The “world’s oldest” message in a bottle appeared almost 150 years after it was thrown into the ocean – with an intriguing riddle inside.
Greeting card designer Amy Smyth Murphy, 49, was walking along a beach in New Jersey earlier this month when she spotted an unusual-looking object at the water’s edge.
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She picked up the green container and to her surprise she saw paper inside.
Murphy told Philadelphia Inquisitor: “I just thought, ‘That’s so peculiar. What is that?'”
Smyth Murphy took it home and opened the bottle with a corkscrew, and his niece used picks to extract the paper message.
She said: “It took me, I would say, maybe 48 hours to really understand what it said, but if you look at it long enough you can start to see it.”
They were then able to decode the difficult-to-read handwritten note that read: “Yacht Neptune in Atlantic City, New Jersey. August 6-76.”
Although the bottle has been missing in the ocean for 148 years, it was found just 15 miles from where it was thrown, if the note is correct.
Smyth Murphy began investigating the exact age of the discovery.
She found an identical Barr & Brother Philadelphia bottle on an online review site dating back to before 1900.
Other similar bottles at the site were from the 1870s.
The document found also included a business card from a well-known Philadelphia instrument company called WG & J Klemm, dating back to the 1800s.
On the back was a handwritten note about the Yacht Neptune.
Smyth Murphy said: “I would love to know who was sailing the ship, who was the captain, where was it going? Was it for pleasure? Was it for business? All those kinds of questions.”
She also searched the Neptune and found an article from 1874 that names Captain Samuel Gale of Atlantic City as the owner.
Gale had “just built a splendid yacht, which he named ‘Neptune,’ in honor of the Neptune Club of this city.”
Neptune was a popular pleasure cruise that attracted many daytrippers thanks to Gale’s charismatic personality, according to her obituary.
Smyth Murphy said: “From the reactions I’ve had so far, everyone really likes the mystery of it.
“Let’s see how much information we can get from this bottle and its history and how it connects to Philadelphia and South Jersey.”
The world’s oldest message in a bottle found on an Australian beach in perfect condition 132 years ago
By Jon Lockett
A BEACHCOMBER has found the world’s oldest known message in a bottle almost 132 years after it was thrown overboard.
Tonya Illman discovered the bottle of Dutch gin half-buried in the sand on a beach near Wedge Island, north of Perth.
It was launched from a German ship into the Indian Ocean as part of an experiment to track currents, experts said.
Inside, the Illman family discovered a tightly rolled-up note tied with string, dated June 12, 1886, and the name of the ship, Paula.
“We took it home and dried it, and when we opened it, we saw that it was a printed format, in German, with very faint German handwriting,” Illman said.
Her husband looked it up online and discovered it was part of an experiment carried out from 1864 to 1933 by the Deutsche Seewarte, or German Naval Observatory.
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This story originally appeared on The-sun.com read the full story
