by Skye Moody
Science rules, but heart holds court. In 1914, during World War I, Thomas Hughes, a British infantryman, missed his wife while on a ship crossing the English Channel. Hughes wrote her a letter, sealed it in an empty ginger-beer bottle, and tossed the bottle overboard. Two days later, Hughes died in battle. In 1999 a fisherman discovered the bottle in an estuary of the Thames. The fisherman located Hughes’s daughter, who was then eighty-six years old and living in Auckland, New Zealand. He flew to Auckland to personally deliver the message.
A letter written on the decks of the torpedoed and sinking Lusitania in May 1915 was later discovered, its final sentences, “Still on deck with a few people. The last boats have left. We are sinking fast. Some men near me are praying with a priest. The end is near. Maybe this note will ...”
In 1944, on a beach in Maine, a bottle was found with this message inside: “Our ship is sinking. SOS didn’t do any good. Think it’s the end. Maybe this message will get to the U.S. some day.” The message was traced to the USS Beatty, a destroyer torpedoed off the coast of Gibraltar on November 6, 1943.
In 1953 a message in a bottle was discovered washed up on a Tasmanian beach. It had been lobbed into the sea by two Australian soldiers aboard a troop vessel carrying them to war in France. When a picture of the message was published, a woman recognized the handwriting as that of her son, who had been killed in action in 1918.
The 1976 film Voyage of the Damned, based on the book by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts, reprised the horror of some 850 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany aboard the SS St. Louis, bound for Cuba. Cuban president Frederico Laredo Bru, who had guaranteed the St. Louis passengers asylum, changed his mind. As the St. Louis languished in Havana harbor from May 27 to June 6, 1939, waiting for negotiations to decide the issue, the passengers formed a committee to represent them in their pleas for sanctuary. When President Bru refused to accept the refugees, the passengers tossed scores of bottled pleas for help into the sea. The St. Louis headed back to Europe, where it unloaded its desperate passengers in Belgium, Holland, France, and England. In 2003, at a book sale in Bath, England, a John Moore discovered an edition of Voyage of the Damned. Inside he found a piece of notepaper with a handwritten message, “Please help us President Bru or we will be lost.” It had indeed come from the St. Louis, one of perhaps hundreds of messages in bottles the stranded refugees tossed overboard.
In an old-time version of Match.com the lovelorn trusted Neptune’s post with their heart’s desires. In 1956 while at sea with nothing very interesting to occupy his mind, Swedish sailor Ake Viking jettisoned a long shot overboard. The message inside Viking’s bottle asked for any pretty girl who might find the bottle to write to him. Months later a Sicilian fisherman plucked Viking’s bottle from the sea. After reading the note, the fisherman, as a joke, gave it to his daughter, Paolina. Paolina wrote to the Swedish sailor and a correspondence ensued. Eventually Ake Viking visited Paolina in Sicily. In autumn 1958, Ake and Paolina married.
After World War II, in 1946, the U.S. Navy used drift bottles to map areas where Japanese mines might wash ashore following storms at sea. By this time oceanographers had begun employing drift bottles in research on currents affecting navigation, fishing, derelict vessels, and marine environments. Information gleaned from drift studies have saved the lives of sailors and swimmers lost at sea. Missing cargo ships and pleasure vessels have been located based on drift studies, and the trajectory of major oil spills plotted. Municipalities along river routes use drift bottles to determine the course their trash takes as it heads downriver. Some modern research projects involve several thousand drift bottles, or drift cards, placed into the ocean, and often the scientists will offer a reward for reporting where and when one is discovered. A knowledge of the sea’s surface drifts and currents helps predict when and where flotsam will wash ashore, thereby substituting scientific accuracy for the mystery and romance that once accompanied the washed-up message in a bottle.
Yet even today a certain excitement accompanies the discovery of a research drift card or bottle, the reward being less monetary than the satisfaction the finder feels knowing he or she has contributed to a scientific research project. Personally, I’d rather find a love note, or an SOS.
Coastal schoolchildren around the globe often drop bottles in their communities’ bays and estuaries hoping for a reply from far away. Since its founding in 1998, the Kuroshio Monogatari Cheerful Children Association, in Genkinakonokai, Japan, has encouraged international pen pal friendships among children through the release of messages in bottles into the Pacific Ocean via the Kuroshio Current off Japan. The zipper manufacturer YKK provides bottles with water-resistant zippers for the project. The zippers keep water out and air in so the bottles won’t easily sink.
Schoolchildren in the United States are also fond of trying this marine experiment. Once in a while a kid gets really lucky. In 1980, at Providence, Rhode Island, Pleasant View School teacher James Westerman encouraged his students to try sending messages in bottles. The students prepared their messages, stuffed them into bottles, and tossed them in Narragansett Bay. In November 1982, one of Westerman’s students, Frank Marston, received a note from a Spanish merchant naval officer in the Canary Islands off North Africa. But that’s not the end of Westerman’s tale: In 1984, young Nomp Travis, another of Westerman’s bottle-lobbing students, received a reply from ten-year-old Jayne Ayre (no kidding) of Barnstaple, England. Jayne Ayre wrote that she had come upon the bottle while strolling the strand with her father on January 29, 1983. “I found your name on it,” wrote Jayne Ayre, “and was thrilled to see it had come all the way from America.” With her reply she enclosed a clipping from the North Devon Advertiser, an article reporting her flotsam discovery.
The Emperor of Flotsam
Oceanographer and university professor Tadashi Ishii is the undisputed global Emperor of Flotsam. A professor of oceanography at Kyushu Industrial University, Ishii is president of the Flotsam Scientific Society in Japan and author of Shinpen Hyouchakubutsu Gitenn, or, The New Encyclopedia of Flotsam, its second edition published in December 2002. Hyouryubutsu—Japanese for flotsam—is Ishii’s passion, and he’s found some remarkable objects on Japan’s beaches. Among flotsamist Ishii’s message-in-bottle collection is a bottle with a strong scent of perfume. The note inside, apparently in a schoolgirl’s Japanese script, said, “I wish my family will be happy forever and my grandma live for a long time, that I’ll have a wonderful boyfriend. I hope my mama is happy in heaven, I want to be a nurse. I wish happiness for my friends and my brothers.... This is for the god of the sea.”
In June 1979, Ishii pulled a whiskey bottle off the tide. Inside was a note from a lovelorn and spurned schoolboy who presumably consumed the bottle’s contents before penning a message to diverse sea gods and placing his heart in their fickle hands. That same year, in September, Ishii found a bottle with a pencil inside and a note that said, “Could you be my friend?” The girl explained that she was very ill and had been in the hospital for a long time. Dr. Ishii, the scientist, possesses a special passion for bottled romance, and, of course, contacted the ailing child.
Even fishermen get the blues, according to Ishii. He found a bottled message in Japanese script on the Ashiya seashore, which he believes was written by a fisherman. The note said, “I wish next year will be a great year for me.” Hey, buddy, don’t we all?
In August 1991, on Okinawa Beach, Ishii found a champagne bottle containing a sheet of notepaper and an American dollar bill. The paper wouldn’t yield to Ishii’s attempts to remove it, so he broke the bottle. The message, written in English, read, “February 19, 1989, Southern California. Sixty miles off the California coast, this bottle was dropped from the air.” The person who dropped the bottle into the Pacific Ocean wanted the bottle back, and so included the dollar bill as postage, apparently having miscalculated the dollar-to-yen exchange rate.
Ishii packaged up the broken bottle shards and mailed them, along with photos of th
e intact bottle, to the sender, asking him, “How many bottles are you guys dropping into the water?” In early December, Ishii received a response: “We began in 1988, dropping the bottles from off the Southern California coast. Most of bottles were found within a 20 km area. Every February through April, I charter an airplane from Santa Barbara and fly westward to Point Conception over the Pacific Ocean dropping over 100 bottles gradually. So far, this year, I’ve dropped 355 bottles. Different types of bottles. 14 bottles were found in Philippines. Two bottles in Hawaii. Also Rio de Janeiro, and Columbia. One was found in Japan, Hiroshima Prefecture—dropped on March 26,1988, from San Nicolas Island, it was found in Japan on October 8, 1990. I use some polyethylene bottles because they usually float, but even so, to strengthen the bottle, I put it on a rooftop for 2 years,” to cure so it wouldn’t break.
When Ishii found the bottle, the paper wasn’t dry. “The American guy said I was the first person whose paper wasn’t dry even though he put red rubber sealer on the bottle and plastic over that.”
Politics Afloat
During the winter of 1994-95, a series of brutal storms on Boswell Bay in Hinchinbrook, Alaska, sent waves clawing at the already eroding sand and gravel Strawberry Beach. The erosion laid bare sediment that hadn’t seen daylight for decades. Beachcombers Brooke and Gayle Adkinson noticed an amber-colored bottle partially buried in the scarp. The bottle had a note inside. Water had seeped into the bottle and the paper was soaked. Using a pair of tweezers, the couple was able to retrieve and unfold the paper, but it came apart. After three hours of tedious work, the Adkinsons had pieced together the note, and to their astonishment they saw it was composed in three languages: Russian, Japanese, and English. One side of the document included the following information: “Imperial Russian ... thrown 5/ 18 July 1913, N 54°26’, E 141°55’.” The other side of the document included the words, “Vladivostok ... East Siberia ... The Pacific Hydrographical Expedition.”
If the information was correct, and the notepaper and bottle did date from Czarist Russia, the bottle had been tossed overboard from an icebreaker in the Sea of Okhotsk a bit north of Sakhalin Island during a 1913 exploratory mission conducted by the Imperial Russian Navy in efforts to find a shorter sea route to Japan. The czar’s hydrographical expedition had tossed bottles with messages inside hoping for responses from their finders, information they would use to help chart ocean currents along Siberia’s Arctic Ocean coastline. At least one of their bottles got loose on the currents and after traveling southward to the Japan coast, the Adkinson bottle headed east on Pacific Ocean currents before being sucked into the Gulf of Alaska current from whence it found rest for a time at Strawberry Beach.
Tadashi Ishii’s Encyclopedia of Flotsam references messages in bottles produced in recent decades by Taiwanese political activists who printed propaganda and Taiwanese flags on vinyl sheets, placed them in various colors and shapes of plastic containers, and set them adrift toward mainland China in hopes of encouraging their finders to rebel against the Chinese Communist regime. Ishii describes the canisters as being green, yellow, or blue, with orange or red lids, the lids embossed with the Chinese character for “good fortune” and on the canister bottom, a plum flower symbol. They were produced in eleven different shapes, including jugs, balls, and flasks. The majority of the canisters, says Ishii, were released en masse from naval vessels near China’s Fujian Province coastline. According to a Chinese yearbook, over 100,000 canisters had been released by 1983. The tactic continued at least until 1991. Not only written propaganda was released in the canisters; according to Ishii, many contained consumer goods such as perfume, face creams, laundry detergent, and sewing needles. Ishii reports that between 1979 and 1986, sixty-two canisters were found on Japan’s beaches. Similar canisters have washed up along the coastlines of Alaska, Hawaii, and Canada.
The Taiwanese aren’t alone in creating flotsam propaganda. In February 1997, beachcombers in Niigata, Japan, came upon South Korean canisters that had been aimed at North Korea’s coastline. These canisters contained leaflets, canned food, and photographs.
On June 10, 1990, University of Washington oceanographer Richard Strickland, while kayaking in Barkley Sound just off Vancouver Island, Canada, retrieved a bottle he had spied on shore. Peering inside, he saw some papers covered with Chinese characters. But circumstance intervened, and Strickland didn’t open the bottle until December 1991. Inside he found six leaflets. One of them was a written appeal for the release of Wei Jingsheng, a Chinese dissident well known in the West. Further inquiry revealed that the bottle Strickland found was probably released in the summer of 1980, when ocean currents and winds proved favorable for sending flotsam mail to the China mainland. The bottle was apparently one of thousands released off China’s Quemoy and Matsu islands by Taiwan activists trying to notify citizens in the Peoples Republic of China that Wei Jingsheng had been arrested and detained.
Now here’s where the mystery deepens. Oceanographer Curtis C. Ebbesmeyer, at the time working at the University of Washington, became involved and, with several other scientists, attempted to track the bottle’s path from the China coast across the Pacific to Vancouver Island. The team agreed that the bottle wasn’t sent before October 1979, the month Wei Jingsheng was arrested. They allowed time for the plan to be carried out: Messages had to be written and printed, bottles stuffed and lidded, and, too, there was travel and, no pun intended, execution time. The next summer’s favorable winds would have blown toward the Chinese mainland, thereby reducing the number of bottles left in the ocean. Conclusion: The bottle was jettisoned during the summer of 1980.
Next came computer technology, via a program called Ocean Surface Currents Simulation, a revolutionary tool developed by oceanographer W. James Ingraham Jr., another University of Washington researcher. But at the time, the technology couldn’t simulate ocean currents along the coast of mainland China, so the oceanographers had to conjecture, based on Ingraham’s and Ebbesmeyer’s considerable experience, about the movement of the bottle until it reached open ocean. If, as seemed possible, the bottle had entered the Kuroshio Current off the Japan coast and traveled the current north by northeast, it might have reached Vancouver Island within two to three years. Once off Vancouver Island, the bottle could have lollygagged around Barkley Sound until 1990, when Strickland retrieved it.
Another theory presented reasonable possibilities. The bottle might have entered the Kuroshio Current, followed the North Pacific Drift, and bobbed into the southbound California Drift, then traveled even further south into the North Equatorial Drift, then back into the Kuroshio. It could have made this panoceanic circle more than once before it finally broke out of the currents and washed up in Barkley Sound. The scientists figured travel time during that decade at around four and a half years for one complete circuit of the North Pacific Ocean, so the bottle may have ridden ocean currents for two or more rotations. Although no absolute conclusion could be reached from this limited evidence, the exercise is the sort of detective work oceanographer’s relish. But the discovery of a single bottle wouldn’t advance science much. If, on the other hand, hundreds of bottles had washed into Barkley Sound, they might represent a shifting drift or current, help predict a seasonal shift, or verify that a freak of nature had occurred. Oceanographers would jump on the new challenge.
Trolling for God: How to Make a Missionary Bottle
In the summer of 1980, at Okinawa, Tadashi Ishii found a beer bottle with a Japanese religious tract inside. Ishii says that some religious Japanese lob holy flyers into the ocean (inside sake bottles?) and that many of them reach Hawaii. In 2004, in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada, Harold Kemp decided to proselytize for his religious faith by bottling evangelical messages and sending them adrift in the Atlantic. Retired at sixty-seven, Kemp said he’d been looking for a pastime when he struck upon the idea of marine evangelizing. Within a few months Kemp had set adrift more than three hundred epistles in bottles. After complaints that he was litt
ering the marine environment, Kemp saw the light, repented, and ceased lobbing Bible verses into the sea.
A Web site authored by Kraig Josiah Rice offers instructions for making “missionary bottles”: “Do you want to make and float your own missionary bottles for the Lord? Here is a complete list of directions, where, if followed carefully, you can become a very successful literature evangelist in regards to missionary bottle evangelism work for the Lord.... It is important to have a burden for the lost and be continually in intercessory prayer every step of the way in this kind of ministry. You are engaging in spiritual warfare.... I hope you and I are up to accepting this challenge.”
In his directions, Rice erroneously calls plastic containers biodegradable. He also cautions, “If the bottle has a neck that is too tight or too loose it should not be used. Some modern ketchup bottles have necks that are too wide—they will not hold a tight enough cork and seawater will seep in as a result and rot the Word of God.”
SOS
In May 2005, eighty-eight refugees from Peru and Ecuador who were stranded at sea for three days off Costa Rica were rescued from their sinking vessel because the women aboard had insisted on placing an SOS note in a bottle and attaching it to a fishing line they saw in the water. The fishermen found the bottled SOS and reported it to authorities, and the vessel MarViva rescued the troubled craft. Although they were saved from drowning, the refugees, who had been abandoned at sea by human traffickers, were refused entry into the United States and were returned to the countries they had hoped to leave behind.