A bottle with a note than convenient and inconvenient. Letters in a bottle. Interesting stories. Bottle mail for research purposes

It seems that messages in a bottle are sent exclusively by shipwrecked victims and only to the movies. The chances that someone will be able to find such a letter, and even more so that it will fall into the hands of the addressee, are negligible. Anything can happen to the message: sea water can spoil it, the bottle can sink, or whoever finds it just throws it away like garbage. But sometimes the truly impossible happens, and a letter in a bottle finds its addressee.

In 1784, Chunosuke Matsuyama and 43 others traveled from Japan to the islands in the South Pacific in search of treasure. During their voyage, the ship was thrown onto the reefs, and soon it sank. Treasure hunters found themselves on a desert island without food and fresh water: they managed to find only a few coconuts and crabs.

Matsuyama understood that they were doomed to a slow death, so he took a thin piece of bark and carved a message on it telling about their sad fate. He placed the message in a miraculously preserved bottle and threw it into the ocean. None of the treasure hunters managed to escape, and they remained on this island forever.

The bottle floated on the ocean for 150 years. In 1935, she was discovered by sailors near the village of Hiraturemura, where Matsuyama was born.

In July 1968, after a vacation in Europe, eight-year-old Sandra Morris was returning to the United States on a transatlantic liner. She wrote her address and a small message on a postcard, sealed it in a bottle and threw it overboard. The girl wanted someone who found this bottle to write her a letter. Three months later, eight-year-old Rosalind Hirs, walking on the beach, found Sandra's message.

Hirs wrote to Morris, and so began their forty-year friendship. The pen pals met once and continued to communicate with entire families for many years. Four decades later, Sandra and Rosalind celebrated the anniversary of their wonderful friendship on the same beach, where the sea brought a bottle with a cherished message.

In 1979, Californians Dorothy and John Peckham celebrated Christmas on a cruise to Hawaii. Traditionally, the crew and passengers would toss bottled messages overboard for good luck. The couple wrote a letter asking whoever found the note to send them a letter, and even put a dollar in the bottle to pay for postage.

Four years later, 9,000 miles from where the Peckhams dumped the bottle, it was found by Hoa Van Nguyen, who had fled Vietnam with his brother. Believing that the note was a sign from above for him, Hoa Van Nguyen carefully kept it. Arriving in Thailand and settling into a refugee camp, Hoa wrote to the Peckhams that he had found their message. The couple received the letter on March 4, 1983, the day John turned 70.

Hoa and the Peckhams began a pen pal friendship. Over the next two years, Hoa married and asked the couple to help him move to the United States. The Peckhams agreed to comply with Hoa's request, and shortly thereafter the Van Nguyen family settled in Los Angeles, thanks to a friendship that began in the most unlikely of circumstances.

In 2001, ten-year-old Laura Buxton, at her grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary celebration in Staffordshire, England, wrote her name and phone number on a piece of paper and placed the message in a balloon. It was inflated with helium, and the girl released the message into the air. After flying 140 miles, the balloon landed on a field in Milton Libourne, Wiltshire. The farmer who found the message took it to his neighbor's daughter, who, by an amazing coincidence, was also named Laura Buxton.

After reading the letter, Laura hastened to contact its author. The girls chatted on the phone and realized that they were similar in many ways. Laura, who found the note, was only a few months younger than her namesake. Both of them were blond, about the same height and even had the same pets. After a while, the girls met and have been inseparable ever since.

September 9, 1915 26-year-old British soldier Thomas Hughes went to France to the front. He wrote a letter to his wife saying, “Dear wife, I am writing this message on this boat and I am sending it out to sea to see if you will receive it. If this happens, sign the envelope in the lower right corner where the stamp is. Put the date and hour of receipt, write your name and save the message. Kiss, honey. Your hubby."

Hughes also wrote a second note in which he explained the purpose of the whole undertaking, and asked the finder of both notes to deliver a message to his wife. Hughes sealed the two papers in an old ginger beer bottle and threw it into the English Channel. Hughes was killed in action two days later, leaving behind a wife and young daughter.

After the war, Elizabeth Hughes moved to New Zealand with her daughter Emily, where she died in 1979. It wasn't until 1999 that someone named Steve Gowan was fishing on the Essex coast and discovered the bottle. He was still able to find Emily and find out that she still lives in New Zealand. The New Zealand Post paid Gowan and his wife to fly to Auckland, and Emily finally received a letter from her father 85 years later.

In 2005, 88 migrants from Peru and Ecuador were captured by smugglers bound for the US. The ship was caught in a storm near Costa Rica. The smugglers fled the ship, leaving the hostages without any means of communication.

The ship ran aground, the supplies on board quickly ran out, and the passengers had to do at least something to try to survive. They wrote a letter asking for help, put it in a bottle and threw it overboard. Fortunately, the fishermen found the bottle only three days later. They reported this to the local authorities, and the ship was quickly located. The passengers, most of whom were women and children, were severely dehydrated, but all survived.

On Christmas Day 1945, Frank Hajostek was returning from service in France. When he got to New York, he wrote a note saying: "Dear friend... I am an American soldier... I am 21 years old... I am an ordinary American, not rich, but still able to achieve something... This is my third Christmas away from home... May God bless you…”

Frank wrote his name, indicated his home address, and, sealing the message in an aspirin jar, threw it into the Atlantic. Eight months later, he received a letter from 18-year-old Breda O'Sullivan, whose father had found the note on the beach near Dingle, Ireland. The letter was the beginning of a romantic correspondence, and in 1952, Frank finally went overseas to see his girlfriend.

Unfortunately, the newspapers found out about this amazing friendship and literally pounced on Frank and Breda, making a whole sensation out of a romantic meeting. This turned out to be too severe a test for the young couple, and the relationship did not work out. Hayostek returned to the US...and again sent a message in a bottle.

On April 16, 1995, a boy named Josh Baker wrote this note: “My name is Josh Baker, I'm 10. If you find my message, please report it on the news. Date: 04/16/1995″.

He sealed the message in an empty bottle and threw it into White Lake in Wisconsin, where it floated for a decade. When Baker turned 18, he was drafted into the army and served in Iraq for a year. Josh returned home safely, but a few months later he tragically died in a car accident in 2005. Of course, his death was especially hard for his parents and friends.

A year later, a certain Steve Leader was vacationing on White Lake with Josh's best friend Robert Duncan. Steve accidentally found the bottle among the garbage, and was shocked when he saw a message from Baker in it. Friends delivered a note to Josh's mother, who took it as a sign that her son never forgot about her in the next world.

Sea travel can get a little boring and lonely, and in 1955, 18-year-old Swedish sailor Ake Viking saw for himself. Therefore, he wrote a letter that began with the words: "To a distant and beautiful stranger." He wrote about himself and thought that the one who found this message might write him an answer. Sealing the letter in a bottle, Ake threw it into the sea. Two years later Viking received an envelope from Sicily. He had to ask a friend to translate a letter from 17-year-old Italian Paolina. She wrote thus:

“Last Thursday I found a bottle on the shore. Inside it was a message in another language. I took him to our priest, he is a great scholar. He said it was Swedish and read your nice letter with the help of a dictionary. I’m not a beauty, but it’s so like a miracle that such a small bottle swam so long and far and in the end it came to me, so I couldn’t help answering you ... "

They continued to exchange letters, and soon the Viking arrived in Sicily. After a short time, Ake and Paola, who learned about each other in such an unusual way, got married.

Hurricane Sandy almost completely devastated the East Coast of the United States in late 2012, but one Long Island cleaner managed to find an ale bottle washed ashore with a message inside. He took the note to his boss, who immediately called the phone number listed on it. It was the phone of Mimi Feri, who lost her 18-year-old daughter in a car accident in 2010. The message in a bottle was written by Sidonie Feri ten years ago.

A note found two years after Sidoni's death helped Mimi somehow come to terms with the loss and try to move on. On a small piece of paper, the girl left a quote from her favorite childhood movie - "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure", as if appealing to everyone who finds her message: "Be cool for each other!"

Many mysteries and mystical stories have always been associated with the sea and long sea voyages, but nothing can compete with the incredible turns and events of such an unpredictable real life. Take the risk of sending a message in a bottle and maybe the sea will give you a pleasant surprise.

Perhaps many have heard of messages in bottles. This is an exotic way of conveying a message when the sender cannot be sure that it will be received at all. It is believed that bottle mail exists only in romantic works, but this is far from the case. Letters have been sent this way for centuries. There are many intriguing and entertaining stories associated with the Neptune Post.

The advent of bottle mail

Messages in a bottle and fiction

Bottles-reports and the last witnesses of the tragedies

“23 Jan. 1865 - we are sinking, pumps are not working, latitude 35., longitude 19.30, captain John Roberts, screw steamer "Golden Eagle". Anyone who finds this, please bring it to the nearest magistrate."

It is also reported that the fisherman Richard Marshall, while walking along the coast of Southport, found a tightly sealed bottle containing the following message:

The Ivory Gull sinks off Mann Island, 4 November. The team is drunk. God help us! J. Tomlin, captain.

Record bottle

How Neptune Mail Helps You Find Love

Bottle mail for research purposes

Although a bottle with a note thrown into the sea seems like a strange means of communication, this method has been used often at different times and for different purposes: for scientific research, to call for help, to convey an important message, and even to seek love.

1.floating down the river

According to legend, the first sender of the vessel with the "stuffing" was the ancient Greek philosopher and naturalist Theophrastus, around 310 BC. throwing several containers into the Strait of Gibraltar. He wanted to prove that the Mediterranean Sea is filled with water from the Atlantic Ocean. One of the messages was found after some time off the coast of Sicily.

The "bottle method" was used to study currents in the future. The American diplomat and inventor Benjamin Franklin, being the chief postmaster of the North American colonies, noticed that the path of mail packets from England to America takes two weeks less than in the opposite direction. With the help of bottles launched into the water, a powerful current was discovered - the Gulf Stream. It was first mapped by Franklin in 1700.

The Zubov State Oceanographic Institute has 46 notes from bottles thrown from the Okhotsk transport and found in Primorye and Kamchatka. Mikhail Zhdanko, head of the hydrographic expedition, asked the sailors sailing in the Sea of ​​Japan, the Sea of ​​Okhotsk and the North Pacific Ocean to participate in the study of sea currents by throwing bottles. The note contained a request to inform where the vessel was found. In total, about 10,000 bottles were thrown between 1907 and 1912. Of these, 219 have been found. Having processed the obtained data, it was possible to construct the first schemes of the currents of the then still little studied seas. The last bottle, thrown in 1910 from Okhotsk, was found in 1988 in the beach area of ​​the island by a resident of Sakhalin.

2.Lord Opener

For two and a half centuries in England, breaking bottles with messages caught in the sea or found on the shore was threatened with the death penalty. For the same amount of time, the position of a bottle opener existed at the court - the only person who was entrusted with this responsible business.

The history of this law is as follows. In the spring of 1560, a vessel with "stuffing" fell into a fisherman's net in the English Channel. The leaflet that was extracted from there turned out to be a message from the English spy to Elizabeth I, in which he reported on the landing of Dutch merchants on Novaya Zemlya, which belongs to the Russians. The news reached the queen. Elizabeth was terribly annoyed, and it’s hard to say what more: whether the ubiquitous Dutch, whether a spy who chose such a strange method of communication, or a fisherman who “opened someone else’s letter” and found out what he was not supposed to know at all. As usual, the "switchman" got it - the fisherman was hanged and a law was issued so that others would be disrespectful.

The post of opener was taken by Lord Thomas Tonfield, to whom the “catch” flocked from all over the country. In the first year of his service alone, he extracted 52 messages from the bottles. They say that when he came to Elizabeth with the next report, she was invariably interested in: “Well, what does Neptune write to us?” However, the position and the strange law were canceled at the very end of the 18th century.

3.SOS

Often resorted to "bottle mail" as a last resort in critical situations. It worked, unfortunately, not always. Often a call for help reached the addressee after decades or did not reach at all. So, in the spring of 1957, a bottle with an old sea chart was found on the Jamaican coast. It barely read the text in English: “July 1750. The Brethren of the Coast is on fire in the mid-Atlantic. In vain is the hope of saving any of the crew, except for the twelve who captured the boat. To my mother Elizabeth of Londonderry: don't cry for me. To my spiritual father, Thomas Dryden: take care of your mother and my little sisters... We are hundreds of miles from the coast. My captain is unsuccessfully trying to maintain order. I await death in silence. May the Almighty reward the one who finds this letter ... "

But the 88 migrants from Peru and Ecuador who traveled to the United States in 2005, although they were caught in a storm, were more fortunate. The bottle they had thrown asking for rescue was discovered by a fisherman from Costa Rica just three days later, and the ship's passengers, most of whom were women and children, were rescued.

4.bottle pastor

The American priest George Phillips, who lives on the shores of Puget Sound in Washington state, was nicknamed the Bottle Pastor. This was facilitated by the way he spread "good and eternal." Empty bottles of alcohol drunk by the inhabitants of the village helped Phillips, in particular, in the fight against the "green snake". He packed his sermons in empty containers and sent them to the will of the waves.

Nature helped Father George: there are strong currents in Puget Bay, reaching speeds of 10 knots (18.5 km / h). Thus, the clergyman sent over 20,000 messages. And - about a miracle! - answers began to come to him from Alaska, the Hawaiian Islands, New Guinea, from Mexico ...

Among the contingent of parishioners expanded in this way, there were many drinkers who considered the words of the pastor that had come down to them in such an original way as a sign of God and coped with their bad habit.

5.Retribution will not pass

One day, a note found in a bottle caught was the reason for the death sentence. During the First World War, in February 1916, during a night raid on London, the British shot down a Zeppelin L-19. The airship fell into the North Sea, but was still on the surface. Team members fired flares, hoping for rescue. The English patrol minesweeper King George V approached those in distress. Senior Lieutenant Ferguson, who commanded them, did not dare to take the drowning people on board: the crew of the minesweeper consisted of only seven people, whom the rescued could well have made prisoners. Having promised the commander of the airship Otto Louwe to send help, the British sailed away. Soon L-19 went to the bottom.

A few months later, the King George V was captured by an enemy destroyer. Fergusson, who appeared before the German military tribunal, was shown a piece of paper, which described his meeting with the crew of the downed airship. The entry was dated February 1, 1916 and was signed by Otto Louwe. The note became the basis for a charge of premeditated murder - refusing to help those in distress at sea, and Ferguson was shot.

6."I am looking for a wife…"

In Ireland, at the pier of the port of Queenstown, in 1956 a vessel was discovered with the following message: “If the finder of this bottle is a woman who has no gray hair in her head, who does not grumble and cooks well and who does not mind marrying a sailor, most spending time at sea ... then let him write to James Gleason - the sailor who sealed this bottle and threw it into the sea from the steamer Victoria in the middle of the Atlantic on March 29, 1895. At first, the discovery was not taken seriously, but then it turned out that the Victoria steamer really plied the seas at that time and James Gleason was among the crew members. He died unmarried along with his ship during a storm off Cape Hatteras in May 1900. But there were stories with happy endings.

In the summer of 1957, 22-year-old Swedish sailor Ake Viking sealed a letter to a “remote and beautiful stranger” in a bottle asking him to respond and threw it into the Strait of Gibraltar. Six months later, she was off the coast of Sicily, where she fell into the hands of the daughter of a fisherman, 17-year-old Paolina Puzzo. Here is what she wrote in response to a note caught in the sea: “I am not a beauty, but it looks so much like a miracle that such a small bottle swam so long and far and in the end it came to me that I could not help but answer you ... » Surprisingly, this letter reached its destination. In October 1958, in the city of Syracuse, the wedding of two people who met in such an amazing way took place. She went down in history under the name "bottle", and vintage photos of young people are still being sold on Amazon (amazon.com) for $35.

The legend says that the inventor of this method of communication was the Greek philosopher Theophrastus, who around 310 BC. e. threw several sealed vessels with notes behind Gibraltar to prove that water from the Atlantic Ocean enters the Mediterranean Sea. A few months later, one of the vessels was found in Sicily.

Some interesting facts:

The navigator and discoverer Christopher Columbus on his way to India sent messages to the Spanish Queen Isabella, securely corking them in bottles and throwing them into the ocean. Some of these messages, driven by the currents, were fished out of the water and taken to Her Majesty's palace. One of the bottles of Columbus was picked up in the Strait of Gibraltar in 1852 by the captain of an American ship.

In England, from 1590 until the end of the 18th century, there was a law according to which anyone who dares to independently break a sealed bottle caught in the sea or found on the shore is facing the death penalty. To read such messages at the court, the position of "opener of ocean bottles" was established. The first opener at the court of Queen Elizabeth I was Lord Thomas Tonfield, who in his first year in office alone extracted 52 letters from bottles. According to some reports, when he came to the queen with the next report, she invariably asked him: “Well, what does Neptune write to us?”

Messages in a bottle are still used by residents of some Indonesian islands as a way to send messages.

Until 1983, the longest bottle drift was considered to be a bottle sent in 1909 from the Russian gunboat Manjur (see the Korean type) to study sea currents: it was picked up off Bering Island (Commander Islands) in 1967. On June 6, 1983, the record was broken when a lotion bottle was discovered on Moreton Island, thrown from the English steamer Arawatta off the coast of Australia in 1910.

In 2005, 88 immigrants were rescued in Costa Rica, who sent a message in a bottle to the open sea about the wreck of their ship. Fortunately, the message quickly got into the net of a local fisherman.

A message in a bottle from Canada that ended up on the coast of Croatia 28 years later

The message in a bottle was washed up on the shores of Croatia after it was thrown into the sea off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada. The bottle was discovered when a group of kitesurfers were cleaning the beach on the Neretva near the city of Dubrovnik, in the very south of Croatia.

Members of the kitesurf clubs Split and Komin were preparing for the new season and were cleaning the beaches when they came across a pile of broken glass. A young club member, Matea Medak-Rezic, noticed that there was a message inside one of the old bottles.

The message read: “Mary, you are truly a wonderful person. I hope we will continue to correspond. I said that I would write. Your friend forever, Jonathan. Nova Scotia'85".

The message in a bottle sailed across the Atlantic, through the straits of Gibraltar, around the Mediterranean, and finally into the Adriatic before being washed up on the Dalmatian coast. If taken directly, the message traveled a distance of 6437 kilometers, however, considering the entire journey, it is safe to say that the message sailed at least five times that distance.

The message in a bottle found 97 years later sets a new world record

The message in a bottle, which has been lost at sea for almost a century, has set a new world record, according to Guinness Book officials. A 97-year-old message discovered near the Shetland Isles claims to be the message in a bottle that has been at sea for the longest period of time. It was discovered by Scottish skipper Andrew Leaper when he hauled in his fishing nets. He compared his amazing find to "winning the lottery." Coincidentally, the 43-year-old skipper piloted the same boat that held the previous record, the Copious, off Shetland. The previous record holder, Mark Anderson, was also on board the ship when the message in the bottle was found.

Thrown into the sea in June 1914 by Captain CH Brown of the Glasgow School of Navigation, the message contained a postcard promising a reward of sixpence to anyone who found the message.

A message in a bottle that was answered 24 years later

Nearly a quarter of a century after a German boy threw a message in a bottle from a ship in the Baltic Sea, he received a response. A 13-year-old Russian boy, Daniil Korotkikh, was walking along the beach with his parents when he saw something sparkling in the sand. “I saw that bottle and it seemed interesting to me,” said Korotkikh. "It looked like a German beer bottle with a ceramic stopper, and it had a message inside." His father, who knows German, translated the letter, which was carefully wrapped in cellophane and sealed with a medical plaster. The message read: “My name is Frank and I am five years old. My dad and I are traveling to Denmark by ship. If you find this letter, please write to me and I will answer you. The letter, dated 1987, indicated an address in Coesfeld.

Now, Frank Uesbeck, the boy who wrote the message, is 31 years old. His parents still live at the address given in the letter. The Russian boy and the German met each other earlier this month online via video chat. Korotkikh showed Wesbeck the bottle in which he found the message, as well as the framed letter itself.

The message in a bottle returned to the sender's family after 76 years

The message in a bottle, which was thrown into the sea 76 years ago, was found in New Zealand and returned to the family of the person who originally wrote it. The bottle was found by Geoff Flood in November 2012, and it contained a note that read, “At sea. If you find this bottle, please donate it to the address below."

The note was dated March 17, 1936, and appears to have been set sail by Herbert Ernest Hillbrick, who stamped his name and address on the note. Mr Flood found the bottle on New Zealand's Ninety Mile Beach. Most likely, Mr. Hillbrick threw the bottle into the sea while on a P&O cruises cruise.

Mr. Flood discovered that the author of the message had died in the 1940s, but his great-grandson, Peter Hillbrick, was still living in Australia. “This bottle floated in the ocean for 76 years and then suddenly ended up in New Zealand,” Mr. Hillbrick said.

Captured crew rescued from pirates after they threw a message bottle into the sea

In 2011, British commandos rescued the crew of a hijacked freighter after they sent a message in a bottle to their rescuers. The captured sailors were locked up in the sealed and armored compartment of their ship as it was taken over by pirates. When they saw that two NATO ships had arrived to free them, they threw the note into the water.

Their message, saying that they were all right and that they were safe, was fished out of the ocean by special forces before they began to assault the ship. All crew members were rescued and appeared to be safe and sound, with the exception of one sailor with a cut on his arm, and the pirates were arrested.

A message in a bottle that got an answer 30 years later... via Facebook

Oliver Vandevalle, who sent a message in a bottle over 30 years ago, finally got a response after a Facebook user tracked down the Belgian on the popular social network.

During a family vacation on a yacht along the south coast of England, Vandewalle, at the age of 14, threw a page from his notebook sealed in a wine bottle into the sea. 33 years later, the Belgian got the answer after Lorraine Yates found a bottle that washed ashore in Swanage, Dorset. Instead of replying to the address on the note, Yates found VandeWalle using the popular social networking site Facebook.

Vandevalle, 47, says: “It was so long ago that my first reaction after she contacted me was to say that it wasn’t me. Then I remembered." In his letter, Vandewalle introduced himself as "a 14-year-old boy whose home is in Belgium." He further wrote, “I don’t know if you are a student, a woman or a man. I am on a sailing yacht 18 meters long. It is called Tamaris. While I was writing this letter, we sailed Portland Bill (Portland Bill) located on the south coast of England. We set sail this morning."

Vandewalle's two sons have attempted to recreate their father's amazing feat, though he doubts they'll succeed. “They didn’t think to write their addresses and, accordingly, the chances that someone will write to them are about zero,” their father added.

The note was discovered 40 years later by someone hiking in Sequoia National Park.

The old, rusty canister had been in the ground for 40 years, but there was something about it that caught the eye of Larry Wright, a 69-year-old resident of Oakland, California.

While walking near Milestone Mountain in Sequoia National Park with his son Aaron and grandson Skyler, Wright came across what appeared to be a film container buried in the ground. Inside it was a perfectly preserved note, handwritten and dated August 17, 1972. The following was written in it:
“Tim Taylor climbed this peak on Thursday, August 17, 1972. Age 13 years. Whoever finds this note - write.

Fascinated by the note's optimism, Wright began a month-long search for Taylor. He began his search by visiting the house listed on the note, where he met its current owner, Koichi Uyemura, who explained that his family had lived in the house for the past 18 years. Uemura reckoned that his family was the third one to buy the house after the Taylor family moved out.

He also tried to find Tim Taylor through voter records and Google, but until he turned to the local newspaper, La Cañada Valley Sun, he couldn't find anything. The newspaper published an article about Wright's find, and calls from family and friends began pouring in on Taylor, who is currently a San Diego County Superior Court Judge. Taylor explained that he buried the note on the day he was hiking with his Boy Scout group. He decided to independently climb an unknown peak, located at 3657 meters above sea level, because it was not indicated on the Boy Scout map. He also said that it was his father who instilled in him the habit of leaving messages in bottles for strangers to find.

Two women became pen pals after one of them found a message in a bottle 40 years ago.

Rosalind Hearse met her US pen pal on the beach where she found her message in a bottle 40 years ago. The note washed up on the beach near the village of Margam, South Wales, after Sandra Morris threw it into the sea from a ship. Since then, women who are already 48 years old have not stopped corresponding.

In 2013, the record for the oldest message found in a bottle was broken.

A man found on a beach in Tofino County, Canada, a bottle with a letter that can be considered the oldest such message ever found - the note is dated 1906, Metro reports.

Steve Thurber of Courtney discovered a sealed bottle with a letter inside, washed up on the shores of the bay by the surf. Thurber found the bottle lying on the sand at a site recently excavated by the Parks Canada Restoration Project.

Steve refused to open the found bottle, but through the glass you can see part of the text of the letter. The note, dated September 29, 1906, was signed by Earl Willard, who sailed from San Francisco to Bellingham on the steamer Rainier. In the letter, Earl also gives his address in Bellingham, where the railway museum is currently located.

In 2012, Scottish fisherman Andrew Leaper found a 97-year-old letter bottle in Shetland. Then the century-old find entered the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest "bottle message". Steve Thurber is also going to apply for the letter he found to be included in the Guinness Book of Records.

Ticket to America

In 1979, on a cruise ship bound for the Hawaiian archipelago, Dorothy and John Peckham were killing time by drinking champagne and throwing message bottles into the ocean. The letters gave the Peckhams' address, a request to write back and a check for $ 1 in order to pay for the postage of the alleged letter.

On March 4, 1983, John's 70th birthday, the family received a letter from a Vietnamese named Hoa Van Nguyen. Nguyen wrote that he and his younger brother found one of the bottles thrown by the Pekhams 15 km from the coast of Songkhla province. The brothers were on a boat in the direction of Thailand, trying to escape from communist Vietnam, and the message in a bottle became for them a kind of answer to prayers. Well, the Peckhams looked at the map of the world and found out that their bottle had traveled 9,000 miles from Hawaii.

For two years the Americans corresponded with new Vietnamese friends. During this time, Hoa, encouraged by the prospects of emigration, managed to get married and have a child. Then he asked John and Dorothy to help move from Vietnam to the United States. The Peckhams agreed to help. It took several months of red tape with the American immigration service, and in 1985 a plane from Thailand landed in Los Angeles, the Nguyen's new homeland.

bottled love

Eik Viking was a lonely Swedish sailor who decided to leave the responsibility of finding his "half" to chance. He wrote a simple letter with an address to "Distant Beauty", corked it into a bottle and threw it into the sea in the hope that a young woman would find the message and become his wife.

Two years later, in 1958, Eyck was surprised to receive a letter from a girl in Sicily named Paolina. She wrote: "I'm not a beauty, but it seems like a miracle how a small bottle ended up in my hands, so I decided to answer you." The guy and the young lady began to correspond, and a year later Eyck came to Sicily to take Paolina as his wife.

Everlasting memory

When Josh Baker was 10, he poured a whole bottle of his mom's vanilla extract down the sink and wrote a note, "My name is Josh Baker. I am 10 years old. If you find this letter, report it on the news. Today is April 16, 1995." Having sealed the message in a vessel, the boy threw the bottle into White Lake, in the state of Wisconsin (USA).

Life went on as usual, and after graduating from college, Josh joined the military in the Navy. He fought in Iraq, almost died, but returned home safe and sound. But a few days later, Baker died suddenly in a car accident. 3 months passed and Josh's friends, Steve Leader and Robert Duncan, walking near White Lake, found a bottle floating and sparkling a few meters from the shore. It was the same bottle with the message of 10-year-old Josh Baker.

Thanks to the letter, Josh's friends and family realized that, having left this evil world, he remained nearby, forever young and perky. So children's scribbles "from the next world" became a symbol of the eternal memory of the deceased war veteran.

The Tale of the Fisherman and the Bottle

It was 1999. Angler Steve Gowan, as usual in the morning, hauled a net from the sea. There was something tangled in the nets, Steve noted. Something turned out to be a bottle, very old and containing two letters written by Private Thomas Hughes and dated September 9, 1914. One of the letters asked for a second message to be sent to the soldier's wife, Elizabeth. A simple love letter from a conscript sailing to France to fight in the First World Civilization attempt to commit suicide.

Reading the letters, Gowan felt a great personal responsibility. Clearly Mrs. Hughes had died, the fisherman reflected, but heirs remained. The search for which Steve took up. He soon learned that Thomas and Elizabeth have a daughter, Emily, who is alive and living in Auckland (New Zealand).

Alas, Tom Hughes himself fell in battle a couple of days after sending the bottle mail. Emily was only two years old in 1914, and she did not remember her own father at all. Only her mother's stories and posthumous awards reminded her of Papa Tom.

Steve Gowan contacted the New Zealand Postal Service, and they agreed to pay for his flight to the country so that Steve could hand-deliver bottle letters to Hughes' aged daughter.

Emily was very pleased. And this is still modestly said.

100 years of solitude

In 2013, a German fisherman from the Heikendorf settlement in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany fished out a bottle with a letter dated May 17, 1913 in the Baltic Sea and became the owner of one of the oldest letters found in a bottle.

The postcard was packaged in a beer bottle. It was written by a man named Richard Platz, a resident of Berlin. He asked the one who found the message to send it to his home address in the capital of Germany. According to fisherman Konrad Fischer, when he saw a bottle in the nets, he wanted to throw it back into the Baltic Sea, but his partner told him that there was something in it. The postcard was bought in Denmark and had two German marks on it.

The experts who checked the message found out that the author of the postcard died during the First World War.

The letter found by Fisher, after being officially included in the Guinness World Records list, will become the second oldest, after the message found in 2013, dated 1906.

Some interesting facts:

- The navigator and discoverer Christopher Columbus sent messages to the Spanish Queen Isabella on his way to India, securely corking them in bottles and throwing them into the ocean. Some of these messages, driven by the currents, were fished out of the water and taken to Her Majesty's palace. One of the bottles of Columbus was picked up in the Strait of Gibraltar in 1852 by the captain of an American ship.

- In England, from 1590 until the end of the 18th century, there was a law according to which anyone who dares to independently break a sealed bottle caught in the sea or found on the shore is facing the death penalty. To read such messages at the court, the position of "opener of ocean bottles" was established. The first opener at the court of Queen Elizabeth I was Lord Thomas Tonfield, who in his first year in office alone extracted 52 letters from bottles. According to some reports, when he came to the queen with the next report, she invariably asked him: “Well, what does Neptune write to us?”

- Messages in a bottle are still used by residents of some Indonesian islands as a way to send messages.

- Until 1983, the longest drift of a bottle was considered to be a bottle sent in 1909 from the Russian gunboat Manjur (see the Korean type) to study sea currents: it was picked up off Bering Island (Komandorskie Islands) in 1967. On June 6, 1983, the record was broken when a lotion bottle was discovered on Moreton Island, thrown from the English steamer Arawatta off the coast of Australia in 1910.

- In 2005, 88 immigrants were rescued in Costa Rica, who sent a message in a bottle to the open sea about the wreck of their ship. Fortunately, the message quickly got into the net of a local fisherman.

A message in a bottle from Canada that ended up on the coast of Croatia 28 years later

Members of the kitesurf clubs Split and Komin were preparing for the new season and were cleaning the beaches when they came across a pile of broken glass. A young club member, Matea Medak-Rezic, noticed that there was a message inside one of the old bottles.

The message read: “Mary, you are truly a wonderful person. I hope we will continue to correspond. I said that I would write. Your friend forever, Jonathan. Nova Scotia'85".

The message in a bottle sailed across the Atlantic, through the straits of Gibraltar, around the Mediterranean, and finally into the Adriatic before being washed up on the Dalmatian coast. If taken directly, the message traveled a distance of 6437 kilometers, however, considering the entire journey, it is safe to say that the message sailed at least five times that distance.

Captured crew rescued from pirates after they threw a message bottle into the sea

Their message, saying that they were all right and that they were safe, was fished out of the ocean by special forces before they began to assault the ship. All crew members were rescued and appeared to be safe and sound, with the exception of one sailor with a cut on his arm, and the pirates were arrested.

bottled love

Two years later, in 1958, Eyck was surprised to receive a letter from a girl in Sicily named Paolina. She wrote: "I'm not a beauty, but it seems like a miracle how a small bottle ended up in my hands, so I decided to answer you." The guy and the young lady began to correspond, and a year later Eyck came to Sicily to take Paolina as his wife.

The Tale of the Fisherman and the Bottle

Reading the letters, Gowan felt a great personal responsibility. Clearly Mrs. Hughes had died, the fisherman reflected, but heirs remained. The search for which Steve took up. He soon learned that Thomas and Elizabeth have a daughter, Emily, who is alive and living in Auckland (New Zealand).

Alas, Tom Hughes himself fell in battle a couple of days after sending the bottle mail. Emily was only two years old in 1914, and she did not remember her own father at all. Only her mother's stories and posthumous awards reminded her of Papa Tom.

Steve Gowan contacted the New Zealand Postal Service, and they agreed to pay for his flight to the country so that Steve could hand-deliver bottle letters to Hughes' aged daughter.

Emily was very pleased. And this is still modestly said.