NEW YORK: The world’s oldest message in a bottle to ever be found is believed to have been recovered -after 108 years at sea.
Marianne Winkler, a retired postal worker, spotted the bottle floating by the German island of Amrum. She said the clear glass bottle had a note inside bearing only the words: “Break the bottle.”
“My husband tried to get the message out of the bottle, but there was no chance, so we had to do as it said,” she said.
When the couple unfurled the note , they found a message in English, German and Dutch which asked the finder to fill in some information on where and when they had found the bottle, before returning it to the Marine Biological Association in Plymouth. It said whoever did so would be rewarded with one shilling.
The MBA staff recognized the bottle was one of the 1,020 released into the North Sea between 1904 and 1906 as part of a project to test the strength of currents. Communications director of the Marine Biological Association, Guy Baker, said, “It was a time when they were inventing ways to investigate what currents and fish did.Many of the bottles were found by fishermen. Others washed up on the shore, and some were never recovered.Most of them were found within a relatively short time.” True to their word, the association sent a shilling to the couple as the promised payment. The current record holder is a bottle found after 99 years.
