On this date in 2015 a bottle with a letter inside by British marine biologist George Parker Bidder III was discovered by a woman on holiday in Germany. The bottle dating from 1906, if confirmed, would be the world's oldest message in a bottle found to date.
The first documents messages in bottles were said to have been released in 310BC by the Greek philosopher Theophrastus, as part of a scientific experiment. He wanted to prove his theory that the Atlantic Ocean flowed into the Mediterranean.
In the days before modern communication, writing a message and putting it in a bottle was often the only way passengers and crew of a sinking ship could communicate with the world. It probably wouldn’t result in a rescue, so it was often a desperate attempt to express their love and final words to people at home in the slim hope someone would find it one day. Messages in bottles did sometimes throw light on what had happened to a missing vessel. A bottle sent from the SS Naronic in 1893, found three years later in England, confirmed that the ship had sunk after hitting an Iceberg.
There have been occasions when sending a bottled message has resulted in rescue, examples being some South American refugees abandoned at sea in 2005, and an Italian ship captured by Somali pirates in 2011.
In Elizabethan times, opening a bottle with a message in it could have got you in big trouble. Queen Elizabeth I allegedly believed that spies used this method to communicate with one another. She is said to have created an official position of "Uncorker of Ocean Bottles". Anyone other than the holder of that title could face the death penalty for opening a bottled message.
Messages in bottles were common enough in the Victorian and Edwardian periods that newspapers had regular columns devoted to them. If you’re interested in the kind of things these messages said, there’s a book you can get which is a compilation of them. It’s called Messages from the Sea and the author is Paul Brown.
It has even been suggested that Christopher Columbus released one on his way home from discovering America. During a severe storm which he thought his ship might not survive, he allegedly wrote a message on parchment to Queen Isabella, about what he’d found in the New World. He wrapped it in waxed cloth, put it in a barrel and threw it overboard. The message was never found, but Columbus made it home and presumably gave the information to the Queen in person.
It was estimated in 2009 that since the mid-1900s, six million bottled messages had been released. Oceanographers studying currents account for 500,000 of them.
Nowadays, of course, you’d think twice about releasing a message in a bottle because of environmental concerns, so you might consider using something biodegradable like the poet in the Japanese medieval epic The Tale of the Heike who inscribed his message on planks of wood.
Aside from science and messages to loved ones, messages in bottles have been used by people looking for pen pals, by evangelists to spread the word of God and by governments wanting to spread propaganda. The term has been used as well to describe messages sent into outer space such as on the Voyager probes.
Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe both wrote stories about messages in bottles, as did Nicholas Sparks in more recent times. Message in a Bottle has also been used as an episode title in Star Trek Voyager and Stargate SG1, and both The Police and Taylor Swift have recorded songs with that title.
The first in a new series! It has invading aliens, gladiator-style contests, rivalry and romance.
The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.
Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.
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