Sea mail - letters in a bottle

Imagine for a second that you are walking along a snow-white beach. Sunset plays with colorful paints in the sky, the waves gently and evenly roll onto the shore, and from the sea a pleasant breeze blows. Submitted? Fine! We continue in the same vein.

A glimmer of light at the very edge of the water draws attention to itself - something reflects the last rays of the setting sun and signals: "Come closer, look what's here." Of course, you come up, hand whisk away a small layer of sand that the waves envelop in the glitter, and identify the most interesting and mysterious artifact you can imagine - an old bottle with a note inside ... Just a fountain of emotions, right?

Scraps of the stories of Jule Vern, Edgar Poe, and Victor Hugo, legends about pirates, thoughts about faraway countries and uncharted exotic shores immediately come to mind.

“Who sent this message? How many years has it been swimming in the ocean? What is written there? Why is the heart beating so hard? What is the discovery to be done now? What if this is a map leading to a treasure? Or did someone send the coordinates of the uninhabited island on which he ended up after a shipwreck? ”- these and hundreds of other questions are ahead of each other, because you managed to touch something unfamiliar, but clearly carrying with you a layer of cultural heritage.

Of course, today letters in glass containers have become more of a maritime romance and an attribute of adventure - such mail keeps a lot of secrets and incredible stories, and from the very words - “Message in a bottle” - breathes discoveries and distant wanderings. Sometimes such finds fill in gaps in history, help in scientific research, and echoes for tens or even hundreds of years.

For example, more recently, the world has spread the news of a record-old message in a bottle. Historical and cultural artifact was found on the Australian island Wedge Island, located two hundred kilometers from Perth - the capital of Western Australia. An exotic vessel filled with sand caught the eye of a local resident, photographer Tone Illman. Later, when the girl was cleaning the bottle, Tonya discovered that there was a bundle of paper inside — a blank in German with faded handwritten notes. Thanks to the tightly compacted sand, the paper hardly suffered, and the letter turned out to be quite readable. As it turned out, the message, dated June 12, 1886, was corked and thrown into the water from the German sailing vessel "Paula" about 950 kilometers off the coast of Australia.

The girl handed the find to the Museum of Western Australia in Perth, whose staff contacted the German archives. They found the logbook "Pauly", where there was a corresponding record of the bottle. Comparing the handwriting samples, the researchers found that the text belongs to the captain himself. At that time (as part of an experiment to search for more high-speed currents of the ocean) thousands of bottles were dropped from German ships, each of which was placed in a special form with the date, vessel coordinates, its name, departure point and route. Everyone who found the message was asked to indicate the time and place of the find, and then take it to the nearest German consulate or naval observatory in Hamburg.

In total, about ten percent of the total number of these bottles was found - 662. But it is this one - found by an Australian photographer - to date the oldest. She has been in the ocean for more than a hundred and thirty years! Awesome, right?

But, as you understand, 130 is not the limit. The history of “Sea Mail” is not counted for decades, but for hundreds or even thousands: it is believed that the Greek philosopher Theophrast was the inventor of this method of communication. In approximately 310 BC, he threw several sealed vessels behind Gibraltar with notes to prove that the water from the Atlantic Ocean enters the Mediterranean Sea. A few months later, one of the vessels was found in Sicily, which greatly influenced the further development of navigation in this region.

Of course, one hundred percent sure in the story of Teofaste is not worth it. Too many years have passed since then, and now we need to make allowances for "fisherman syndrome", in which over time and the number of retellings, an ordinary crucian with a palm transforms into a furious pike the size of a small barn. Thus, “the affairs of bygone days, the ancient stories of the deep” could easily have acquired additional details during transfer from mouth to mouth, which makes one doubt the veracity of if not all of the information, then at least part of it.

But, if you do not delve into history so deeply and turn to later events, you can find a huge amount of evidence of studying the currents - in 1763, French meteorologist Lagenier, returning to France from duty to Santo Domingo (Haiti), threw 14 bottles into the ocean notes, one of which was caught in Brittany after a few months. In 1837, the German hydrograph Berghauz described the history of 21 bottles and showed on the maps the approximate routes of their voyage. In 1839, in France, a map of navigation was already compiled of 97 bottles. The Prince of Monaco Albert I, in the course of research of the Gulf Stream in 1885-1886, threw 1,675 bottles and other vessels into the Atlantic Ocean, out of which 226 were caught.

Of course, after the advent of navigators, satellite communications and other innovations that simplify life at sea, they stopped throwing notes exclusively from a scientific point of view - now you can often catch simple messages from bored cruise participants, throwing empty text bottles of entertaining text like “Us Kolya was bored, we say hello to you! ”

In 1957, the 22-year-old Swedish sailor Ake Viking chose a much more interesting approach: he threw a sealed bottle into the sea with an address to his future wife. Two years later, 16-year-old Paolina Puzzo from Sicily answered the Swedish guy - and soon a correspondence ended between them that ended in a wedding. By the way, this bottle went the same way as the legendary Teofastovskaya.

It is interesting that in England for two and a half hundred years there existed the position of an opener of ocean bottles. No one except him, under pain of death, was allowed to open the caught bottles with letters. This position was introduced in 1560 by Elizabeth I, when a fisherman caught a secret message with a net, addressed personally to the queen. It was a denunciation of a spy who reported that the Dutch had landed on the islands of Novaya Zemlya and were looking for a way to Japan through the Arctic Ocean. Such information was equated to State secrets, so the fisherman was quickly deprived of the opportunity to continue to exist, and all Britons were warned - under threat of deprivation of life, any found bottles of messages should be sent immediately to the royal office. By the way, the sailors could find the Northern Sea Route only in three hundred years.

Do not cost sea mail and without oddities. In August 2011, a resident of the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean also found a bottle. A note was found inside the vessel half a century ago, the author of which asked the person who found the bottle to deliver it to “Tina, the owner of the Beachcomber Motel” and receive $ 150 from her as a reward. As it turned out, the sender of the message was Tina’s husband: he wanted to play a trick on his stingy wife, forcing her to fork out.

The history of navigation has hundreds of cases in which messages found in bottles turned out to be the only information that shed light on the mysterious disappearance of a ship. There is evidence of unexpectedly falling wealth, when the sender bequeathed a part of his fortune to someone who finds a bottle. The data from the bottle became the basis for the death sentence. Bottles saved stuck on the islands, united people and became an apple of discord. Many bottles are even counterfeited for profit. No one knows how many such messages have been forever absorbed by the sea and how many have yet to be found. But it is certain that each of them is a piece of history that will make your heart beat more often when you brush away a layer of sand and see a piece of inscribed parchment inside a glass vessel.