The romance and history of the message in a bottle
There is a romantic aura to the idea of a message in a bottle – a sense of hope and faith, of belief in fate and coincidence. A little like the helium balloons I remember releasing as a child, with a message attached*, they hold the potential for a new story to be written.
Until I researched their history, I assumed that messages in bottles mostly met the same fate as those balloons: lost and never to be heard of, or, more likely, still just feet away from where they were released. They felt more like the stuff of fiction than reality.
In fact, messages sealed in bottles and released into the sea have historically served two very practical purposes, assisting with science and communication.
The first documented messages in bottles were released in 310BC by the Greek philosopher Theophrastus, in an attempt at proving his theory that the Atlantic Ocean flowed into the Mediterranean. Bottles have continued to be used for the same purpose, to study currents, into the 20th century.
Until the invention of the wireless telegraph, bottles were also the only way crew and passengers on ships had to send messages out to the rest of the world. While the hope of rescue would have been slim, these messages acted as last goodbyes to loved ones, but also helped solve maritime mysteries. The fate of some ships, lost and never found, sometimes with hundreds of passengers and crew on board, was discovered only when a bottle came ashore. This happened with a bottle sent from the SS Naronic in 1893, found three years later in England, confirming that the ship had sunk after hitting an iceberg.
Much more recently, messages tucked inside bottles have been instrumental in successful rescues, including that of South American refugees abandoned at sea in 2005, and an Italian ship captured by Somali pirates in 2011.
Many messages are however of a more personal nature – not only final goodbyes from sinking ships, but also declarations of love and confessions of murder, with varying degrees of veracity. In the Victorian and Edwardian period these messages were so commonly found that newspapers would publish them in regular columns. Paul Brown’s Messages from the Sea is a fascinating, and poignant, collection of such missives.
The gesture of sending a message in a bottle can be seen as reaching out to a stranger, letting go of a secret, seeking relief from trusting fate with its destination. It can be a child’s game, a hoax, or an experiment, but whatever the purpose, it seeks to intervene in a narrative, to trigger a response which is intrinsically uncertain.
A very touching recent story, of a message released by a child and found after her tragically early death, is a perfect example of how putting ink to paper and leaving it to chance can create unexpected meaning and solace.
There are too many stories to mention here, but they each add to the already evocative image of a bottle, drifting at sea, found and uncorked by a stranger, across place and time. It is this sense of story I love. More than a letter in an envelope, a message in a bottle embodies a sense of narrative, of mystery and love, of tragedy and hope. It makes them the perfect format for mementoes, proposals and keepsakes, or for surprise messages to discover and make your own.
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Sources
The life-and-death history of the message in a bottle, Paul Brown on Medium
Oldest message in bottle: behind history's famous floating notes, National Geographic
Sending out an SOS, New York Magazine
Message in a bottle, Word of Mouth on BBC Sounds
* This was in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and not something I’d recommend doing: balloons are harmful to the environment and helium is a scarce resource
