You will be familiar with the concept of writing a letter, putting it into a bottle, carefully sealing it, and casting it out to sea in the hope that it will one day find a messenger.
Perhaps you have also hummed The Police’s 1979 hit Message in a Bottle.
There are lots of ways to communicate, and as communication professionals, we are here for all of them, but throwing letters in bottles into the sea doesn’t seem like the most… effective way of reaching out.
Yet this niche form of communication has a long history. Allegedly, in about 310 BCE, the Greek philosopher Theophrastus used bottled messages to determine if the Mediterranean Sea was formed by the inflowing Atlantic Ocean (the first, but far from the last, time bottles were used in this way to study the movement of the seas and oceans). Since then, people have released messages in bottles for all sorts of reasons: research, in the hope of finding an exotic pen pal, and just because.
Some of the saddest stories of messages in bottles involve people in shipwrecks and other disasters, expressing the hope that their last words will reach a loved one. Like Alice Bettridge, a young woman working on the Kamloops freighter. In December 1928, a trapper found a bottled note at the mouth of the Agawa River, Ontario. When he opened it, it read: “I am the last one left alive, freezing and starving to death on Isle Royale in Lake Superior. I just want Mom and Dad to know my fate.”
Because of concerns about littering and polluting, messages in bottles have gone out of vogue, but the very idea of a heartfelt message being sent out to sea in search of a recipient continues to resonate, and still pops up in literary and theatrical contexts.
Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-bottle-floating-in-a-body-of-water-SkVpd5YhUug
