Bottle mail is as old as the bottle itself. It intrigues young and old. Who is the man or woman who hides a note in a bottle? Who is that child who wants to send a drawing through the sea? Beachcombers and walkers on the beach of Ameland regularly find a bottle with a note. You don’t look for bottle mail, you find it. The Beachcombers Museum Swartwoude in Buren has quite a collection. It is also a wonderful collection of stories, because there is a story behind every message in a bottle.
Communicating with bottle mail
Bottle mail is sending a message to a stranger via water. The person who throws the bottle into the water, usually sea but it can also be inland water, has no way of knowing who will ultimately find the bottle.
Help and art
The bottle can contain a cry for help, a request for help, a work of art, a call for contact or it can be a joke or competition.
It has even been used for espionage purposes.
Photo Petra de Jong / Source: Netherlands in photos, Flickr (CC BY-2.0)
1957
In the early summer of 1957, four eleven-year-old friends are standing on the beach near Hollum. They carry a bottle with a message to the water. After a good throw and with the help of wind and waves, the bottle moves seaward. The girls lose track of their message in a bottle and don’t really believe in a response to their message. One of those Ameland girls is surprised to receive a response from a girl from Denmark.
Mandø and Ameland
A ten-year-old girl finds the message in a bottle on the beach of the Danish island of Mandø. She understands from the note that girls from Ameland are looking for pen pals. The Danish girl writes to one of the Ameland girls. On Ameland, a former sailor translates the letter as best he can. The Ameland girl returns a letter in Dutch and the Danish girl seeks translation help from a pharmacist. Her father brings a Dutch dictionary and the Ameland girl buys a Danish dictionary. Then they write to each other in coals of Dutch and broken Danish, but the message always gets through. The girls grow older and learn English at school, after which they continue correspondence in English. They wrote to each other for eleven years. Then boys come into play and children are born. Contact between Ameland and Mandø is watering down.
2005
In the summer of 2005, the Danish woman and her husband entered the garden of the Ameland girl and her husband. They are more than welcome. The Amelanders change their day program and show the Danish couple the entire island. It will be a beautiful day and the Ameland family is cordially invited for a return visit. The story is true and a wonderful example of contact through bottle mail.
Bottles on Ameland
Some special message in bottles that were found on the beach of Ameland:
- June 2016 – Devin (7) finds a bottle thrown into the water by Sophie (10) at Scarborough on January 1, 2016. The bottle crossed the North Sea.
- February 2015 – Douwe (7) finds a bottle post on Ameland’s northwest beach that was thrown into the water by a beachcomber from Texel near Rottumeroog in October 2010. The bottle has been in transit for more than four years;
- April 2012 – A message in a bottle ends up in the parking lot at Holwerd. There is a note and drawing from a German girl in it;
- May 2011 – A note with dozens of signatures from different people, a group of friends from Baltrum;
- March 2011 – A certain Michiel, a hard-working, practical man who can work well alone and likes a joke now and then, sends an application by message in a bottle;
- March 2011 – A boat made of plastic bottles, launched on Ameland, is found on the Shetland Islands;
- January 2011 – The bottle was thrown into the sea near Dover by someone from Belfast and was found on the beach near Buren;
- December 2008 – A bottle with mail from the Frisian mainland, thrown into the Wadden Sea from Zwarte Haan, arrives on the beach of Ameland;
Beachcombers Museum
The Agricultural and Beachcombers Museum Swartwoude collects the bottles with message in a bottle. Beachcombers bring their harvest to that museum. Various types and sizes of bottles are available with a note or a message engraved in the glass.
Oldest message in a bottle on Shetland Islands
The oldest message in a bottle that was recovered turned out to be 98 years old. He was found in April 2012 off the coast of the Shetland Islands. A local fisherman found the oldest message in a bottle ever. The record was set by a 93-year-old bottle of mail, which was found in 2006. The oldest bottle comes from a shipment of 1890 bottles thrown into the sea by a Scottish expedition in 1914. It was part of an experiment to map the undercurrents in the sea around Scotland. Each bottle contained a reply card asking the finder to send details of the find. The finder then received a reward of six pence.
From Plymouth to Amrum
In 2015, a couple on Amrum found a message in a bottle that was even older, 108 years old. It was thrown into the sea in Plymouth between 1904 and 1906, along with 1,019 other bottles. Most were found quickly, but this one took time. He was found in August 2015 on the German Wadden Island of Amrum. The thousand bottles were part of a study into currents in the sea. The finders received one shiling reward, as promised in the card inside the bottle. They also received a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records.
Postman
‘Bottle mail – The sea as mail deliverer’ is the title of bottle mail collector Wim Kruiswijk. He found his first bottle in 1970 and since then many bottles and contents have crossed his path. By the end of 2007, he had already collected bottle mail 935 times. Most are fairly recent messages, but occasionally there is an old bottle, such as the one from 1914, with a message from a soldier on his way to the front to his wife and daughter.
Source: Book Bottle Post
Kruiswijk
The bottles can be thrown into the water from land or from a ship. The journey the bottle makes depends on current and wind. A glass bottle travels an average of ten kilometers per day. A plastic bottle, which is higher in the water, can float twice as fast and in strong winds the speed increases. Every message in a bottle has its own story, Kruiswijk noted. Half of the bottles come from children. Some of the hundreds of bottle posts from Kruiswijk were thrown into the sea from the ferry to Ameland or were found on the Amelander beach.
Message in a Bottle
ISBN 978-90-8616-066-2
Publisher LanastaPrice 22.95
18,500 kilometers to New Zealand
In September 2014, a message in a bottle was found (not on Ameland) that had floated a journey of more than 18,500 kilometers. It had drifted from the tip of South America to Antarctica in 2012, then ended up on a beach on Macquarie Island southwest of New Zealand. Lifeguards found him during a beach clean-up. The letter in the bottle showed that Dutch sailors had thrown it into the water at Cape Horn on September 21, 2012. The bottle traveled across the ocean at a speed of 29.5 centimeters per second.