“She decided to wait until her children aged eight and 10 got home from school before they attempted to retrieve the note from the bottle,” the BBC reported.

“When I picked them up I told them I had something really exciting to tell them and they said ‘Is it that we are having hot dogs for tea?'” she said.

“They had a few more guesses and then I told them a message in a bottle had been found in our house and they were really excited and thought it was maybe treasure.”

Debate Over Oldest Message in a Bottle Sure to Follow

Some believe this is merely a “time capsule,” not a true “message in a bottle” because it never went to sea.

Poppycock.

When I look at this message in a bottle, I see a message… I see a bottle… and I see the message inside of the bottle. For me, that settles it.

But if you need convincing, listen up:

Messages in bottles have been sent on dry land since at least the Civil War, when they would occasionally be used to protect sensitive communications during threatening weather, or volatile conditions. Were they just time capsules, because they were on dry land? Of course not – the very idea is ridiculous.

Just recently, in 2022, a dry land message in a bottle garnered worldwide media attention, sent by a girl in a Kent migrant camp. It described conditions inside the camp and asked the outside world for help. Was that not a message in a bottle, either?

What about Scotland’s own Robert Sinclair, whose life was literally saved by a message in a bottle he sent on dry land? Suffering an asthma attack in a farmhouse, he dropped a message in a bottle SOS out the window. Soon after, it was picked up by a neighbor’s dog who took it to their owner, Brian. Brian took the note to police who then found Robert Sinclair and took him to the hospital. According to the dogma (ha!) that a true message in a bottle must come from the sea, Robert Sinclair’s SOS was nothing more than a time capsule. Surely, we can all agree this is an absurd notion.

The argument here, at its core, is over denotation vs. connotation. Messages in bottles carry seafaring connotations, sure. But nothing in the bare bones definition of a message in a bottle demands that it spend time at sea.

This debate over whether Dr. Stimpson’s find is a “true” message in a bottle is a waste of time.

Of course it is a message in a bottle, and it is the oldest ever found. Period.

What Does the 1887 Note Say?

This 135 year old note from 1887 consists of the kind of handwriting you just don’t see much of anymore. Big, loopy script; really beautiful handwriting. Dated October 6th, 1887, this message is actually just over 135 years old.

The world’s oldest message in a bottle, unrolled. Photo: Peter Allan / Eilidh Stimpson, from Facebook.

According to group efforts to decipher the full text of this message, it reads:

James Ritchie and John Grieve laid this floor but they did not drink the whisky. October 6th 1887. Who ever finds this bottle may think our dust is blowing along the road.

JG

JR

Compared to the second oldest message in a bottle ever found (the previous record was 132 years), which was just a scientific form seeking data, this one is downright poetic. I love that the world’s oldest message in a bottle captures the romance and whimsy of this longstanding hobby.