Messages in a bottle – from a Titanic victim’s last words to a love potion

Since the ancient Greeks began the habit in the third century BC to study water currents, it’s reckoned more than six million messages have been put in bottles and dropped in the ocean.

Now, one plopped into the North Sea by eight-year-old schoolgirl Joanna Buchan from Aberdeenshire in 1996 has been found 800 miles away in Norway – 25 years later.

Here James Moore looks at more amazing stories…

Tragic coincidence

In 1784 Japanese sailor Chunosuke Matsuyama and 43 others were shipwrecked on a South Pacific island. He carved a message into a piece of coconut wood, put it in a bottle, and set it adrift hoping for help. Sadly, they were never rescued, but the bottle was found in 1935, washed up in the village of Hiraturemura in Japan where Matsuyama had been born.

Love potion

Lovelorn Swedish sailor Ake Viking put a message in a corked bottle in 1956 “to someone beautiful and far away.” Two years later he received a letter from a Sicilian girl called Paolina, who wrote: “I am not beautiful, but it seems so miraculous that this little bottle should have travelled so far and long to reach me that I must send you an answer.” The pair eventually married.

Floating miracle

While on a 1979 cruise to Hawaii, Americans Dorothy and John Peckham tossed a champagne bottle off the ship with a note inside asking the finder to write back. They eventually got a note back from Vietnamese man Hoa Van Nguyen. He picked it up 9,000 miles away, while floating in a tiny boat trying to flee the country’s communist regime. He told the Peckhams the find had given him the strength to carry on and would later settle in the US with the couple’s help.

World war wonder

When fisherman Steve Gowan hooked an empty ginger beer bottle off the Essex coast in 1999 he found a love letter inside written in 1914 by Private Thomas Hughes to wife Elizabeth. Hughes had dropped it in the English Channel as he travelled to the Western Front in France but was tragically killed just two days later. But Steve managed to reunite the World War One missive with his daughter Emily, who’d been just two at the time.

Touching tale

In 2002 a friend of author Karen Liebreich found a teardrop-shaped bottle on a beach in Kent. Inside was an anonymous letter from a French woman, to her 13-year-old son who had died, which she’d thrown over the side of a cross Channel ferry. Karen wrote a book about it and the pair later met.

Last liners

Before perishing as the Titanic sank in 1912, 19-year-old Irishman Jeremiah Burke put a note in the holy water bottle his mother had given him and tossed it into the sea.

It read: “From Titanic, goodbye all, Burke of Glanmire, Cork.” It was found a few months later washed up back on the Irish coast.

In 1915 a passenger on the torpedoed liner Lusitania also put a message in a bottle which read: “Still on deck with a few people. The last boats have left. We are sinking fast…”

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