Message-in-a-Bottle Seemingly Thrown from the Titanic

It was September 12, 1990. In those times, way before instant messaging and Zoom calls, a little girl was looking for pen pals. Zoe was aboard a ship from England to Belgium, on vacation with her parents. She was only 10 years old at the time but was a very clever schoolgirl. She took a piece of paper and started putting some words together. She introduced herself, then wrote about how she liked ballet and playing the flute and the piano. Of course, she couldn’t help but mention her two adored pets, a little hamster she called Sparkle, and her fish, Speckle. She also put down the address at which she could be reached in case someone was interested in writing back to her. But alas, she was at sea. Who could she send this message to?

An interesting idea came to her mind. She carefully placed her letter in a plastic bottle, tightly closed the lid to protect it from the water, and threw it into the sea. The little girl’s excitement faded away over the years as she didn’t receive a response. Maybe the bottle got stuck somewhere. Maybe it was swallowed by some big, scary sea creature. Or maybe the water actually poked through the plastic cap and destroyed her message. Many years later, on Christmas, a letter for Zoe was received at her parents’ house, under her maiden name. The postage signaled that the message was from Europe. It was from a Dutch couple, Piet and Jacqueline Lateur, who had found her delicate bottle and were very considerate to write back. They pointed out that they had found the letter among the debris thrown at the shore by the sea. Zoe’s letter had been stranded for a staggering 23 years at sea and traveled for more than 350 miles to reach its final destination, near Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. That’s quite a voyage for a small plastic bottle!

A story similar to that of Zoe is the strange connection between two little boys. A little German boy named Frank Uesbeck was on a boat traveling to Denmark when he got the same idea as Zoe. He was 5 years old at the time he put together a message and threw it into the unknown. The year was 1987. He got his response years later: when he was 29. His letter, just like the one Zoe would send a couple of years later, had been at sea for 24 years. His message was found by a boy named Daniil Korotkikh while he was on a walk with his parents on the Curonian Spit, near the Baltic Sea. Daniil was lucky that his father knew enough German to translate the message. The unlikely friends eventually met via video conference call in 2011. Not all message-in-a-bottle stories have been explained away.

In 2013, a Croatian surfer came across a damaged bottle while near the Adriatic Sea. The message it contained dated back to 1985, and it was from a man named Johnathan. The sender was eager for his letter to reach a woman named Mary, and he also expressed his keenness for her to respond. Since the letter was supposedly sent from Nova Scotia, the bottle had to have traveled a mind-boggling 3,700 miles! The message went from the Atlantic Ocean, entered the Mediterranean Sea, and reached the Adriatic shores in Croatia. The identities of neither John nor Mary were ever discovered.

There are also messages in a bottle with wonderful love stories to share. This was the case for Ake and Paulina Wiking. When Ake, a lonely Swedish sailor placed a letter in a bottle and threw it in the Mediterranean Sea, he had no idea the piece of paper would eventually reach his future wife. This was in the early 1950s. The bottle was found by an Italian man who was inspired enough to give it to his niece, Paulina. After a year of back-and-forth letters being exchanged, Ake and Paulina eventually met and got married.

Having decided to share their story with the world, they became somewhat of a celebrity couple for the time. They even shared video footage of their wedding with the world, and their story was featured in a bunch of newspapers. This fortunate event started a movement between young people looking for love, increasing the number of messages being thrown out at sea in search of a fairytale ending.

Not all the stories that started out like this eventually worked out, though. In 1945, an American named Frank Hayostek placed a similar message to that of Ake’s in a bottle and threw it into the waters. Almost a year later, his letter was found by an Irish woman. Her name was Brenda O’Sullivan. Their years of correspondence soon caught the attention of the media at the time, but their friendship never flourished because of the added pressure. They eventually met in person when Frank traveled to Ireland, but he didn’t stay for long, and they eventually got out of touch with each other.

After Titanic met its tragic ending, many bottles containing secret messages started to surface. Almost all of them proved to be counterfeited, apart from one letter. Years after Titanic had sunk in the icy Atlantic waters, a bottle was found on the Irish shores. It was supposedly from a man named Jeremiah Burke, and, to this day, it is considered to be the only genuine message-in-a-bottle originating from Titanic. The piece of paper simply stated the sender’s name and the location: the Titanic, accompanied by the word “Goodbye”. Since the date has washed away, it’s difficult to estimate whether the note was sent before or after the ship had hit the iceberg. The common understanding is, however, that since Jeremiah was looking to relocate to the US, he was merely sending his last symbolic regards to his family and friends back in Ireland.

This simple way of meeting and sometimes corresponding with people has turned into a hobby for a man from a Canadian province named Prince Edward Island, located east of the US state of Maine. This man, Harold Hackett, claims to have sent over 4,000 bottles into the Atlantic Ocean since 1996. He also claims to have received many responses from all over the world, including letters from people in Europe, like France and Germany, but also from the Bahamas or even from Africa. This unlikely pastime earns him about 150 Christmas cards from his pen pals each year. To this day, he refuses to add his phone number to any of his letters. This way, he ensures that if people ever want to contact him, the only means of doing so is via a written letter. He’s also studied the best times to send messages in the water, based on the direction of the winds and the currents.

Now some bottles spend a whole lifetime at sea after being cast away by their sender. It was the case for a British man that wrote a message and placed it into a bottle before throwing it in the English Channel in 1914. His name was Thomas Hughes, and he wanted to direct the message to his wife but was polite enough to write a letter to whoever got their hands on the bottle first, asking them to redirect the piece of paper accordingly. The bottle didn’t reach his wife since it was found 85 years later on the Essex coast. The man that stumbled upon the bottle was kind enough to reach out to the family and placed the message in possession of Thomas’s daughter.

And, 85 years isn’t the longest time for a small bottle to be cruising the waves. A scientist named Hunter Brown was studying currents in the North Sea when this idea came to his mind. He placed the same message in almost 2,000 bottles and requested the unlikely recipient write back with the location of their discovery. He thought this method would help him better understand the layout of the North Sea currents. A bottle was found about 11 miles from its original departing location after 97 years. To this day, more than 300 of the original bottles relating to Hunter Brown’s project eventually made it to the shore.

Not all of the messages that were found in bottles got replied to via physical letters. Oliver Vandevalle threw a bottle containing a letter on the English coast while he was on vacation with his family. He was 14 at the time. 33 years later, a woman reached out on Facebook claiming she had gotten his message and tracked him down through his social media profile. At first, he hardly remembered having placed the letter in the bottle, but he eventually recounted the events, even the fact that he sealed the bottle with candle wax to make sure it was leakproof. And then there’s Christina Aguilera and her bottle... No wait, hers’ is about a “GENIE in a bottle”. Okay, never mind.