message in a bottle

History and uses

Bottled messages may date to about 310 BC, in water current studies reputed to have been carried out by Greek philosopher Theophrastus. The Japanese medieval epic The Tale of the Heike records the story of an exiled poet who, in about 1177 AD, launched wooden planks on which he had inscribed poems describing his plight. In the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I reputedly created an official position of "Uncorker of Ocean Bottles", and—thinking some bottles might contain secrets from British spies or fleets—decreed that anyone else opening the bottles could face the death penalty. (However, it has been argued that this is a myth.) In the nineteenth century, literary works such as Edgar Allan Poe's 1833 "MS. Found in a Bottle" and Charles Dickens' 1860 "A Message from the Sea" inspired an enduring popular passion for sending bottled messages.

Scientific experiments involving drift objects—more generally called determinate drifters—provide information about currents and help researchers develop ocean circulation maps. For example, experiments conducted in the mid-1700s by Benjamin Franklin and others indicated the existence and approximate location of the Gulf Stream, with scientific confirmation following in the mid-1800s. Using a network of beachcomber informants, rear admiral Alexander Becher is believed to be the first (from 1808–1852) to study travel of so-called "bottle papers" around an ocean gyre (a large circulating current system). In the late 1800s, Albert I, Prince of Monaco determined that the Gulf Stream branched into the North Atlantic Drift and the Azores Current. In the 1890s, Scottish scientist T. Wemyss Fulton released floating bottles and wooden slips to chart North Sea surface currents for the first time. Releasing bottles designed to remain a short distance above the sea bed, British marine biologist George Parker Bidder III first proved in the early twentieth century that deep sea currents flowed from east to west in the North Sea and that bottom feeders prefer to move against the current.

The United States Coast and Geodetic Survey (USC&GS) used drift bottles from 1846 to 1966. More recently, technologies involving satellite tags, fixed current profilers and satellite communication have permitted more efficient analysis of ocean currents: at any given time, thousands of modern "drifters" transmit current position, temperature, velocity, etc., to satellites, thus avoiding conventional drift bottles' dependence on serendipitous finds and cooperation by conscientious citizens.

Bottle design and recovery rates

Some bottles are ballasted with dry sand so that they float vertically at or near the ocean surface, and are less influenced by winds and breaking waves than other bottles that are purposely not ballasted. Wooden blocks float higher in the water and thus are more influenced by wind—a design specially suited for simulating travel paths of plastic waste that is less dense than glass containers.

An early-20th-century "bottom" (or seabed) drift bottle design by George Parker Bidder III involved weighting a bottle with a long copper wire that causes it to sink until the wire trails upon the sea bottom, at which time the bottle tends to remain a few inches above the bottom to be moved by the bottom current. A mushroom-shaped seabed drifter design has also been used. Seabed drifters are designed to be scooped up by a trawler or wash up on shore.

Water pressure pressing on the cork or other closure was thought to keep a bottle better sealed; some designs included a wooden stick to stop the cork from imploding. Vessels of less scientific designs have survived for extended periods, including a baby food bottle a ginger beer bottle, and a 7-Up bottle.

A low percentage of bottles—thought by some to be less than 3 percent—are actually recovered, so they are released in large numbers, sometimes in the thousands. Reported recovery rates for large-scale scientific studies vary based on the ocean of release, and range from 11 percent (Woods Hole, 156,276 bottles from 1948 to 1962, Atlantic), to 10 percent (Woods Hole, 165,566 bottles from 1960 to 1970, Atlantic), to 3.4 percent (Scripps Institution, 148,384 bottles from 1954 to 1971, Pacific). Oceanographic drift card recovery rates have ranged from 50 percent if released in densely populated areas (North Sea, Puget Sound) to 1 percent in uninhabited areas (Antarctica). Recovery rates decrease as bottles are released further from shore, with oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer developing a rule of thumb that bottles released more than 160 kilometres (100 miles) from shore have recovery rates below 10 percent, and "only a few percent" of those released more than 1,600 kilometres (1,000 miles) from shore are recovered. About 90 percent of marine debris washes up on less than 10 percent of the world's coastlines, favoring beaches perpendicular to the dominant ocean current. Objects with similar buoyancy characteristics tend to collect together.

Time and distance

Some drift bottles were not found for more than a century after being launched.

Floating objects may ride gyres (large circulating current systems) that are present in each ocean, and may be transferred from one ocean's gyre to another's. Further, objects may be sidetracked by wind, storms, countercurrents, and ocean current variation. Accordingly, drift bottles have traveled large distances, with drifts of 6,500–9,700 kilometres (4,000–6,000 miles) and more—sometimes traveling 160 kilometres (100 miles) per day—not uncommon. Bottles have traveled from the Beaufort Sea above northern Alaska and northwestern Canada to northern Europe; from Antarctica to Tasmania; from Mexico to the Philippines; from Canada's Labrador Sea and Baffin Bay to Irish, French, Scottish, and Norwegian beaches; from the Galapagos Islands to Australia; and from New Zealand to Spain (practically antipodes). Based on empirical data collected since 1901, a computer program called OSCURS (Ocean Surface Current Simulator) digitally simulates motion and timing of floating objects in and between ocean gyres.

Despite being launched substantial time periods before being found, some bottles have been found physically close to their original launch points, such as a message launched by two girls in 1915 and found in 2012 near Harsens Island, Michigan, U.S., and a ten-year-old girl's message launched into the Indian River Bay in Delaware, U.S. in 1971 and found in adjacent Delaware Seashore State Park in 2016.

Historical examples

Historical examples are listed in chronological order, based on year of recovery (when applicable):

Early examples

It is reputed that about 310 BC, Aristotle's protégé Greek philosopher Theophrastus used bottled messages to determine if the Mediterranean Sea was formed by the inflowing Atlantic Ocean.

When Christopher Columbus encountered a severe storm while returning from America, he is said to have described on parchment what he had found in the New World and requested it be forwarded to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. He is said to have enclosed the parchment in a waxed cloth and placed it into a large wooden barrel that was cast into the sea. The communication was never found.

On April 15, 1841, the Wellington, W.C. Kendrick, Commander, bound "from Madras and Cape bound to London", launched a bottled message in the mid-Atlantic (at 13° N) "for the purpose of throwing some light on the ocean currents".

In 1847, from the brig Eagle laden with corn for the starving Irish in Waterford, Ireland, master Gregg dropped a bottled message with his location (42.40N, 54.10W) on March 27, requesting the find be sent to the Nautical Magazine (London) for publication to provide information on Atlantic currents. The bottle was retrieved on July 20 by Capt. Robert Oke on the revenue cutter Caledonia off the coast of Newfoundland (46.36N, 55.30W).

In 1856, a bottle was found on the Hebrides coast, Scotland, containing a note stating a ship, believed to be the SS Pacific, had sunk after a collision with an iceberg.

In February 1862, the Bashford Hall "sent afloat a message in a bottle describing her perilous state." However, she arrived safely at Falmouth, England on March 6, 1862.

After the January 11, 1866, sinking of the SS London in the Bay of Biscay, bottled messages—reported as "farewell messages from passengers... to friends and relatives in England"—were reportedly found in months following.

In 1875, ship's steward Van Hoydek and cabin boy Henry Trusillo of the British sailing ship Lennie released 24 bottled messages into the Bay of Biscay, telling of the murder by mutineers of their captain and officers. French authorities soon received the message, rescued Hoydek and Trusillo, and brought the mutineers to justice.

20th century

Message-bearing bottles from Titanic (1912) and Lusitania (1915) have been widely recounted as fact, but even before these bottles were found The Irish News stated in April 1912 that "very many" such stories turn out to be "cruel hoaxes".

In February 1916, when German Zeppelin L 19 experienced unfavorable weather, battle damage and multiple engine failure after attacking the British Midlands, its commander's last message to superiors and the crew's final letters to relatives were released into the North Sea to be found on a Swedish coast six months later. The written descriptions of how a British fishing trawler had refused to rescue the downed Zeppelin's crew—the trawler captain claiming he feared the German airmen would overpower his own unarmed crew—contributed to an enduring international controversy.

In 1924, five survivors of the Mary A. Bolling of Philadelphia, shipwrecked along the Indian Ocean, threw a message in a bottle asking for help. The bottle was found in Belgium a year later.

On December 23, 1927, Frances Wilson Grayson, niece of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, prepared to attempt to be the first woman to make a transatlantic flight (non-solo). Her Sikorsky amphibian plane disappeared en route from New York's Long Island to Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, her attempt's launching point, and was never found. A bottled message was found in Salem Harbor, Massachusetts, in January 1929, the unauthenticated message reading, "1928, we are freezing. Gas leaked out. We are drifting off Grand Banks. Grayson."

In December 1928, a trapper working at the mouth of the Agawa River, Ontario, found a bottled note from Alice Bettridge, an assistant stewardess in her early twenties who initially survived the December 1927 sinking in a blizzard of the freighter Kamloops. She later succumbed but before she perished, wrote "I am the last one left alive, freezing and starving to death on Isle Royale in Lake Superior. I just want mom and dad to know my fate."

In 1929, a bottle that came to be known as the Flying Dutchman was released by a German marine science expedition with instructions for any finders to report the find but return the bottle to the sea. Found at several locations in succession, the Flying Dutchman traveled 25,750 kilometres (16,000 miles) from its release point in the southern Indian Ocean, to Cape Horn in South America, and back through the Indian Ocean to its last reported find in 1935 on the west coast of Australia.

21st century

A teardrop-shaped bottle was found in March 2002 on a beach in Kent, England, containing an unsigned letter from a French woman expressing her enduring grief over the death of her son at age 13. British author Karen Liebreich spent years of research, unsuccessfully trying to find the mother and eventually publishing a book called The Letter in the Bottle (2006). The book was published in French in 2009, sparking huge media coverage that alerted the mother for the first time that her letter had actually been discovered. Saying she initially felt violated by publication of her personal suffering, on condition of continued anonymity, she agreed to tell Liebreich the details of her son's 1981 death in a bicycle accident, her decades of suffering afterwards, and the story surrounding release of her letter from an English Channel ferry.

In May 2005, three days after eighty-eight migrants were abandoned by human smugglers on a disabled boat, the migrants tied an SOS-bearing bottle to a long line of a passing fishing vessel, whose captain alerted authorities to rescue the migrants.

On December 10, 2006, a bottom drift bottle, released on April 25, 1914, northeast of the Shetland Islands by the Marine Laboratory, Aberdeen, U.K., was recovered by a Shetland fisherman, after the bottle had spent over 92 years at sea.

In February 2008, a family beachcombing at Eucla, Western Australia discovered a bottle with a message from one John Blissett, a crew member of the schooner Patanela, which disappeared in mysterious circumstances off the coast of Botany Bay on the 8th of November, 1988. The authenticity of the message was confirmed by Marjorie Blissett, John's mother.

In October 2011 in waters off Somalia, the crew of the pirated cargo ship Montecristo used a bottle with a flashing beacon to alert NATO ships that they had retreated to an armored room, permitting a military rescue operation to proceed with knowledge that the crew was not being held hostage.

In April 2012 a fisherman recovered a bottom drift bottle that had been released 98 years earlier, on June 10, 1914, one of 1,890 released by the Glasgow School of Navigation to test undercurrents in the seas around Scotland. The 2012 find occurred east of Shetland by the Copious, the same fishing vessel involved in the 2006 find.

Long-duration events

Table listing long-duration (>25-year) events involving messages in bottles (scroll):

s denotes stationary messages (placed on land, not in a body of water).

Popular perceptions

Besides interest in citizen science drift-bottle experiments, message-in-a-bottle lore has often been of a romantic or poetic nature. Such messages have been romanticized in literature, from Edgar Allan Poe's 1833 story "MS. Found in a Bottle" through Nicholas Sparks' 1998 Message in a Bottle. Clint Buffington, subject of the 2019 documentary short film The Tides That Bind / A Message in a Bottle Story, surmised in an interview with The Guardian that sending a bottled message expresses a hope to find connection in a fear-filled world.

In Newsweek Ryan Bort recounted various historical messages as being cries for help, or "final, poetic words of resignation left behind for (an) indifferent sea", or from "lonely, lovelorn souls, searching for serendipity", or a search for "affirmation ... that comes from somewhere other than yourself". Bort described sending a message in a bottle as a romantic act that has "such a delicious potential for magic" or as "surrendering a part of yourself to something larger", concluding that "every message in a bottle is a prayer".

Finding a bottled message has generally been viewed positively, the finder of a 98-year-old message referring to his find as winning the lottery. However, intense media attention over a personal relationship that resulted from one woman's find, is said to have caused her to remark that had she known what would happen, she would have left the bottle on the beach. Another woman said she initially felt shocked and violated by publication of the personal suffering she had expressed in a bottled letter that she never expected would be found or read.

Similar methods using other media

The term "message in a bottle" has been applied to techniques of communication that do not literally involve a bottle or a water-based method of conveyance, such as the Europa Clipper plaque (2024), the Pioneer plaque (1972, 1973), the Voyager Golden Record (1977), and even radio-borne messages (see Cosmic Call, Teen Age Message, A Message from Earth), all directed into space.

Balloon mail involves sending undirected messages through the air rather than into bodies of water. For example, during the Prussian Siege of Paris (1870–1871) about 2.5 million letters were sent by hot air balloon, the only way Parisians' letters could reach the rest of France.

Stationary time capsules have been termed "messages in a bottle", such as a 1935 message in a lemonade bottle correctly portending difficult times, which was found in 2016 by masons restoring damaged Portland stone at Southampton Guildhall. A geologist left a bottled message in 1959 in a cairn on isolated Ward Hunt Island (Canada, 83°N latitude), allowing its finders in 2013 to determine that a nearby glacier had retreated over 60 metres (200 ft) in the intervening 54 years. More durable examples of time capsules are the Westinghouse Time Capsules of the 1939 and 1964 New York World's Fairs, intended to be opened 5,000 years after their creation.

Prisoners from the Auschwitz concentration camp concealed bottles containing sketches and writings that were found after World War II.

Certain emergency medical services urge patients to record information describing their medical conditions, medications and drug allergies, emergency contacts, as well as advance healthcare directives for when the patients are incapacitated or suffer from dementia or learning difficulties, and place the record as a special "message in a bottle" stored in (conventionally) a refrigerator, where paramedics can quickly locate it.

Environmental issues

Plastic bottles are known to constitute plastic marine pollution, and eventually break down into smaller pieces because of ultraviolet light, salt degradation or wave action. Glass bottles can break into sharp-edged pieces, and bottle caps are ingested by sea birds.

Some agencies continue to use drift bottles into the 21st century, but with increased awareness that man-made floating items can harm marine life or constitute waste material, biodegradable drift cards and biodegradable wooden drifters with non-toxic ink are gaining favor.