The history of the message in a bottle begins in ancient times, and over millennia the practice of casting messages overboard has served various purposes, from desperate attempts to communicate distress, to sending poetry, to exploring the workings of the oceans. The Ancient Greek philosopher Theophrastus is said to have sent the world’s first message in a bottle, to investigate how ocean currents moved. This first message speaks to the hope that the sea and its currents can bring together people separated by the vast world’s oceans. During the age of exploration, sailors often used bottles to send distress signals or communicate their observations: in 1493, when battling a storm, Christopher Columbus wrote down his discoveries in a letter and sealed it in a barrel that was thrown into the sea: as far as we know it’s still there.

This book is a unique and extraordinary collection of messages in bottles, mainly from the early 1800s to the early 1900s – a time when maritime shipping was expanding almost exponentially. There were no weather forecasts, storms could arrive with no warning, nautical charts were often unreliable, and sailing ships had poor maneuverability and were frequently overloaded (in 1880, 700 ships were wrecked off the British coast in just six months). At a time when the ability to communicate over long distances was non-existent, the only way to seek help was through a message in a bottle, thrown from a sinking ship: a pledge for rescue against all odds, or a final farewell to loved ones back home. Sometimes they were found quickly, but often it was several years, and in some cases, much longer. During the heyday of sailing ships, their discovery was so common that papers like The Times and The New York Times regularly published stories of found messages under the headline ‘Messages from the Sea’.

The message in a bottle continues to captivate: free from routes and schedules it drifts with ocean currents entirely subject to the whims of nature. Its discovery is always an event marked by coincidence, surprise and curiosity. Whether the sender is a shipwrecked sailor, a scientist, or a poet, the message contains a fragment of a life story adrift, contributing to a romantic aura around seafaring and the lure of the unknown beyond the horizon.