THE “world’s oldest” message in a bottle has washed up nearly 150 years after it was thrown into the ocean – with a puzzling 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.
She picked up the green vessel and to her surprise saw paper inside.
Murphy told the Philadelphia Inquirer: “I just thought, ‘This is so peculiar. What is this?'”
Smyth Murphy took it home and opened the bottle using a corkscrew, with her niece then using took picks to pry the paper message out.
She said: “It took us I would say maybe 48 hours to really understand what it said, but if you stare at it long enough, you can kind of start to see it.”
They were then able to decode the difficult to read handwritten note which said: “Yacht Neptune off Atlantic City, New Jersey. Aug. 6 – 76.”
Despite the bottle missing in the ocean for 148 years, it was found just 15 miles where it was released from, if the note is accurate.
Smyth Murphy began to do some digging on exactly how old the find could be.
She found an identical Barr & Brother Philadelphia bottle on one online valuation site dated pre-1900.
Other similar bottles on the site were from the 1870s.
The paper inside find also included a business card for a well known Philadelphia instrument company called W.G. & J Klemm dating to the 1800s.
On the back of that was the hand written note about Yacht Neptune.
Smyth Murphy said: “I would love to find who was sailing on the ship, who was the captain, where was it going? Was it for pleasure? Was it business? All those types of questions.”
She also dug into the Neptune and found an article from 1874 which names Captain Samuel Gale of Atlantic City as the owner.
Gale had “just built a splendid yacht, which he christened ‘Neptune,’ after the Neptune Club of this city.”
Neptune was a popular pleasure cruise which drew scores of day trippers thanks to Gale’s charismatic persona, according to his obituary.
Smyth Murphy said: “From the reactions so far that I’ve had, everyone really likes the mystery of it.
“Let’s see how much info we can get out of this one bottle and the history of it and how it connects to Philadelphia and South Jersey.”
By Jon Lockett
A BEACHCOMBER has found the world’s oldest known message in a bottle nearly 132 years after it was thrown into the sea.
Tonya Illman discovered the Dutch gin bottle half-buried in the sand on a beach near Wedge Island, north of Perth.
It was thrown from a German ship in the Indian Ocean as part of an experiment to track currents, experts said.
Inside, the Illman family discovered a note tightly rolled up and tied with string, carrying the date June 12, 1886, and the name of the ship, Paula.
“We took it home and dried it out, and when we opened it, we saw it was a printed form, in German, with very faint German handwriting,” Illman said.
Her husband searched online to find that it was part of an experiment run from 1864 to 1933 by the Deutsche Seewarte, or German Naval Observatory.
