Bottled Messages: How Neptune's Mail Saved Lives and Connected Hearts

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Perhaps many have heard of messages in bottles. This is an exotic way of transmitting a message, when the sender cannot be sure that it will be received at all. It is believed that bottle mail only exists in romantic works, but this is far from the case. Letters have been sent this way for centuries. There are many intriguing and entertaining stories associated with the "post of Neptune".

The emergence of bottle mail

Historians believe that the first sender of the bottled notes was the ancient Greek philosopher Theophrastus. Traveling beyond Gibraltar along the shores of the Atlantic, he sent several sealed vessels with notes on the waves. In them, he asked the finder to respond. Thus Theophrastus set out to investigate the currents in the Mediterranean. According to legend, one of his messages was soon discovered in Sicily.

Messages in a bottle and fiction

Bottle mail is often found in the adventure literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. A message in a sealed vessel, suddenly brought by water from an unknown distance, is intriguing. Domestic readers remember well the round-the-world adventure of the British company in the novel by Jules Verne "The Children of Captain Grant". His letter in three languages with an appeal for help was found in the stomach of a shark, which prompted the heroes to further travel. The messages in the bottle were also found by the characters in the novel "The Mysterious Island" by the French writer.

This way of presenting information was also used by Edgar Poe in his early short story "The Manuscript Found in a Bottle", Howard Lovecraft in "The Little Glass Bottle", Victor Hugo in the novel "The Man Who Laughs." The perpetrator describes his mysterious murders and sends a message over the waves in the novel "Ten Little Indians" by Agatha Christie.

Report bottles and the last witnesses of tragedies

A bottle with an unexpected message is a good plot, but it wasn't Jules Verne who came up with it. For many centuries sailors, finding themselves in a desperate situation, thus sent the last news about themselves, in the hope that they would be saved.

Christopher Columbus, while traveling to the shores of America, sent notes in vessels to get them to the expedition's sponsor, Queen Isabella of Castile. Several of them made it to the addressee. According to unconfirmed reports, in 1852, one of the bottles of Columbus was discovered by the captain of a ship in the Strait of Gibraltar. True, experts consider this find a hoax.

Another naval power in England even had a special procedure for handling "postal" vessels. Since 1560, under pain of death, it was forbidden to open sea finds. They were to be given to the Royal Uncorker of Ocean Bottles. Under Elizabeth I, this post was held by Lord Thomas Tonfield. During his first year in office, he received 52 "bottles from the ocean." Every time Tonfield went to report to the queen, she asked: "Well, what does Neptune write to us?" Information from informers and numerous denunciations were delivered to her in tarred bottles. For almost two and a half centuries, the law was in force, and all this time the threat of the death penalty did not disappear.

The more the ships of the naval powers explored the most hidden corners of the Earth, the more often they found themselves far from trade routes and possible assistance in the event of a shipwreck. In such cases, the last and only hope to send a message to relatives often remained - to write a note, put it in a bottle and send it to unknown waters.

Often on earth they learned about the tragedies that had occurred precisely from the "mail of Neptune". Such messages appeared every year, they were published in the press. In one of the 1865 editions of the Wellington Independent in New Zealand, you can find a note:

It is immediately reported that fisherman Richard Marshall, while walking along the coast of Southport, found a tightly sealed bottle containing the following message:

Record bottle

In 2014, German fisherman Konrad Fischer found a sealed dark brown beer bottle in the nets. It contained an old postcard with two German marks. From the text it became clear that the message was sent by the German Richard Platz in 1913. He asked the finder to write to his address in Berlin. The appearance of a 101-year-old note from his great-grandfather came as a shock to the Platz family, because they knew nothing about him.

How Neptune's Mail Helps Find Love

In 1957, 18-year-old lonely sailor Ak Viking, during a cruise, wrote a letter that was addressed to "A lonely beauty who is far from here" and threw it into the sea, crossing Gibraltar. She was found by 17-year-old Paolina Pozzo in Sicily. Correspondence began between the young people, and they soon got married.

Bottle mail for research purposes

Researcher Dean Bumpus collected and bought used beer, whiskey, wine and champagne containers, washed them and sent them out to sea with notes. From 1956 to 1972, he sent more than 300,000 bottles to the ocean. Thus, the scientist figured out how floating objects move off the coast of America. In this he was assisted by volunteers from the navy, coast guard, fishermen, and research vessel personnel.

Each bottle contained instructions and a card that the finder had to fill out and send to the institute where Dean Bumpus worked. For every bottle found there was a 50-cent bonus. Over the years, 10% of messages were returned. Most of them were found in the first months and years after the "dispatch".

Dean Bumpus' research program was not the first, but one of the largest in scope. Despite the emergence of new technologies, thousands of bottles of various scientific organizations are floating in the sea today.

Scrapbook bottles are a romantic relic of the past that can still be found today. Today you can also see sunken ships that still thrill the minds of treasure hunters.