World's oldest message in a bottle found in Australia
08 March, 2018
More than 131 years after being thrown overboard, the world's oldest message in a bottle has washed up on a beach in western Australia. The bottle was found by Tonya Illman and Grace Ricciardo in the dunes near Wedge Island in January.
Weeks of research and correspondence crafted a Sherlock-style web of clues that traced the historic note back to 19th century Germany, reports Sky News.
The survival of the document has been heralded as a miracle, as the bottle was found wedged in the sand and without a lid after heavy rain and strong winds on the island, some 112 miles north of Perth. Illman and her husband Kym placed the note in an oven to dry it out before unraveling it to reveal a set of coordinates and a date of 12 June 1886.
Illman's German was not quite good enough to deduce much more of the text, other than the letters "aula" in a naming field, which he guessed might mean the ship was called Paula.
From there the real investigative work began, and three days later the couple received confirmation from a curator of maritime archaeology at the Western Australian Museum that a boat named Paula was listed in an 1883 Lloyds Register, with a home port of Marseille.
It was a 320-ton German barque ship, later found to be on a voyage from Cardiff to what is now known as Indonesia.
But the French port listed in the register appeared to contradict the port written on the note, which started with an "E".
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