Official Kids Mag www.kidscoop.com © Vicki Whiting June 2023
They didn't know it at the time, but the
bottle had been tossed from a ship 131
years and 223 days before the day it
was found!
Tonya Illman was walking
along the sand dunes on Wedge
Island when she spotted the
bottle sticking out of the sand.
It was obviously old and she
thought it would look good on
her bookcase.
When the damp sand was
tipped out of the bottle, she
discovered a rolled up piece of
paper, tied with a string. The Illmans took
the bottle and paper home and put the
paper in the oven for five minutes to take
out the moisture.
The paper contained printing in German
and some faint handwriting. They took it
to Dr. Ross Anderson, the assistant curator
of Maritime Archeology at the Western
Australian Museum. After some research,
he was able to confirm that the date on the
paper of June 12, 1886 was authentic.
In Germany, researchers actually had a
record of this bottle being thrown
overboard into the Indian Ocean from the
German ship, Paula, which at the time
was travelling from Wales to Indonesia.
It was apparently part of a 69-year
experiment in which thousands
of bottles were thrown into
oceans in order to trace ocean
currents and help mariners find
faster shipping routes. Each
message marked the ship's
coordinates and requested that
the finder contact the German
Consulate with information on
where it was found.
It was estimated that the bottle
was drifting in the sea for about
a year before landing on the
Wedge Island beach. Shifting sands buried
the bottle for a long time and kept it damp,
preserving the paper inside.
Of the thousands of bottles and messages
thrown into oceans for this experiment,
662 or the originals have been found and
the German authorities notified. But this
particular one is now considered the oldest
message in a bottle.
n Australian family
found a bottle on a
beach in Western Australia
that had been tossed into the
ocean long ago.
A Message from the Past
Damp sand in the bottle kept the paper from crumbling to pieces through the decades.
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Surprise Inside
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