In 1956 a young sailor at the sea was feeling very far from his family and friends. He wrote a note and put it in a bottle. Then he sealed the bottle and threw it into the ocean. The note asked any pretty girl who found it to write to him.
Two years later a man was fishing on a shore in Sicily, an island in the Mediterranean. The fisherman saw the sailor’s bottle and picked it up. As a joke, he gave it to his pretty little daughter. Still as a joke, the girl wrote the lonely sailor a letter. More letters went back and forth. Soon the sailor visited Sicily; he and the girl were married in 1958.
This is just one of the many stories about drifting bottles that have changed people’s lives.
Strange as it may seem, a sealed bottle is a good traveller at sea. It can travel safely through storms that can destroy ships. And glass will last almost forever.
The speed of a drifting bottle changes with the wind and the ocean current. No one can be sure just where it will go. For example, two bottles of the same size, shape and weight were dropped at the same time into the ocean near Brazil, South America. The first drifted east for 130 days. It was found on a shore in Africa. The second went north-west for 196 days, and was found in Nicaragua, Central America.
Probably the longest trip ever made by a bottle began in 1929. In that year a bottle was thrown into the south Indian Ocean. A note inside could be read through the glass. The finder was asked to report when and where he picked it up, then to throw the bottle back to the sea without opening it.
The bottle first went east, to Cape Horn, the southern tip of South America. Someone found it, reported it and threw it back into the sea. Then others found it, reported it and threw it back.
From Cape Horn the bottle moved into the Atlantic Ocean. Then it went to the Indian Ocean again, passing the place where it had been first dropped. Finally it reached Western Australia, in 1935. It had travelled 16800 miles at the sea in 2447 days. That was about 6.8miles each day.
The most important use of drifting bottles is to find ocean currents. When the position and direction of currents are known, ships can use the forward movement of a current, or stay away from currents that would carry them off their course.
Benjamin Franklin, the American statesman and scientist, was one of the first to use bottles in the study of currents. He wondered why British mail ships needed a week or two longer than the American ships to cross the Atlantic. He thought the Gulf Stream might explain the difference.
Franklin talked to American captains. He found that they knew each turn of the Gulf Stream and made little use of its currents. From his talks with the American captains, Franklin made his first map of the Gulf Stream. Then he checked his map by using sealed bottles.
About 1860 the British Navy began to use drifting bottles. Officers of a ship would drop a bottle containing a form that gave the name of the ship and the place and date of the dropping. Finders were asked to write on the form the place and date of finding the bottle, and to return the form to England.
About 30 years later the United States Navy began to use the same system. This system is stilled used, with forms written in eight languages. About 350 of these forms come back to the United States navy each year. From the reports many useful sea maps have been drawn.
Fishermen are among the sea-going people who need to know exactly where currents are. In order to help fishermen, Scotland once paid a scientist to study the currents in the North Sea. More than 2000 bottles were used in making this study. Although this study was made in 1894, its results helped fishermen so much that the same method is continued even to today.
Over the centuries, sea-going bottles have carried messages of great human interest. Sailors in trouble have written many of these messages.
A group of boys playing on the north-eastern shore of the United States in 1944 found a bottle with a note in it. The note read: “Our ship is going down. This is the end. Maybe our message will reach the United States someday.”
Navy experts found that the note had come from and American ship named the Beatty. The ship had gone down off Gibraltar in 1943, and and many lives had been lost.
In 1953 a bottle was found in Tasmania with a message signed by a two lonely Australian soldiers. The soldiers had been on a ship that was taking them to France in the First World War. The mother of one of the soldiers recognized the handwriting of her son. He had been killed in the war 35 years before the message reached her.
An even stranger story is told of a seaman from Japan. His name was Matsuyama. He started out 1784 with 44 other men to look for the buried treasure. Their ship went down, and all 45 men were left to small Pacific island. Before he died Matsuyama carved their story on a piece of wood, sealed it in a bottle and dropped the bottle in the sea.
The sea carried the bottle to the very village where Matsuyama had been born. It was there in 1935, more than 150 years after Matsuyama had died on a distant island.
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