From sea-mail to e-mail

She noticed the bottle during a weekend camping excursion and thought at first that it was just litter.

“I went to pick it up and realized that instead it was full of salt and it had a note in it with a pink plastic fish,� Eliza recalls.

She continues to describe how the bottle reminded her of “when you look in fairytales and they have little glass one; it looked like that, except it was plastic.�

The note contained a partial address from Massachusetts dated two years earlier.

Eliza wrote a letter informing the mysterious bottle sender that the message had been received adding, “next time send it by e-mail instead of sea-mail.�

A 10-year old girl responded by saying how “cool� it was that someone from a different country had found her letter.

This was Eliza’s first message by sea but had sent her own message awhile back by tying it to a helium balloon which was received by a person living in Ingomar, Nova Scotia.

Sending a message in a bottle is not meant for a specific person but to end up wherever the currents carry them.

There has always been a romantic connotation to this method of messaging. Throwing words out to the ocean, not knowing where they might end up and who will read them.

The first message ever sent by this method was in 310 BC by the ancient Greek philosopher Theophrastus as an experiment to show that the Mediterranean Sea was formed by the inflowing Atlantic Ocean.

Explorer Christopher Columbus, after discovering the New World, was said to have entered a severe storm. Afraid that his discoveries would be lost, he wrote them down and sealed them in a bottle with instructions to have them delivered to the Queen of Spain if found. The message was not found until about 300 years later.

During the battles of the 16th century, the English Navy used this form of communication to send ashore information about enemy positions. In fact Queen Elizabeth I created the official position ‘uncorker of bottles.’ If any other person was caught opening these bottles they were sentenced to death.

Even the world of the internet has a website where you can send out a virtual message into a virtual sea and track who reads it and where it goes. So far over three million people have sent such a message.

Therefore, for over 2,000 years the message in a bottle has survived, even during an age when email is the popular choice of communication.