7 Remarkable Messages in Bottles

The number of the discovered “The Book of Lists” disturbed my peace, so I came up with another amusement, which I began to slowly but surely implement. This amusement provides an opportunity to become more familiar with the contents of books. Thus, in the original “The Book of Lists” [1], there is a list of seven remarkable cases of finding messages sealed in bottles thrown into the sea.

Let the sea romance capture you, and your inner voice say a bold “hey-ho.” Hoist the sails and let's begin.

1. Deliver Us This Day

In 1825, one Major MacGregor bottled a message and dropped it into the Bay of Biscayne: “Ship on fire *. Elizabeth, Joanna, and myself commit our spirits into the hands of our Redeemer, Whose grace enables us to be quite composed in the awful prospect of entering eternity.” The note was found 1½ years later, but the major and his party had already been rescued.

* Probably, ships burn very slowly if there is time to maintain such high rhetoric.

2. Double Jeopardy *

In the 19th century, a British sailor, perhaps in an attempt to found a lonely hearts club, threw a bottled marriage proposal into Southampton waters as his ship left port for India. At Port Said **, on the return journey, he was walking along the quay and saw a bottle bobbing in the water. He retrieved it, opened it, and read his own proposal for marriage!

* I must admit, I did not quite understand what the danger was. The original title sounds like Double Jeopardy.

** Even a car map allows us to understand that the distance traveled by the bottle is very great. It may have needed to bypass France, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Italy, and Libya before reaching Egypt.

3. The Last Message From the Lusitania *

In 1916, a British seaman saw a bottle bobbing in the North Atlantic. He fished it from the water, opened it, and read the final message sent from the Lusitania before it sank, taking with it some 1,198 passengers: “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…” And there it ended.

* The Lusitania was torpedoed by the German submarine SM U-20 in 1915. The hit destroyed the ship's steering, making the consequences even more severe.

4. Better Late Than Never

In 1714, Japanese seaman Chunosuke Matsuyama embarked on a treasure hunt in the Pacific. His ship was caught in a gale and sank, but he and 44 shipmates managed to swim to a deserted coral reef. Matsuyama and his companions eventually died of starvation and exposure, but before they did, Matsuyama attempted to send word home. He wrote the story on chips of wood, sealed them in a bottle, and tossed it into the sea. The bottle washed ashore 150 years later on the beach where Matsuyama grew up.

5. The Fast Message

“A bottle thrown overboard into the Pacific to aid the U.S. Navy's Hydrographic Office * drifted 1,250 miles in 53 days!” oddity hunter John Hix reported in 1941. “It was picked up in the New Hebrides, southwest Pacific, by a native who could not read any of the eight languages on the papers it contained!”

* Today, this is the U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office.

6. Conspiracy in a Bottle

Another chapter in the saga of Adolf Hitler transpired when a note, probably a hoax, was found in a bottle on the Danish coast in 1946. It was written on a page torn from the logbook of the German U-boat Naueclus and was dated one year earlier. The note claimed that Hitler did not die in the Berlin bunker, as was widely believed, but aboard the Naueclus, which sank on November 15, 1945, while en route from Finland to Spain.*

* It was impossible to find any significant traces of the submarine Naueclus on the Internet. All extremely few references lead back to “The Book of Lists”. So there is a big question to the author of the list, Joseph B. Morris, where he got this information.

7. A Message From the North Pole

In 1948, a Russian fisherman found a bottle in the sand bordering Vilkilski Strait in the arctic. A message was inside, written in both Norwegian and English. It was incomprehensible even when translated: “Five ponies and 150 dogs remaining. Desire hay, fish, and 30 sledges. Must return early in August. Baldwin.” The bizarre message became clear when it was learned that polar explorer Evelyn Baldwin had sealed the note and sent it in 1902. He managed to survive the arctic without ever receiving the hay, fish, or 30 sledges. Whether or not he made it back by August is unknown *.

* The National Geographic magazine has an article dedicated to this expedition. Its title “115 Years Ago, This Arctic Expedition Ended in Disaster” indicates that things were not going well for the Arctic investigators. Baldwin led the expedition and was fired in 1902 after his failure.

List of links:
[1] David Wallechinsky, Irving Wallace, Amy Wallace, “The Book of Lists”, ISBN 978-0-688-03183-1
[2] “115 Years Ago, This Arctic Expedition Ended in Disaster” from the “National Geographic” website