OLDEST MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE DISCOVERED ON AUSTRALIAN BEACH
On January 21, 2018, the world's oldest message in a bottle was found on a beach in Western Australia—a true example of "better late than never." While strolling with her family and friends just north of Wedge Island, which is located 112 miles (180 km) north of Perth, Tonya Illman noticed a bottle protruding from the sand close to her son's vehicle. She had no idea that it was a bottle that had been thrown into the Indian Ocean by a German ship and was almost 132 years old.
Illman picked up the bottle to take home because he thought it would look good on a bookshelf. That's when the narrative changed. Illman tells the Western Australia Museum, "My son's girlfriend was the one who discovered the note when she went to tip the sand out." The note was wrapped with string, tightly rolled, and damp. After bringing it home and drying it out, we opened it to find a printed German form with very little handwriting in German.
According to Kym Illman, Tonya's husband, when they noticed the field for the year was "18..," they became aware that they might have something significant in history. They discovered that it might have been a component of a drift bottle experiment conducted by the German Naval Observatory after Kym conducted some historical research. German ships emptied bottles into the ocean between 1864 and 1933; printed notes with the precise coordinates, ship name, and route were attached.
According to some research, the bottle was dropped from a ship sailing from Cardiff, Wales, to Makassar, the Dutch East Indies. The Illmans took their find to the Western Australia Museum to see if it was authentic or fake.
The museum's initial investigation revealed that the bottle was a mid-to late-19th-century Dutch gin bottle and that the paper was from the 19th century. They also confirmed that the course mentioned in a message from 1886 was taken by a German ship called Paula. "Amazingly, Paula's original Meteorological Journal was discovered during an archival search in Germany. It contained an entry dated June 12, 1886, written by the captain, indicating that a drift bottle had been thrown overboard. Dr. Ross Anderson, Assistant Curator of Maritime Archaeology at the WA Museum, stated, "The date and the coordinates exactly correspond with those on the bottle message."
The oldest message in a bottle has officially been inducted into the Guinness Book of World Records thanks to the Illmans' discovery, which was verified by the German organisations initially in charge of the drift research. The Illmans are happy to have found the bottle, which they have loaned to the WA Museum, even though it only took them 131 years and 223 days to find. "We discuss it frequently, the peculiar circumstances surrounding the discovery," Kym Illman says to My Modern Met. "There's a billion to one chance, but someone was probably going to find it at some point in history."