the world's oldest message in a bottle

[Art Blade]

A note, placed in a bottle and thrown overboard from the German barque Paula on June 12, 1886, was found in West Australia near Wedge Island, WA, on January 21, 2018. It is a whooping 131 years and five months old Most likely it only floated around for a few months and then literally beached. It stayed on the beach of a sparsely populated area until it was found.

https://www.kymillman.com/oldest-message-in-a-bottle/

[PZ]

Hard to believe a note could survive all those years, but very interesting!

[Dweller_Benthos]

Very interesting read. I never find anything more remarkable on the beach than a broken sand dollar shell.....

[fragger]

That is pretty incredible. It's not surprising that a bottle could lay on a beach undiscovered for over a hundred years in Western Australia, though. Some of the beaches over there go for miles and miles with almost nobody ever on them. A lot of them are inaccessible except by 4-wheel drive. Plus the bottle has probably been covered and uncovered by wind-driven sand, over and over again.

If you look at Wedge Island in Google Maps you'll see that there's nothing around for miles - no towns, nothing. Who knows what else has been washed up on WA beaches and been lying there for decades or even centuries, still waiting to be found. There have been a lot of shipwrecks along that coast, many of them Dutch East Indiamen that would catch the "roaring forties" eastward across the Indian Ocean from the southern tip of Africa, then swing north to get to what is now Indonesia. Some misjudged it and ended up foundering on reefs along the WA coast. They were doing that from as long ago as the 16th century, 200 years before James Cook came along (but Cook hit the eastern coast of Australia from the Pacific. He took the long way around )

[Art Blade]

nice info, fragger

Now, isn't this again OWG at its best? I'm from where the bottle originated and you're where it ended up, and the other chaps reading and commenting here are from yet another far-away corner of this planet. I think we've got it well covered here at OWG

[nex]

Pretty amazing info guys 
Thank you both Art and fragger for sharing.

You're right Art, where else but OWG....

[PZ]

Indeed; I really enjoy the international nature of our conversations - so nice to see different points of views and ideas based on location in the world. 

[fragger]

I feel the same way, all

I was just thinking about how when that bottle was thrown overboard, whoever did so could never have imagined that when it was found, people from both the thrower's country of origin and the bottle's final destination would be able to discuss it simultaneously with each other.

It's a very cool thing to me that even though there's only a handful of us who regularly post, we all hail from such far-flung locations. America, Germany, Holland, Norway, South Africa, Brazil, Australia... (if I missed anyone's country there, please forgive me ) In the past we've also had regular contributors from England, Ireland, Sweden, Russia, India, Kuala Lumpar... It's quite the little international community we have here And we all get on so well together. Why can't the rest of the world be like this?

There I go with that ideal world stuff again

[PZ]

Nothing wrong with imagining (and wanting) an ideal world community 

[Art Blade]

absolutely

[nex]

sniff.........