The World’s Oldest Message in a Bottle
A message in a bottle washed up on the shore of Wedge Island on the western coast of Australia and was found on January 21, 2018. While a message in a bottle with an actual note inside would be a unique find, what made this one special was how old the message, and the bottle, were.
A Perth, Australia, resident named Tonya Illman found the bottle while walking on a sand dune. The bottle wasn’t closed and was filled partially with sand, but she saw that there was a rolled piece of paper inside wrapped with string. She retrieved the note with the help of her son’s girlfriend and waited for it to dry. When she was able to unroll it, she discovered that the note was printed in German and had the year 18 written on it, followed by a blank that would have been used to print which 1800s year it was. The writing was all but gone, but she could make out a month and a day of June 12th. It appeared that the note was indeed from sometime during the 1800s.
Illman, along with her husband, contacted the Western Australia Museum, who then contacted experts in the Netherlands and Germany to assist with learning more about where the bottle and message came from. They discovered that the message wasn’t from a marooned sailor or a message that someone had put in a bottle for fun, but was, in fact, part of a German naval experiment dating from between 1864 to 1933.
