of Perth). At first she planned to keep the bottle and place it on her bookshelf, but her son's girlfriend noticed there was something inside. The paper looks like a form, filled out in German. The ink had almost completely disappeared, and with the help of a light, most of the text was recovered.
The bottle left the ship "Paula" on June 12, 1886, and this was verified thanks to the work of the Western Australian Museum and the German BSH, which, against all odds, managed to locate the ship's original meteorological logbook, where it shows that a bottle was indeed thrown overboard on June 12, 1886. Furthermore, the handwriting in the logbook was identical to that of the message, confirming it was the captain (whose name never came to light).
A Naval Experiment That Spanned Decades
The message was part of an experiment started by the German Naval Observatory in 1864. German ships that traveled the world threw thousands of bottles into the sea until it ended in 1933, and during those 69 years only 662 were recovered, the last one in January 1934 on the Danish coast.
Illman's bottle raises the number to 663, and fortunately, its "owner" did the right thing: she lent it to the Western Australian Museum, where it was exhibited for two years.
