Message found in a bottle on WA beach. It seems the oldest-known message of this kind and was thrown 132 years ago.
The date shown in the message is 12 June 1886. It said in German language, it had been thrown overboard from the German sailing barque Paula, 950km from the WA coast.
This extraordinary historical discovery was made by a Perth family.
Mrs Tonya Illman first noticed something sticking out of the sand when she was walking across sand dunes just north of Wedge Island, 180 kilometres north of Perth.
"It just looked like a lovely old bottle, so I picked it up thinking it might look good in my bookcase," she said to ABC.
At first she thought that this is not true, may be someone has done this for fun. However, she said,
"My son's girlfriend was the one who discovered the note when she went to tip the sand out."
"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 on it."
The Illman family conducted some research online and were convinced they had either made a significant discovery or fallen victims to a hoax.
They contacted Western Australian Museum. The assistant curator of maritime archaeology Ross Anderson then conducted a series of investigations.
In his opinion it was a mid-to-late 19th-century Dutch gin bottle, and the form inside was written on cheaply-made 19th-century paper.
He contacted colleagues in the Netherlands and Germany for help to check the authenticity of the bottle.
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