Disir
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- Sep 30, 2011
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More than 130 years ago a German ship threw a message overboard. It eventually buried itself on a remote Australian beach, and turned out to be part of an important worldwide experiment.
The world's oldest message in a bottle was discovered on a remote Western Australian beach, a museum announced on Tuesday.
An Australian family discovered a bottle half-buried in the sand of tiny Wedge Island, about 140 kilometers (88 miles) north of Perth. Inside was a tightly rolled piece of paper.
"[We] were walking across the dunes when I saw something sticking out of the sand so I went to take a closer look," discoverer Tonya Illman said.
"The note was damp, rolled tightly and wrapped with string. 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 on it."
The bottle was handed to the Western Australian Museum for analysis, who coordinated with German and Dutch agencies to research its history.
The message read:
"This bottle was thrown overboard on June 12, 1886 at latitude 32° 49' South and longitude 105° 25' from Greenwich East.
From: Bark Ship Paula, Port: Elsfleth, Captain: D [illegible], On her journey from Cardiff to Macassar.
The finder is requested to send the slip in the bottle to the German Naval Observatory in Hamburg or the nearest consulate for the return to the same agency after filling in the information on the back.”
World's oldest message in a bottle discovered in Australia, sent from Germany | News | DW | 06.03.2018
That is so cool. I would love to come across one of those.
The world's oldest message in a bottle was discovered on a remote Western Australian beach, a museum announced on Tuesday.
An Australian family discovered a bottle half-buried in the sand of tiny Wedge Island, about 140 kilometers (88 miles) north of Perth. Inside was a tightly rolled piece of paper.
"[We] were walking across the dunes when I saw something sticking out of the sand so I went to take a closer look," discoverer Tonya Illman said.
"The note was damp, rolled tightly and wrapped with string. 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 on it."
The bottle was handed to the Western Australian Museum for analysis, who coordinated with German and Dutch agencies to research its history.
The message read:
"This bottle was thrown overboard on June 12, 1886 at latitude 32° 49' South and longitude 105° 25' from Greenwich East.
From: Bark Ship Paula, Port: Elsfleth, Captain: D [illegible], On her journey from Cardiff to Macassar.
The finder is requested to send the slip in the bottle to the German Naval Observatory in Hamburg or the nearest consulate for the return to the same agency after filling in the information on the back.”
World's oldest message in a bottle discovered in Australia, sent from Germany | News | DW | 06.03.2018
That is so cool. I would love to come across one of those.
