World's oldest message in a bottle found washed up on WA beach

On March 6, 2018, reports emerged that the world’s oldest known message in a bottle had been discovered on a beach in Western Australia. A couple found an old Dutch gin bottle half-buried in the sand and took it home. After drying the damp paper inside by putting it in an oven for five minutes, they discovered a printed German form with faint handwriting, dated to 1886.

The find was investigated by Ross Anderson, the assistant curator of maritime archaeology at the Western Australian Museum. Experts confirmed the message was authentic, originating from a German ship named Paula during a 69-year scientific experiment conducted between 1864 and 1933. During this study, German captains threw thousands of bottles overboard to track ocean currents, each containing a form detailing the date, the vessel’s coordinates, and its route.

Prior to this discovery, the world record for the oldest message in a bottle was 108 years. This bottle had remained untouched for nearly 132 years. Archival research in Germany located the logbook for the Paula, revealing a specific entry from June 12, 1886, where the captain recorded throwing a drift bottle overboard.

While approximately 662 of the messages from the experiment were eventually recovered and returned to Hamburg, none of the physical bottles from those recoveries had been kept. The form retrieved from the Western Australian beach matched the exact format of other 1886 documents preserved at the German Seewarte.