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Messages in the bottles
Finding a bottle floating in the sea, pulling it up and finding a message inside: is a very romantic thing, transporting us to adventures and tragedies that someone wanted to leave to the chance of the waves and currents, to have someone completely unknown read their story.
In January 2018, Tonya Illman and her husband Kim were walking on the beach at Wedge Island, near Perth, Western Australia. The currents had washed a lot of trash onto the sand, and Tonya picked up a plastic bag to dump all the stuff that was ruining their walk. At one point she picked up a glass bottle which appeared to contain something, and decided to take it home to put it on the living room bookshelf. The bottle had been corked by a rag and sand, but inside she could see that there was something, like a hand-rolled cigar. So her husband Kim put the bottle in the oven to dry what was inside, and when he took it out he saw that it was a small roll of paper held tightly by a string. He began to unroll it slowly so as not to break the paper that had dried out.
On the piece of paper was a printed message asking anyone who found the bottle to take it to the German consulate. The message came from the science ship Paula and the date was June 12, 1886.
At the Museum of Western Australia in Perth, experts confirmed that the bottle and the message was authentic. It was a page from the…
