When a message in a bottle rings true: Floating theories about 'floating' epistles

Every discovery of jetsam also results in thousands of theories being set afloat.

By ET Bureau | Feb 24, 2020, 08.43 AM IST

The message scrawled on a scrap of a cake box inside, dated 1938 and asking the finder to send a photograph to a man then living hundreds of kilometres away on the mainland of UK.

The discovery last week of a classic ‘message in a bottle’ on an island off Britain by a man walking his dog on the beach is not surprising. The message scrawled on a scrap of a cake box inside, dated 1938 and asking the finder to send a photograph to a man then living hundreds of kilometres away on the mainland of UK, merely shows how popular such floating epistles were ever since Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe popularised it with their writings.

As there were no qualms about polluting the oceans at that time, thousands of bottles are estimated to have been tossed in and most of them never surfaced. Indeed the fact that this latest bottle was found not far from where it was set adrift — probably by the writer as the culmination of a trip to the island — shows that not all such flotsam and jetsam end up on epic journeys such the postcard in a bottle that was thrown into the sea in Britain in 2011 and turned up 14,500km away in western Australia a year and a half later.

The more mysterious journey, of course, is of the ring that was lost by a lady in the very mundane setting of a department store washroom in the coastal city of Portland, Maine in the US 47 years ago and found this month across the Atlantic Ocean under a pile of soil in Finland. No doubt a thousand theories will be floated about how it managed to travel so far.

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