From "Message in a Bottle," a Wikipedia article. Lots more message-in-a-bottle stories at that link. Examples:
In December 1928, a trapper working at the mouth of the Agawa River, Ontario, found a bottled note from Alice Bettridge, an assistant stewardess in her early twenties who initially survived the December 1927 sinking in a blizzard of the freighter Kamloops and, before she herself perished, wrote "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."...The longest time between a message sent and when it was received, as far as we know, is 151 years. A seaman named Chunosuke Matsuyama sent a message from an island in the Pacific in 1784. It was found in Hiraturemura, Japan in 1935.
In 1956, Swedish sailor Ake Viking sent a bottled message “To Someone Beautiful and Far Away” that reached a 17-year-old Sicilian girl named Paolina, sparking a correspondence that culminated in their marriage in 1958. The affair attracted so much attention that 4,000 people celebrated their wedding.
The message in a bottle is a popular theme. There's Edgar Allan Poe's story "MS. Found in a Bottle" and there's The Police song "Message in a Bottle":
I'm reading that Wikipedia page after clicking over from "Beachcombing," which turns out to be an extremely interesting subject:
The first appearance of the word "beachcombers" in print was in Richard Henry Dana Jr.'s Two Years Before the Mast (1840) and later referenced in Herman Melville's Omoo (1847).It described a population of Europeans who lived in South Pacific islands, "combing" the beach and nearby water for flotsam, jetsam, or anything else they could use or trade. When a beachcomber became totally dependent upon coastal fishing for his sustenance, or abandoned his original culture and set of values ("went native"), then the term "beachcomber" was synonymous with a criminal, a drifter, or a bum. While the vast majority of beachcombers were simply unemployed sailors, many may have chosen to live in Pacific island communities; as described by Herman Melville in Typee, or Harry Franck in the book Vagabonding Around the World....I was reading "Beachcombing" because I'd used the word — for the first time on this blog? — in my post about the brain found on the beach. No! It was the second time. Click here if you want to laugh again at the "Rock Lobster Guy."
Some beachcombers traded between local tribes, and between tribes and visiting ships. Some lived on the rewards for deserters, or found replacement crewmen either through persuasion or through shanghaiing. Many, such as David Whippy, also served as mediators between hostile native tribes as well as between natives and visiting ships. Whippy deserted his ship in 1820 and lived among the cannibal Fijis for the rest of his life. The Fijis would sometimes capture the crew of a stranded ship for ransom, and eat them if they resisted. Whippy would try to rescue them but sometimes found only roasted bones. Ultimately he became American Consul to Fiji, and left many descendants among the islands....
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What, no "If I could save time in a bottle?" song?
How sad to have been shipwrecked on Lake Michigan and dying of starvation and cold. And it wasn't just the Fijian's who were hostile to British/Foreign ships. Mutiny on the Bounty gives people the wrong idea of the South Seas. Not all those Polynesians were out welcoming ships with flowers. Fletcher Christian and his mutineers barely escaped with their lives from the first island they tried to settle on. Pitcairn was the 2nd choice. Bligh meanwhile was constantly dogged by hostile natives all the way from Tahiti to east Java.
Speaking of the Police...we saw Sting on stage in 'The Last Ship.'
We have season tickets for a musical series in a big city. I thought it would be him singing a la Springsteen's Broadway show.
But it was a serious musical Sting wrote about the shipbuilding town where he grew up.
A bit preachy and lefty, but forgiven because the music was amazing. The guy is seriously talented.
If you ever get a chance to see him live, run, don't walk.
A more recent example of the type was Ben, the old beachcomber in Local Hero (1983). His scene on the beach with Burt Lancaster was not quite like the one Burt did with Deborah Kerr, though.
Always loved the drum groove in Message in a Bottle.
I camped on Isle Royale. Moose woke us up one morning.
Hasn't Columbus been canceled?
I mean.....he was a racist!! He called the native American's Indians!!
Of course, judging by the folks streaming in, and out of the Amazon buildings downtown. He was right!!!
The great 1983 movie "Local Hero" has a beachcomber. Ben, an old guy who lives in a shack, "works" the beach for a living. Someone's got to do it, he says. His sand is very tidy.
Harry Franck's Vagabonding Around the World, about a recent college grad who goes around the world living rough, tramping about, combing beaches and hanging with beachcombers, getting a bit of work here and there and staying in sailor's homes and the like is a really fun time capsule of a read.
If you have never read "Two Years Before The Mast", do it now, it's probably even free a lot of places. It is a fascinating book, written by a Harvard scholar who went to sea to supposedly help cure his failing eyesight (presumably from too much reading and studying). It is very descriptive of the conditions on a sailing ship in the 1800's, the primitive state of California at that time. Highlights include how the sailors sewed and mended their own clothes and took pride in their appearance, brutal punishments suffered by insubordinates, and harrowing episodes of climbing up ice-covered rigging during winter storms at sea.
People today don't realize just what a forlorn hope Columbus' expedition was.
As also many another expedition in the age of exploration, many of which simply disappeared. Many others returned with a handful of survivors.
Those guys just sailed off into the blue, knowing nothing about what they were likely to run into. That takes a state of mind that is no longer possible, maybe, in this modern world, or it could be that such men can still be found, but there is no longer an opportunity to take that sort of open ended risk.
The narrator in Typee didn't choose to live there! He couldn't get away. It was all he could do to keep from getting killed or tattooed for that matter.
Guy had class.
If you ever get a chance to see [Sting] live, run, don't walk.
My wife and I saw him in concert in Oakland back in the 1988-89 time period. It was an outstanding concert and one of the musical performance highlights of my life.
I'm wondering if "The Last Ship" made use of his songs from "The Soul Cages", much of which dealt with his father's death. My own father spent a year dying from cancer and emphysema on the other side of the country from me. I would talk with him on the phone once a week, joke with him, tell him that I loved him. Then I'd hang up, listen to that album, and weep. It actually helped me get through that year.
Dennis Miller on his podcast just recently talked about walking on a beach with Rod Stewart and Bruce Springsteen and finding a message in a bottle. Its a good story, but his main point was the decency and humility of Springsteen in his approach to the situation.
Joe Smith: I'm glad you enjoyed spending your money to be preached at by a Leftist. I'll pass on your recommendation to run, don't walk, to do the same.
There's a good little doc somewhere on TV (Amazon Prime, Hulu, Netflix, I don't remember) about the debris that washed up from the Japanese tsunami. I saw some of it back when I lived up there and went to the beaches occasionally. Can't say I ever found anything really all that interesting, lots of net floats, lumber, styrofoam, and beach glass (which is kind of interesting in itself).
(Update: It's called Lost and Found, see https://www.oregonlive.com/movies/2013/03/lost_and_found_about_the_stori.html for description. Very affecting.)
@bwebster
It is about the closing of the shipyard in his home town, and the social ramifications of lost jobs, etc.
The original version was savaged by the critics. We saw the re-worked version which the critics liked a bit more.
Of all the musicals we've seen (four years' worth), this was one of the best. Incredible melodies and chorus singing with 20 or 30 people. Everyone we saw it with were very impressed.
I was a Police fan back in the day, and that music still holds up well. But Sting is a hell of a songwriter and performer on his own.
https://www.sting.com/news/The%20Last%20Ship
@Wilbur
I am as conservative as anyone I know...the 'leftism' was on the softer side. It was more or a human story about men losing work and what would happen to them and their families.
It seems that, unlike you, I have a nuanced view of the world and can still appreciate great art no matter the source.
If I only listened to songs written by conservatives, I'd be pretty much stuck with listening to nothing but Sinatra.
And speaking of Francis, 'Lighten up.'
https://youtu.be/bwUlkKfR_NI
One of my favorite Police songs. In some pop or rock songs there is a line of extraordinary insight. Like "Seems I'm not alone at being alone". For me it speaks to our common human frailty. To be lonely is universal. It's happened to us all, and yet often in that loneliness we forget about others and think only of ourselves.
Some other poignant songs about loneliness: Only the Lonely - Roy Orbison, Elinor Rigby - the Beatles, The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore - the Walker Brothers, Lonely is the Night - Billy Squire and many more.
Some great lyrics there.
In 1974 on my first visit to Alaska I found a message in a bottle on a tiny island in Funter Bay, about twenty miles from Juneau. According to the note it had been launched from Fox Point on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound about two years earlier by three young teens, two girls and a boy. It had traveled about 1400 miles to get there. Then, like an idiot, I misplaced the note before I could respond to it. I assumed it was lost. About four years ago I was going through some of my mom's papers after she died and I found the note. The names on the note were not extraordinarily unique, but despite that an internet search quickly turned up some likely matches. The boy had grown up to be a beloved medical worker, but had died a year previously. The other match was the girl who appeared to have thought up the message-in-a-bottle idea. The internet had tracked nearly her entire life through moves from place to place in western Washington, including a recent address. I sent a snail mail with a facsimile of the note asking if she had launched it, and sure enough, she responded that she had. She remembered the boy, said he was nice but that she'd lost touch with him. I gave her the bad news. I sent her the original note, and we corresponded for a bit and that was that. Closure. That's my message-in-a-bottle story
That would be awesome if somehow the Columbus message survived and washed up on the beach like a brain. If you found the Columbus message would you you tell anybody or just burn it immediately to kill the racism before it infected you?
I watched the video, and I really don't get why everyone says the Police are racist murderers. I mean sure, they are all white, very white, but there has to be more to it. I didn't even see any guns. Seems crazy to riot over them, and why should they be defunded. They made some good songs, and they should get paid for them. It must be the anti-capitalism that really fuels the anger out there.
@bagoh20
"I watched the video, and I really don't get why everyone says the Police are racist murderers."
: )
What poignant messages. It reminds me of the close to death notebooks of the hiker who started to hike the Appalachian Trail and got lost and realized she was dying, and then (keeping the notebooks which were later discovered) died.
Beachcombing, or its equivalent on the rocky shores of Monterrey, is also referred to humorously in Steinbeck's TORTILLA FLAT.
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