Since the ancient Greeks started the custom of throwing bottles into the sea in the 3rd century BC to study water currents, it is believed that more than six million messages have been placed in bottles and thrown into the ocean. This tradition resurfaced recently when several websites circulated the story of a Scottish schoolgirl's message in a bottle, which she threw into the sea at the age of eight in 1996, and it was recently found 800 miles away in Norway, 25 years later.
With this amusing story in the spotlight, the British website "Daily Star" published a collection of messages thrown into the sea that captured widespread interest. In 1784, Japanese sailor Chunosuke Matsuyama and 43 others sank on an island in the South Pacific. He carved a message on a piece of coconut wood, placed it in a bottle, and threw it into the sea in hopes of getting help. Unfortunately, they were never rescued, but the bottle was found in 1935, washed ashore in the village of Hiratourimura in Japan, Matsuyama's birthplace.
Swedish sailor Lovfloren Ak Viking tossed a message in a bottle in 1956 "for a beautiful and distant person." Two years later, he received a reply from a girl from Sicily named Paulina, who wrote: "I am not beautiful, but it seems like a great miracle that this little bottle should have traveled far and long to reach me, and I ought to send you a reply." The couple eventually married.
During a cruise to Hawaii in 1979, Americans Dorothy and John Peckham threw a champagne bottle from the ship with a note inside asking anyone who finds it to write back. Eventually, they received a reply from Vietnamese man Hoa Van Nguyen, who found the message nearly 9,000 miles away while on a small boat trying to flee the communist regime in his country. He told the Peckham family that the discovery gave him the strength to move forward, and he eventually settled in the United States with their help.
When fisherman Steve Juan was on a fishing trip in 1999, he found a ginger beer bottle off the coast of Essex, which contained a love letter written by soldier Thomas Hughes in 1914 to his wife Elizabeth. Hughes had dropped it in the English Channel while traveling to the Western Front in France, but he was tragically killed just two days later. However, Steve insisted on delivering the letter to its rightful owners, even though it dated back to World War I, meaning the wife had passed away. He successfully returned the letter to their daughter Emily, who was only two years old when her father wrote the message.
In 2002, a friend of writer Karen Librach found a teardrop-shaped bottle on a beach in Kent. Inside was an anonymous message from a French woman to her 13-year-old son who had passed away. Karen wrote a book about this story and later met the mother.
Before perishing, when the Titanic sank in 1912, Irishman Jerimiah Burke, aged 19, placed a note in a bottle of holy water given to him by his mother and threw it into the sea. The message read: "From Titanic, goodbye everyone, Burke from Glanmire in Cork." The message was found a few months later and washed back to the Irish shore.
