Sands of time: world’s oldest message in a bottle found on Australian beach
▻https://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-bottle/sands-of-time-worlds-oldest-message-in-a-bottle-found-on-australian-beach-i
The oldest known message in a bottle was found on an Australian beach 132 years after being thrown from a German ship in the Indian Ocean as part of an experiment to track currents, experts said.
The Dutch gin bottle, with no cork or top, was spotted by Tonya Illman in January in remote sand dunes 180 km (112 miles)north of Perth, the capital of Western Australia state.
Inside, her family discovered a note tightly rolled up and tied with string, carrying the date June 12, 1886, and the name of the ship, Paula.
“We took it home and dried it out, and when we opened it, we saw it was a printed form, in German, with very faint German handwriting,” Illman said.
Her husband searched online to find that, in an experiment run from 1864 to 1933 by the Deutsche Seewarte, or German Naval Observatory, ship captains would throw bottles overboard, each with a message giving the date, the ship’s name, its location coordinates, home port and destination.