12 Amazing Message-In-A-Bottle Stories

essay story about message in a bottle

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There's something undeniably romantic about tossing a message into the ocean and seeing to whom fate — abetted by the currents and wind — might deliver the marine missive.

Messages have been slipped into bottles and shipped on mysterious voyages at least since 310 B.C., when Greek philosopher Theophrastus employed the tactic to test his theory that the Atlantic flows into the Mediterranean Sea. And in fact, so-called "drift bottles" are still employed as a means of charting ocean currents.

But aside from researchers studying oceanic circulation, there are many other motives that compel people to cork up their words and send them on seafaring adventures. From rescue pleas and sad farewells to random notes, messages in bottles are a curious antidote to the high-speed modes of communication we've come accustomed to. The following are some of the more remarkable tales describing the journeys of messages delivered by the sea.

1. A bittersweet reminder

A simple brown bottle plucked from the Baltic Sea by a fisherman gave one woman a glimpse of the grandfather she had never met.

Fisherman Konrad Fischer (shown above) found the bottle 101 years after Richard Platz tossed it into the Baltic while on a hike on the German coast. Though Platz died in 1946, a genealogist followed the clues and found his way to the door of his granddaughter, Angela Erdmann. Platz died six years before Erdmann was born, making the delivery of the postcard bittersweet.

"He also included two stamps from that time that were also in the bottle, so the finder would not incur a cost," Erdmann told The Guardian . "But he had not thought it would take 101 years."

2. Across the Atlantic in 9 years

While visiting a beach in Rockport, Massachusetts, Max Vredenburgh and his father sealed a message in a bottle and threw it out to sea. That was August 2010, when Vredenburgh was 10 years old.

The message included Vredenburgh's name and a few of his interests at the time, along with his address and a request for a response. He soon forgot about his dispatch, but the Atlantic Ocean didn't. In November 2019, Vredenburgh — now a student at Suffolk University in Boston — received a text from his father saying the message had been answered. The response came from someone named "G Dubois," who apparently found the bottle on a beach in October. That beach wasn't in Massachusetts, though, or even North America — it was in France.

"It will have taken 9 years to cover the 6000 [kilometers] that separates us," the response stated. "You had grown a lot during that time: 10 to 19 years old." Vredenburgh, who posted pictures of both letters on Twitter, added that "due to popular demand i will be keeping everyone updated on the situation!"

3. A treasure found in Texas

In January 2019, Jim and Candy Duke were enjoying one of their favorite Saturday pastimes — walking along the Padre Island National Seashore in Texas — when they discovered a glass bottle entangled with tree limbs on the shore. Miraculously, the bottle wasn't covered in barnacles and looked almost brand new. The bottle contained a message on orange paper that said "BREAK BOTTLE."

They took the bottle home and struggled to open it. "It was very hard because the rubber stopper had swollen into the part of the neck of the bottle that was a little bit larger making it harder to get out," Candy Duke told Treehugger. "We even broke a neighbor's wine opener trying to extract it."

The paper inside was actually a postcard with instructions to fill out the date and location the bottle was retrieved, mail it back to the Galveston Laboratory of the U.S. Bureau of Commercial Fisheries (now known as NOAA Fisheries) and receive a 50-cent reward.

From February 1962 to December 1963, the laboratory released 7,863 bottles into the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Texas. The purpose was to study water currents and its role in young shrimps' movements from spawning grounds to nursery grounds. The Dukes mailed the postcard back but asked the lab not to send them the reward.

4. Castaways revealed

In 1794, a Japanese seaman named Chunosuke Matsuyama and his 43 companions were caught in a storm and shipwrecked on a South Pacific island. Without supplies, all of the crew eventually died; but not before Matsuyama wrote a message telling of their misfortune, carved in coconut wood and slipped in a bottle. No one knew what had become of the group until the bottle was discovered 150 years later near the Japanese village of Hiraturemura.

5. Ghost message from the Titanic

Irish cousins Jeremiah Burke, 19, and Nora Hegarty, 18, boarded the ill-fated Titanic in 1912 to meet up with Burke's sisters who had settled in Boston a few years earlier. Before setting sail, Burke's mother gave him a bottle of holy water. As the Titanic began her descent into the sea, Burke managed to write a message, "From Titanic, goodbye all, Burke of Glanmire, Cork," which he placed in the holy water bottle. The cousins died in the tragedy, and a year later, the bottle washed ashore a few miles from his family home. The artifacts were kept in the family for nearly a century before being donated to the Cobh Heritage Centre in 2011.

6. And 85 years later…

In 1914, British World War I soldier Pvt. Thomas Hughes wrote a letter to his wife, sealed it in a ginger ale bottle, and tossed it into the English Channel. He died two days later fighting in France. Fast forward to 1999, when a fisherman found the bottle in the River Thames. It was too late to deliver the letter to Mrs. Hughes, who died in 1979, but not too late for Hughes' 86-year-old daughter, who was only 1 when her father died. The message was delivered to her at her home in New Zealand.

7. A German experiment

In 2018, Tonya Illman was walking around sand dunes on Wedge Island (near Perth, Australia) when she discovered an old gin bottle with a rolled-up paper tied with string inside. The paper was dated June 12, 1886, and was from a German vessel. Apparently, from 1864 to 1933, several German ships would toss bottles with messages inside overboard. The notes would contain the ship coordinates, the date and its route. The German Naval Observatory wanted to learn more about ocean currents much like the "drift bottles" of ancient times. Therefore, the notes would ask people to write where and when they discovered the bottle and return it. A local maritime museum verified the note, and the bottle is currently on display.

8. One of the oldest

In 2011, a Scottish fisherman named Andrew Leaper was pulling in his haul near the Shetland Islands when he spied a bottle in the catch. Within, he discovered an old letter, a very old letter — in fact, at the time, it was certified as the oldest message in a bottle ever found by the Guinness Book of World Records, though the Wedge Island bottle has now staked that claim. The message was scrawled by Capt. C. Hunter Brown of the Glasgow School of Navigation and was sent to sea in 1914 along with a whopping 1,889 other bottles. A government agency in Aberdeen continues to track Brown's project; to date, 315 of his castoffs have been recovered.

9. Unfinished business

When the ocean liner the Lusitania was struck by a torpedo on her 1915 journey from New York to Liverpool, it took a mere 18 minutes for her to sink. But that was long enough for one passenger to reportedly pen perhaps the most poignant and eerie message in a bottle yet recovered: "Still on deck with a few people. The last boats have left. We are sinking fast. Some men near me are praying with a priest. The end is near. Maybe this note will..." What the writer hoped the note might do is a secret forever swallowed by the sea.

10. Love potion

In 1956, long before match.com was an option, a lovesick Swedish sailor by the name of Ake Viking took his search for love to the salt water. A quick message, "To Someone Beautiful and Far Away," was corked in a bottle and dispatched into the ocean. Two years later, Viking's plea was answered by a Sicilian woman named Paolina. "I am not beautiful, but it seems so miraculous that this little bottle should have traveled so far and long to reach me that I must send you an answer," she replied. The two began a correspondence that ended in Viking's move to Sicily to marry his match made by the sea.

11. Memo to mom

In the early 2000s, a 10-year-old girl from Manhattan was visiting friends in Long Island when she scribbled a message and threw it into the ocean, enclosed in a ginger ale bottle. The bottle containing the missive written by Sidonie Fery was discovered in 2012 by Patchogue parks workers cleaning up beach debris from Superstorm Sandy. But what made this discovery, and its subsequent return, so poignant is that Fery died in a tragic fall from a cliff in Switzerland in 2010. The message, which was passed on to Fery's grieving mother, was a simple but profound reminder: "Be excellent to yourself, Dude."

12. The lifesaver

In 2005, more than 80 mostly teenaged migrants were abandoned on a boat off the coast of Costa Rica. Left on the crippled vessel by the crew who was illegally smuggling the passengers, they were adrift without any means of typical communication. They ingeniously popped an SOS into a bottle, which was soon miraculously found by fisherman, who then delivered the message of "Please help us" to the denizens of a nearby World Heritage site island. The workers there alerted their headquarters, the lost-at-sea drifters were rescued, and the group was taken to the island to recover.

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Message in a bottle: 10 famous floating note discoveries

essay story about message in a bottle

What is believed to be the world's oldest discovered message in a bottle has been presented to the sender's granddaughter, 101 years after it was first tossed into the sea in Germany.

People have been putting messages in bottles for much longer than a century: in 310 BC, Greek philosopher Theophrastus put sealed bottles into the sea as part of an experiment to prove the Mediterranean Sea was formed by the inflowing Atlantic Ocean.

Oceanography is a common reason drift bottles are thrown overboard, but there are also some romantic and surprising stories of sending messages across the sea throughout history.

Here are 10 of the most famous floating note discoveries:

1. A new world record?

FOUND BY: Konrad Fischer in the Baltic Sea, 2014 SENT FROM: Richard Platz in the Baltic Sea, 1913 TIME AT SEA: 101 years

A message in a bottle tossed in the sea in Germany 101 years ago, believed to be the world's oldest, was presented to the sender's granddaughter, a Hamburg museum has said.

A fisherman pulled the beer bottle with the scribbled message out of the Baltic Sea off the northern city of Kiel in March, Holger von Neuhoff of the International Maritime Museum in the northern port city of Hamburg said.

Mr Von Neuhoff said researchers were able to determine, based on the address, that it was 20-year-old baker's son Richard Platz who threw the bottle in the Baltic while on a hike with a nature appreciation group in 1913.

Fisherman Konrad Fischer holds a bottle containing a message from 1913.

2. Floating on North Sea currents

FOUND BY: Scottish skipper Andrew Leaper near the Shetland Isles, 2012 SENT FROM: Captain C. Hunter Brown near the Shetland Isles, 1914 TIME AT SEA: 97 years and 309 days

A drift bottle released out to sea on June 10, 1914 by Captain C. Hunter Brown was recovered by UK fisherman Andrew Leaper almost 98 years later, on April 12, 2012.

Brown was a scientist at the Glasgow School of Navigation studying the currents of the North Sea, and the bottle was one of 1,890 released on June 10, 1914.

It is the current Guinness World Record holder for oldest message in a bottle.

The message inside read: "Please state where and when this card was found, and then put it in the nearest Post Office. You will be informed in reply where and when it was set adrift. Our object is to find out the direction of the deep currents of the North Sea."

The bottle was discovered 9.38 nautical miles from the position it was originally deployed.

3. Jonathan to Mary

FOUND BY: Matea Medak Rezic in Croatia, 2013 SENT BY: Jonathon (identity unknown) from Nova Scotia, Canada, 1985 TIME AT SEA: 28 years

A 23-year-old kite surfer, Matea Medak Rezic, stumbled across a half-broken bottle while clearing debris from a Croatian beach at the mouth of the Neretva river in the southern Adriatic.

Message in a bottle

Inside the bottle was a message from Jonathan, from the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, who had written it 28 years earlier, honouring his promise to write to a woman named Mary.

The message reads: "Mary, you really are a great person. I hope we can keep in correspondence. I said I would write. Your friend always, Jonathon, Nova Scotia, 1985."

The bottle would have had to have travelled approximately 6,000 kilometres across the Atlantic Ocean, entered the Mediterranean Sea, and then drifted into the Adriatic Sea.

Jonathan and Mary's identity, and how the two knew each other, is unknown.

4. Writing to Zoe

FOUND BY: A Dutch couple in Oosterschelde, Netherlands, 2013 SENT BY: Zoe Averianov, from a ferry travelling from Hull to Belgium, 1990 TIME AT SEA: 23 years

Zoe Averianov, from Hebden Bridge, was 10 years old when she threw her message in a bottle overboard as she went on holiday, travelling by ferry from Hull in England to Belgium on September 12, 1990.

Her message read: "Dear finder, my name is Zoe Lemon. Please would you write to me, I would like it a lot. I am 10 years old and I like ballet, playing the flute and the piano. I have a hamster called Sparkle and fish called Speckle."

Twenty-three years later at Christmas in 2013, a letter arrived to Zoe's parents' address from a Dutch couple: "Dear Zoe, yesterday on one of my many walks with my wife along the dikes of Oosterschelde looking among the debris thrown by the sea of embankment I found a little plastic bottle containing your message."

5. A mother to her son

FOUND BY: Karen Liebreich and Sioux Peto on a beach in Kent, 2002 SENT BY: An unnamed French mother from a ferry crossing the English Channel, 2002 TIME AT SEA: A few weeks

In 2002, while on a ferry crossing the English Channel, a French mother threw a teardrop-shaped bottle, some clothes and lilies overboard.

Inside the bottle was a note from the mother to her child, Maurice, who had died at age 13: "Forgive me for being so angry at your disappearance," the letter went. "I still think there's been some mistake, and I keep waiting for God to fix it … Forgive me for not having known how to protect you from death. Forgive me for not having been able to find the words at that terrible moment when you slipped through my fingers".

A few weeks later, Sioux Peto found the bottle washed up on a beach in Kent when she was walking her dogs.

Peto found a lock of hair and a letter written in French inside. She gave the letter to her friend, UK-based author Karen Liebreich, to translate.

Over the following few years, Liebreich tried to discover who the French mother was, but without success.

Then in 2006, Liebreich authored the book The Letter In The Bottle about the discovery, and a few years after the book's release, the mother who wrote the letter contacted Liebreich and the two women finally met a month later in northern France.

6. A grandson's connection

FOUND BY: Geoff Flood at Ninety Mile Beach in New Zealand, 2012 SENT BY: Herbert Hillbrick from an unknown location, but thought to be from a ship travelling from England to Australia, 1936 TIME AT SEA: 76 years

Geoff Flood was taking a walk with his partner on Ninety Mile Beach in New Zealand one Sunday in November 2012, when he noticed a bottle floating near the beach.

Inside the bottle he found a handwritten note dated March 17, 1936: "At sea. Would the finder of this bottle kindly forward this note, where found, date, to undermentioned address."

Underneath the note was signed the name: "H E Hillbrick, 72, Richmond Street, Leederville, Western Australia."

The note was written on special stationery marked with a picture of the ship that the note is thought to have come from - the SS Strathnaver, a British Royal Mail Ship that carried people between England and Australia.

Flood discovered that H. E. Hillbrick had died in the early 1940s, but he was lead to Hillbrick's grandson, Peter Hillbrick, who was living in Perth.

Peter told local media of the discovery: "The only connection I have with Grandfather is now that bottle. That's about all. So, it's a fascinating story."

7. From five-year-old Frank

FOUND BY: Daniil Korotkikh on the Curonian Spit in Lithuania and Russia, 2011 SENT BY: Frank Uesbeck from a ship travelling to Denmark, 1987 TIME AT SEA: 24 years

Daniil Korotkikh, a 13-year-old Russian, was walking with his parents along a beach on the Curonian Spit when he saw what he said looked like a German beer bottle with a ceramic plug lying in the sand.

Inside he find a message written in German. Korotkikh's father knew some German and translated the letter. It said: "My name is Frank, and I'm five years old. My dad and I are travelling on a ship to Denmark. If you find this letter, please write back to me, and I will write back to you."

The five-year-old boy who wrote the letter is, Frank Uesbeck, who was 29 when the message was discovered.

Korotkikh and Uesbeck met each other via an internet video link in March, 2011.

8. Across the Atlantic

FOUND BY: Breda O'Sullivan in Dingle, Ireland, 1946 SENT BY: Frank Hayostek, 1945 TIME AT SEA: Eight months

Frank and Breda

On Christmas Day in 1945, a 21-year-old American World War II veteran, Frank Hayostek tossed a bottle over the side of his troop carrier with a note tucked inside.

Eight months later, the bottle was found on a beach near Dingle in Ireland by 18-year-old milk maid, Breda O'Sullivan.

What followed was seven years of letters exchanged back and forth across the Atlantic between them.

The two finally met in August 1952 when Hayostek had saved enough money to fly to Ireland amid an international media circus over the story, but the pair were never able to get their romance off the ground.

9. Escaping a regime

FOUND BY: Hoa Van Nguyen off the coast of Thailand, 1983 SENT BY: Dorothy and John Peckham from a cruise to Hawaii, 1979 TIME AT SEA: Four years

In 1979, during a cruise to Hawaii, Dorothy and John Peckham wrote notes and placed them inside empty champagne bottles, then threw them overboard.

They wrote asking anyone who found the message to get in contact with them, and they included a $1 bill in each to cover postage of the reply.

In 1983, the Peckhams got a response. Hoa Van Nguyen, a former soldier in the Vietnamese Army, had written them a letter saying he and his younger brother found one of the bottles while floating off the coast of Songkhla Province in Thailand in an attempt to escape the communist regime in Vietnam.

The Peckhams exchanged letters with Van Nguyen, and when Van Nguyen asked whether the couple could help his family move to the United States, they worked with US immigration to make it happen.

The families finally met in 1985 when Van Nguyen flew into Los Angeles from Thailand.

10. A British soldier on the way to the front

FOUND BY: Steve Gowan on the Essex coast, England, 1999 SENT BY: Private Thomas Hughes when he tossed it into the English Channel, 1914 TIME AT SEA: 85 years

In 1999 while fishing off the Essex coast in England, Steve Gowan found a green ginger beer bottle with a screw-on stopper.

Inside, Gowan found a message from 26-year-old World War I soldier Private Thomas Hughes to his wife, with a covering note for the finder of the bottle.

The bottle had been tossed into the English Channel as Hughes left to fight in France.

The covering note read: "Sir or madam, youth or maid, Would you kindly forward the enclosed letter and earn the blessing of a poor British soldier on his way to the front this ninth day of September, 1914. Signed Private T. Hughes, Second Durham Light Infantry. Third Army Corp Expeditionary Force."

The letter read: "Dear Wife, I am writing this note on this boat and dropping it into the sea just to see if it will reach you. If it does, sign this envelope on the right hand bottom corner where it says receipt. Put the date and hour of receipt and your name where it says signature and look after it well. Ta ta sweet, for the present. Your Hubby."

Two days after writing the letter in 1914, Hughes was killed.

The family later moved to New Zealand, where Gowan was able to deliver the letter to Hughes's daughter, Emily Crowhurst, 85 years later.

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Interesting Literature

A Summary and Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘MS. Found in a Bottle’ is one of Edgar Allan Poe’s sea stories, and one of his earliest works of fiction: it was published in 1833, when Poe was still in his early twenties. The story recounts an unnamed narrator’s experiences at sea, following a storm and shipwreck.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the story is the idea that the narrative we are reading was written by a man shortly before he died at sea, and that the narrative miraculously survived at sea in a glass bottle before being found by someone.

You can read ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’ here before proceeding to our summary and analysis below.

‘MS. Found in a Bottle’: summary

The story is narrated by a man who, as so often in Poe’s stories, is alone, cut off from his family. He boards a ship from Batavia (in Indonesia), but the ship is hit by a simoom or storm during its voyage. The ship capsizes, and only the narrator and one other passenger, a man from Sweden, manage to avoid drowning.

The ship bobs along the water until it reaches the South Pole, crashing into another ship. This time, only the narrator himself survives, and climbs aboard the galleon his ship has collided with.

The ship is manned by old and decrepit men who (for some reason) fail to notice the narrator, and all of the equipment is outdated and not fit for purpose. However, the narrator is able to salvage some paper and ink from the captain’s cabin, and uses that to write his ‘MS.’ (i.e., manuscript) detailing his story, before casting it into a bottle and throwing it into the sea.

The ship continues towards Antarctica, where it is sucked into a whirlpool. The narrator’s final entry in his manuscript tells of how he and the ship are ‘going down’, into the concentric circles of the whirlpool.

‘MS. Found in a Bottle’: analysis

Edgar Allan Poe was a pioneer of the short story form. Indeed, he’s even credited with introducing the term ‘short story’ into the language; amazingly, the term didn’t exist before the mid-nineteenth century. Over the course of several dozen classic short tales, Poe pioneered several new genres, most famously science fiction and the psychological horror story. He also wrote Gothic tales and sea stories.

‘MS. Found in a Bottle’ is, along with ‘ A Descent into the Maelstrom ’, the most celebrated example of the latter. Joseph Conrad, himself one of the finest writers of sea stories in the English language, said it was ‘about as fine as anything of that kind can be – so authentic in detail that it might have been told by a sailor of sombre and poetical genius in the invention of the fantastic.’

Praise doesn’t come much higher, or from a much more esteemed place, than that. It’s even been suggested that Herman Melville was influenced by ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’ when writing his classic sea story, the novel Moby-Dick .

Poe’s sea stories demonstrate his interest in some recurrent themes, and both of these stories contain some intriguing shared features: the force of a powerful whirlpool against which man is helpless to defend himself, the extreme ends of the earth (the northern areas around the Arctic in ‘A Descent’, the South Pole in ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’), and the idea of the story’s narrator being the last holdout against these powerful natural forces, whose account of his brush with death (and, in the case of ‘MS.’, eventual presumed death) is preserved for us to read.

Some critics have analysed ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’ as a work of satire on the genre of the sea story, based largely on the fact that the story’s events are wildly improbable: the narrator lurches from one disaster to the next during his voyage, but more improbably still, he manages to document his experiences while all about him is chaos. How likely is it that none of the crewmen aboard the black galleon would be able to see him? Is some magic at work here?

Yet set against this argument, we might point out the lengths to which Poe goes to make an implausible narrative authentic and credible: for instance, the narrator’s jottings on his ‘MS.’ become shorter and shorter as his ship lurches closer to disaster, suggesting that he has less time to keep his diary while all is falling down around him. And Poe’s other tales, dealing with the supernatural as they so often do, strain the limits of credulity.

What Poe was especially adept at doing, however, was exploiting the reader’s uncertainty surrounding a narrative, through using an unreliable narrator or else blurring the boundaries between the real and the unreal, the supernatural and the psychological, and so on.

In this connection, then, we might analyse ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’ as a text that is about narrative itself: the narrative is not a means to an end (i.e. telling an exciting and suspenseful sea story), but the very subject of the story. Poe’s title points this up: rather than detailing the events of the story (as ‘A Descent into the Maelstrom’ so plainly does), ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’ throws the emphasis onto the manuscript itself, rather than what it contains.

Poe is exploring, perhaps without openly mocking or satirising, the fine line a writer of adventure stories must tread: that is, between extreme plausibility and extreme adventure. If the events of the story are too recognisably real and ordinary, they are unremarkable, and readers of adventure stories expect something out of the ordinary. Conversely, if the events described are too far-fetched, the illusion of reality, or ‘suspension of disbelief’, is destroyed and readers can see they are being manipulated by the author.

What is even less well-known or well-recognised is that ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’ won Poe a prize in a short story competition: he submitted the tale to the Baltimore Saturday Visiter and the judges all agreed that Poe’s story was the best of all of the submissions. Poe won $50 for the story.

1 thought on “A Summary and Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’”

Never read this story before and now I want to read it. LOL.

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Message In A Bottle

Nicholas Sparks

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1998

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Movie Reviews

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"Message in a Bottle'' is a tearjerker that strolls from crisis to crisis. It's curiously muted, as if it fears that passion would tear its delicate fabric; even the fights are more in sorrow than in anger, and when there's a fistfight, it doesn't feel like a real fistfight--it feels more like someone thought the movie needed a fistfight 'round about then.

The film is about a man and a woman who believe in great true love. The man believes it's behind him; the woman hopes it's ahead of her. One of their ideals in life is "to be somebody's true north.'' Right away we know they're in trouble. You don't just find true love. You team up with somebody, and build it from the ground up. But "Message in a Bottle'' believes in the kind of love where the romantic music comes first, trembling and sweeping under every scene, and the dialogue is treated like the lyrics.

Yet it is about two likable characters--three, really, since Paul Newman not only steals every scene he's in, but puts it in the bank and draws interest on it. Robin Wright Penn plays Theresa, a researcher for the Chicago Tribune, who finds a letter in a bottle. It is a heartbreaking love note to "Catherine,'' by a man who wants to make amends to his true north. Theresa, a divorced mother of one, is deeply touched by the message, and shares it with a columnist named Charlie ( Robbie Coltrane ), who of course lifts it for a column. Theresa feels betrayed. (If she thinks she can show a letter like that to a guy with a deadline and not read about it in tomorrow's paper, no wonder she's still a researcher.) The column leads to the discovery of two other letters, on the same stationary. Charlie has the bottle, the cork, the stationery and the handwriting analyzed, and figures the messages came from the Carolinas. A few calls to gift shops, and they know who bought the stationery.

It's Garret Blake ( Kevin Costner ). Theresa is sent out on a mission to do research about him. She meets his father (Newman), and then the man himself, a shipwright who hand-crafts beautiful vessels. He takes her for a test sail. The wind is bracing and the chemistry is right. "You eat meat?'' he asks her. "Red meat? I make a perfect steak. It's the best thing I do.'' With this kind of buildup, Linda McCartney would have tucked into a T-bone.

Soon it's time for Theresa to return home (where after she writes one column, the paper promotes her and gives her an office with a window view; at that rate, in six weeks she'll be using Col. McCormick's ancestral commode). Of course she wants him to come and see her--to see how she lives. "Will you come and visit me?'' she asks. His reply does not represent the proudest moment of the screenwriter: "You mean, inland?'' Sooner or later, he's going to find out that she found his letter in a bottle and is not simply a beautiful woman who wandered onto his boat. That his secrets are known in those few places where the Tribune is still read. Yes, but it takes a long time, and when his discovery finally comes, the film handles it with a certain tact. It's not just an explosion about betrayal, but more complicated--partly because of the nature of the third letter. (Spoiler: It's a bit of a stretch that Garret's dying wife coincidentally hit on the idea of writing a note in a bottle to him on the same typewriter and stationery he was using, especially since she presumably didn't know about the first two notes.) As morose and contrived as the movie is, it has a certain winsome charm because of the personal warmth of the actors. This is Robin Wright Penn 's breakthrough to a different kind of acting, and she has a personal triumph; she's been identified with desperate, hard-as-nails characters, but no more. Costner finds the right note of inarticulate pain; he loves, but doesn't feel he has the right to. Paul Newman handles his role as Costner's ex-drunk father with the relaxed confidence of Michael Jordan shooting free throws in your driveway. It is good to see all three of them on the screen, in whatever combination, and the movie is right to play down the sex scenes and underline the cuddling and the whispers.

But where, oh where, did they get the movie's ending? Is it in the original novel, "Message in a Bottle," by Nicholas Sparks ? Don't know. Haven't read it. The climactic events are shameless, contrived, and wildly out of tune with the rest of the story. To saddle Costner, Penn and Newman with such goofy melodrama is like hiring Fred Astaire and strapping a tractor on his back.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

Message In A Bottle movie poster

Message In A Bottle (1999)

Rated PG-13 For A Scene Of Sexuality

126 minutes

John Savage as Johnny Land

Robbie Coltrane as Charlie Toschi

Paul Newman as Dodge Blake

Illeana Douglas as Lina Paul

Kevin Costner as Garret Blake

Robin Wright Penn as Theresa Osborne

Jesse James as Jason Osborne

Produced by

  • Kevin Costner
  • Denise Dinovi

Based On The Novel "" by

  • Nicholas Sparks

Directed by

  • Luis Mandoki
  • Gerald Dipego

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Message in a Bottle: The History, and the Stories You Never Knew

essay story about message in a bottle

For fans of pop culture (and especially the nostalgic kind), the idea of a Message in a Bottle probably conjures thoughts of the 1998 Nicholas Sparks novel. Or maybe it’s the 1999 romantic drama film based on the same story, starring Kevin Costner, Paul Newman and Robin Wright. To others, the concept instantly evokes the hit 1979 song by The Police, and you may find yourself already humming along— Sending out an S.O.S.!— at the mere mention of it.

But the history of casting out missives via ocean bottles actually goes much deeper than these popular references—thousands of years deeper, in fact. Here, we explore the history of sending messages in a bottle, and round up a few of the most amazing stories from around the world. 

The Brief (and Not Totally Comprehensive) History of Messages in Bottles

A common misconception about messages in bottles is that they are usually romantic in nature. A long lost love letter in a bottle, sent from the heart and discovered years later—what could be a more poetic notion? The truth is, though, the earliest known instances were far from it. Rather than passionate, many instances of these messages have been decidedly practical. 

In the age of ancient philosophy, one of Aristotle’s own pupils, the Greek philosopher Theophrastus, is credited with having sent the first message in a bottle. He did so in order to test his theory that the mighty Atlantic Ocean flowed into the Mediterranean Sea. It’s still unclear whether he ever received the confirmation he was hoping for.

Suspicious that British spies or any number of nefarious actors may have been using messages in bottles in order to communicate secret messages, Queen Elizabeth took swift action. She appointed a special “Uncorker of Ocean Bottles” to open all such bottles that were found, and decreed that it was a capital crime for anyone else to open one. 

A Japanese seafarer named Chunosuke Matsuyama was shipwrecked in the remote South Pacific, along with his crew of 40-something other men. Desperate, he carved a message into coconut timber, stuffed it inside a bottle and threw it into the sea. This same message was discovered generations later in 1935, and in a twist of fate, legend has it that the bottle turned up in the same village where Matsuyama had been born centuries before. 

While not as sensational as prior examples, this is the year in which the United States Coast & Geodetic Survey first began to study messages in a bottle. Their methods centered around releasing messages into the ocean in great quantities in order to track where they ended up, giving the surveyors critical information about the nature of ocean currents and tides. 

In one particularly poignant discovery, a message washed up on shore near Dunkettle, Ireland. It read, “From Titanic. Goodbye all. Burke of Glanmire, Cork”—and it had been tossed into the sea by a young passenger of the ill-fated ship, which sank on April 15, 1912. In a strange twist, the bottle washed up only a few miles from Burke’s own hometown. It remained in the family for generations, before it was donated to the Cobh Heritage Centre . 

Just a few short years later, a stoic message in a bottle was launched from the site of another tragic shipwreck. The RMS Lusitania, a British ocean liner, had just been torpedoed by a German U-boat, and as it began quickly taking on water (the massive ship sank entirely in just 18 minutes), one unknown passenger hastily wrote a farewell: “Still on deck with a few people. The last boats have left. We are sinking fast … The end is near. Maybe this note will…”

While many more messages in bottles were surely cast and discovered in the intervening years, 1999 saw the discovery of a missive dating back to the first World War. Private Thomas Hughes had penned a note to his wife and tossed it into the English Channel in 1914, and he tragically was killed in battle just two days later. Found 85 years later in the River Thames, the bottle was given to Hughes’ daughter, who was in her late 80s herself by that time. 

In a more uplifting instance, a group of 88 South American refugees found safety thanks to casting out a message in a bottle. After finding themselves abandoned at sea near Costa Rica, they sent out a note pleading for help—and a nearby fishing vessel happened to find it tangled in one of its lines. The fishing boat ultimately came to their rescue. 

Modern-Day Messages in Bottles

Today, some scientists and oceanographers use messages in bottles to study global currents. They launch thousands of such bottles into the ocean at a time, usually from ships that are anchored at specific coordinates. Then they wait—in many cases, decades or more—for those bottles to be discovered. In one such study in the year 2000, climate researcher Eddy Carmack of the Institute of Ocean Science in Canada cast out around 6,400 bottles. By 2012, only 4% of these bottles had been recovered, with many mysteries of the tides still yet unknown. 

A Practice Best Left in the Past

Scientists may still deploy various message-in-a-bottle tactics to study ocean currents as they continue to evolve in the changing climate. But there are good reasons for the novice message creator to reconsider, and the biggest of these is the toll on the environment. While these messages have been known to travel thousands of miles around the world, and have given us a trove of interesting stories, messages in bottles can be a sneaky contributor to ocean pollution. 

Beyond the contamination aspect, there’s also the fact that bottles can become damaged by the elements over time, and their shards (whether glass, plastic or otherwise) can pose a threat to marine life. Even when the bottles remain intact, they can ultimately break down over time from salt and UV light. In those cases, they can release harmful chemicals, microplastics and other compounds into the ocean water.

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  • Favourites / Inspiring / Short Stories / Short Stories About Family

Family in a Bottle

by Cassie Gammie · 29 October 2022

short story about a message in a bottle

Message in a Bottle Short Story

Walking down the beach was one of Sarah’s favorite things to do. She lived in a busy city, and while she loved it, it was nice to take some time and slow down every once in a while. That’s why she kept a small apartment near the ocean.

Every few months she would take a few days off of work to escape for some peace and quiet. In the mornings she liked to do yoga on the beach, and in the afternoons she would work on her novel she was trying to write; she was on chapter four.

It was after dinner and Sarah was strolling along the beach. The sun was starting to set and, surprisingly, there was no one else there but a few seagulls.

She looked down into the shallow water, trying to see if there were any shells she could take back to her apartment, or any crabs she could poke at. Sarah was admiring a particularly large crab when something just a little more off shore caught her eye.

Sunlight was reflecting off of something, and if Sarah had been wearing sunglasses, she would have missed it. The object looked like a piece of glass.

Deciding to ditch the crab, Sarah ran out towards the glass. Something told her this was going to be way cooler than a giant crab or a cool looking shell.

Sarah was nearly waist deep, but she didn’t care. She was too focused on the object in the ocean. She reached out her hand, waiting for a wave to bring the glass closer. However, she misjudged the size of the wave and toppled over.

Washing up on the beach, Sarah was worried that she had lost the glass. She looked everywhere, hoping that the sun would give away its location, but the sun had just set.

She was about to give up, when something washed up at her feet. Sarah felt overjoyed when she realized it was the glass from earlier. However, it wasn’t just a big piece of glass. It was a bottle that had a piece of paper in it.

Sarah had always dreamed of finding a message in a bottle, and quickly picked it up before the surf could wash it away again. She didn’t want to risk dropping whatever was in the bottle into the ocean so she ran back to her apartment before opening it.

Ripping open the door, she carefully set the bottle on the table so she could change out of her wet clothes. Sarah moved as fast as she could so she could examine the bottle more closely.

The sun had tinted the glass a light purple and the cork was dark brown. Other than that, the bottle was very plain, probably an old alcohol bottle, and obviously pretty old.

The cork was stuck, so Sarah went into the kitchen go find her corkscrew. After carefully removing it, she tipped the bottle upside-down to get the piece of paper out.

Sarah carefully smoothed out the piece of paper on the table and then realized there was something on both sides. On one side there was a navy rank with the name Scott. Underneath the name was a small message that said, “If found, please return to this address so I can buy you a drink.” The address was underneath.

On the other side there was a drawing of a man and a woman standing on a boat. Surprisingly, the two people looked remarkably like her grandparents. It made sense; her grandfather’s name was Scott, and he was in the navy. However, he was dead. Her grandmother was still alive, though.

Sarah decided to call her mother, and after talking for over an hour it was confirmed that the bottle was, in fact, from her grandfather. She was told that he had once found a message in a bottle and wanted to send one out to see where it would end up. He put his address there in hopes of meeting someone from a completely different place. But it was so long ago, the address wasn’t correct anymore.

Sarah hadn’t seen nor talked to her grandmother in years. She couldn’t remember why they didn’t talk, but she was nervous. Deciding to be brave, Sarah picked up her cell phone and dialed in the number for her grandmother that her mom gave her.

It rang a few times and she recognized her grandmother’s voice on the other end. “Hello?”

“Hey, Gram, it’s me. Sarah.”

“Sarah?! Sarah, my granddaughter , who hasn’t called me in years ?”

“Yeah, I’m sorry Gram, but I have to tell you something…I found Papa’s message in a bottle he sent out…the one with the drawing of you two…”

The line was silent for a moment, and then her grandmother spoke again. “Where are you?”

“I’m in California. I have an apartment by Long Beach.”

“That’s near where your grandfather was stationed. He really wanted someone to find it.”

Her voice was quivering Sarah could tell her grandmother was trying not to cry. She had never felt so awkward in her life, but she kept talking. “Will you tell me about it? About his time in the navy? He never told me about when he was stationed in California.”

Sarah was afraid that her grandmother would get angry, angry for not calling her since he died. They never had the relationship that Sarah and her grandfather had. After he died, Sarah stopped calling.

To Sarah’s surprise, her grandmother obliged, and they ended up talking on the phone for hours. Sarah forgot that she moved back to California after her grandfather died, and the two made plans for lunch. Her grandmother promised to tell more stories about her grandfather. Apparently he was a little more adventurous than he let on, and Sarah was happy to be able to reconnect with her grandmother.

more by CASSIE GAMMIE

photograph by Brian Mann

The Writers Manifesto

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essay story about message in a bottle

Great story! Very touching. Love the irony to the story line.

essay story about message in a bottle

I love this story, it is so inventive. I love the loop structure of it. You are great!

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Sending Out an S.O.S.

essay story about message in a bottle

In the next few weeks, a 26-foot, 2.7-ton bottle launched by the Norwegian soda company Solo is expected to make landfall. The bottle, which is currently floating off the coast of French Guiana, contains a 129-square-foot message in multiple languages explaining that the finder will get to have a party thrown in his honor. Of course, the vessel is only the most recent addition to aquatic note-passing’s long and sloshy history.

essay story about message in a bottle

310 B.C. The earliest known message in a bottle is sent by the Greek philosopher Theophrastus, one of Aristotle’s pupils, as a way of testing his hypothesis that the Atlantic Ocean flows into the Mediterranean Sea.

essay story about message in a bottle

1500s Queen Elizabeth appoints a royal “Uncorker of Ocean Bottles” and makes the unauthorized opening of an “ocean bottle” a capital crime.

1846 The United States Coast & Geodetic Survey begins releasing messages in bottles into the ocean en masse to gather data on ocean currents.

essay story about message in a bottle

1913 A message in a bottle that reads “From Titanic. Goodbye all. Burke of Glanmire, Cork” washes ashore in Dunkettle, Ireland.

essay story about message in a bottle

1915 As the ocean liner Lusitania is sinking—after being torpedoed by a German U-boat—one passenger has time to pen this message: “Still on deck with a few people. The last boats have left. We are sinking fast … The end is near. Maybe this note will—”

essay story about message in a bottle

1996 Amateur fisherman Harold Hackett of Prince Edward Island, Canada, sends the first of over 4,800 messages in bottles. He’s since received more than 3,100 responses.

1999 A bottle is discovered in the River Thames sent from World War I private Thomas Hughes, who wrote a message for his wife and tossed it into the English Channel as he left to fight in France in 1914. He was killed in battle two days later. The bottle is delivered to his 86-year-old daughter in New Zealand.

2005 After being abandoned at sea off the coast of Costa Rica, 88 South American refugees are rescued when a fishing vessel receives their plea for help in a bottle tied to one of the boat’s fishing lines.

essay story about message in a bottle

2009 In a land-based discovery, workers near Auschwitz find a message in a bottle written by prisoners of the Nazi camp dated September 9, 1944, and bearing the names, camp numbers, and hometowns of seven men.

essay story about message in a bottle

2011 After the Italian bulk carrier Montecristo is hijacked by Somali pirates, the crew is rescued when NATO warships receive a message stating that it is safe to board the ship.

2012 A note written by Sidonie Fery, who died at 18 in 2010, washes up in the Hurricane Sandy debris. The message, written when Fery was 10, reads: “Be excellent to yourself, dude.”

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Message In A Bottle

Every solid thing had turned into its watery equivalent.

The rain fell in long, straight chains, each drop linked to the last - long lines of rain, welded out of the iron-grey sky and dropped like security shutters, sealing off road from road, town from town.

Drive straight on - no, the road is impassable; turn in a bath of rain, the wings of the car splashing like a bird. There are no birds flying this afternoon. No birds bathing in a shallow stone trough of water. There is no shallow water. By evening the roads will be canals, and the steep rises up the valley will be waterfalls. The river and the road are the same thing now and none of us can walk on water.

"I have to get home," I say to the policeman at the roadblock, but he shakes his head, rain running like tears down his face. I look ahead; everything is soaked, shifting, except the rain itself, which to all appearances is solid. Can't see through it, can't see past it. The rain is like a room where the walls are gradually moving closer together. Soon I'll be like a saint in a glass case, a relic from another time. The rain will close round me like I'm a message in a bottle, like I'm a genie in a jar. The lead sky will plug the top and I'll never get out, never. That'll be me, nose pressed up against the rain-glass, a homunculus in an alembic. On this alchemical afternoon when nature is switching her liquids and solids, my outline is beginning to blur. I say to the policeman - "I have to get home."

He shakes his head slowly, because things move more slowly under water. He turns to talk to a lorry driver hulked inside yellow waterproofs, his red face the colour and texture of soggy corned beef. I try my mobile again, the rain running up my sleeve as far as my elbow. Then, as the policeman goes with the lorry driver towards his cab to get a map, I realise I can slip back in my car, release the handbrake and just roll out of sight, down the hill, down the road I need to get home.

I suppose this is a crime - failing to obey an officer in uniform, but if I park the car and wait to be rescued, how long will I be waiting? Life is not a fairy tale and I am not a princess. There is no happy ever after. Marriage has taught me that.

I get in the car. I make my getaway. My heart is beating like it's someone else's - you never notice your own heartbeat - and my heart is someone else's. I'll get home to you. I'm on my way home. Message Sending Failed

I'm driving on. The off-road tyres were never designed to turn catamaran. I'm gliding duck-wise down through the rising floods, not far now to my turning, when I remember that water is always level - not sometimes, always. One of the characteristics of water, other than its wetness, is that it is always level. I realise, too late, that the water-level on the road is much deeper than I have reckoned because this road dips. I've driven it thousands of times and I know that it dips, but, yet, I have been driving along it in all the serenity of it being straight. A wet road, a treacherous road, but a straight road.

In slow motion the water comes up over the windscreen like a fish tank filling. Up the glass it goes, and I am back at home as a child, my nose pressed up against the glass of our aquarium as my father gently fills it with the special hose, and the coral arch, and the little plastic statue of Poseidon and the mermaid with her comb on her rock each become magnified slightly, and the weed stands and floats, and finally the four angel fish and two zebra fish are lowered back in their net, and my father's finger and thumb sprinkle fish-flakes on the level surface of the water.

Then the water rises over the top of the car.

Jesus! This car has electric windows and no electrics. My breath is shallow as the water is deep. How much air have I got? This is a hatchback, so the spare tyre is in the rear under the carpet, and I once saw a film where James Bond breathed the air from the tyre, but I am not James Bond, and to open the door I must equalise the pressure in the car and to do that I must smash the window, and to do that... tyre... wheel brace...

I scramble over the back, find the heavy metal wheel brace, and smash it with all my strength into the rear window. It shatters. With the water like a power-jet fighting me, I lug at the stupid wires of the heated rear window and try to make a hole that will take me out. Now I am on the inside of the aquarium and if I can't make a hole big enough, and I can't, I must wait, wait, until the water takes control of the car, and... here it comes, total terror and one deep breath, my hair floating like weed.

I have to turn slowly back to the front, and beg my hands to work the handle that works the door...

The door gives, and I lie down and shove it with both feet. I come straight out like a birth, and behind me my tiny Titanic carries what was my life. I am out.

In the rush of jubilation, heady as the air I can suddenly breathe freely, I missed the fallen tree; that is, I didn't miss it, I hit my head on it and passed out.

Susan hasn't come home yet - she was in the car - yes, we are worried... her mobile - no. there's been no signal all day. I hope so, too.

You have... two new messages, and a saved message, saved message, saved message. Martin... it's Susan.

When I came round, I was floating quietly down the river-road like Ophelia, like the Lady of Shalott, like Winston Churchill's funeral barge, like the Take That! final tour, like the stones floated down the Thames to build St Paul's Cathedral, like Francis Drake sailing up from Deptford after scuttling the Armada, like a whale, huge on the outside, tiny on the inside, who thinks he can drift slowly past the docks and wharves, turn round at Tower Bridge and go home again, but he never can go home again because he's bigger than he knows, and the river is not so deep as it was once, in the old days, in the stories that one whale tells to another, stories like tubes of glass blown out into the sea.

And that was me, perfectly sealed in a glass tube, where the water had hardened around me like resin.

And that was me, floating home.

Martin stood on the back steps of the house looking at the river. It would not reach the house - it was built high enough up the bank - but the garden was now a lake. He watched the rain, thinking how rain is usually transparent, and how this rain was dark, each drop like lead-shot. It wasn't cold but the rain was harsh and heavy, hailstone rain. A new kind of rain, he thought, hostile, unforgiving, not like mercy, like punishment. But why should humans expect any mercy? Where was Susan?

Martin was going to tell Susan about Caroline. He had two pizzas from the freezer and a couple of bags of that salad washed in chlorine or toilet bleach or whatever it was the supermarkets did to salad to make it last longer or to kill the bugs. He had promised to make supper, but it seemed a waste to buy anything nice when neither of them would feel like eating, and when she would probably throw the food at him. He hadn't chosen anything too wet or too tomatoey for that reason.

She should have been home long before now. He wanted her to be all right, to be safe - and part of him, not a big part, only a fingernail or a nostril, wanted her to be dead. Clean and simple dead. Then he could be sorry, and he would be sorry, too, because he had loved her once, when love had seemed clear and transparent, before it darkened and hardened, and fell like a shutter between them. Yes, if she were dead, a quick painless death by water, then he would be free to remember all the good things, and later, no one, not even her own parents, would begrudge him Caroline. He would be free.

But he knew there would be no such thing as a merciful ending.

He looked at the sky. Lead-shot.

The water has quickened. I can only steer this thing by swinging my arms and legs from side to side, like steering a go-cart, or one of those lie-down pedal cycles. I can't explain how I have come to be inside a pod of water, but that is what has happened. There is no water inside the water, and I can breathe. The falling rain makes it difficult to see out, but I know that after the dip the river runs under the bridge, which means... whoa! White-water rafting is not a suitable method of transport. But it doesn't matter because this river is our river and all I have to do now is snag myself to the bank and call Martin.

Martin was standing at the back door when he thought he heard his name being called by someone far away as a dream is far away. The voice was familiar but uncanny; known and not. He hesitated, then he put on his coat.

The river was swollen, its tongue dark and foaming behind the trees. He thought about time being a river, and never step in the same river twice, but if he could go back in time, he would, wading up the current of his life until he got to the place where love had dried up, where there was no water, no wading, only a thick bed of stones. Being in bed with Susan was like that now - stones.

Martin stood still. There were things floating in the river: books, a photograph album, a bouquet of white roses, a shoe. Someone's house must be flooded already, he ought to save these things and give them back. He wondered what he would grab and run with if his own house were flooding.

He leaned in and dragged two books and the photograph album out of the water. A teddy bear was spinning towards him with that look of regret common to stuffed toys of a certain age. He hauled him out and sat him in the fork of the willow.

Martin opened the photograph album. A young man with a new haircut smiled at him. The woman at his side was holding out her hand, newly ringed.

Something was bumping against his legs. It was a bed. It took him all his strength to pull it clear. He sat on the side of the wooden frame, panting. Behind the bed was a chest of drawers, then a picnic table, then a gas cooker, then a 60s Mini, then a cot. The cot was crying. Martin jumped straight in and grabbed the cot in both arms, bracing his body against the swirling water. The cot was empty.

Now he was in the middle of the river, but the river had become a conveyor belt and, rocking giddily towards him, half floating, half submerged, came the detritus of his past, the long-gone objects forgotten and thrown away, lost and buried, land-filled, recycled, charity-shopped and dumped, replaced, refitted, disappeared forever, over and done with, life is a straight line, time's arrow, time's river, flow on, flow on. What happens when the floods come?

There was a dead body coming towards him. He screamed and hid his face. The body spun in the high water like an astronaut in space, weightless and loose, then caught on a branch like a puppet, freed itself, floated on.

There were others in the river with him now, coming closer with questioning looks on their faces. Friends he had had to leave behind - Martin was an ambitious man - colleagues he had regretfully dismissed - Martin was a leader - his son, he hadn't seen much of his son. The river rose.

What's this, floating nearer, as he stands up to his chest in the clear fast water? He can see her feet like the feet of an embalmed Pope. But she isn't embalmed, she's alive, and she's his wife, and she's coming down the river like a ship sighted and feared, thought lost and damned, crewed by spectres. The spectre of his wife rushing at him feet first. He catches the pod. It bursts like a soap bubble. She's in the water with him, her head cut and bleeding, dripping red drops like hurt rain.

Susan is hurt.

Imagine it. The flood waters subside and the ark comes to rest on top of Mount Ararat. The dove returns with an olive branch in her mouth.

Imagine it. Years and years later, the ground is long since dry and fertile, and the boat is still up there, beached on its mountain-top like a memory-point - absurd, impossible testimony to something that never happens.

But it did happen.

Later, I realised that I wanted to get home so very badly because some part of me knew that home would never be as it had been after that day. My life with Martin, our life together, was washing away; one more day of rain and it would be gone.

I knew what he was going to tell me. I knew how I was going to respond. We were both ready for the last act, and then the rain came, merciless and clear, and the river rose, depositing the past for us both to see; our beginning, and then, our end.

He plans everything, but this was not the plan. My heart beating too fast, I sank because I was drowning anyway. Just keeping my head above water, hoping.

But in the castaway stories of shipwreck and loss, something finds its way to the shore. The floods that destroy also return, and where I landed was where I left so long ago - a landing place I used to call my own. A place to begin again.

I was already sealed and stoppered, locked and nailed down, put in a bottle by the enchantments of fear, every fluid element hardening around me, dark transformation of pain.

In the wreckage I escaped. I stood up, water coursing down my body, blood on my face. But these were liquids and not stones, this was movement, not mass. The casing had shattered - what was inside was not pretty, but it was alive. I am alive.

Inside the bottle, a piece of paper, a story in a glass tube. Unfold it, what does it say?

Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.

And the paper is dry land, and the story is a place to begin again.

© Jeanette Winterson , 2007

  • Original writing
  • Jeanette Winterson

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Nalo hopkinson's message in a bottle.

Kamla is an art curator from the future. Sent back into our present—her past—in order to retrieve artworks that otherwise would not survive until her own time, she’s one of a group of curators who had themselves cloned. Their memories were implanted into embryos that were genetically altered, with fully developed brains to contain their already-adult sensibilities, and with “extra-long” telomeres so that they would grow up extremely slowly. In our present they’ve been diagnosed as having “Delayed Growth Syndrome (DGS).” The mission of these “children who weren’t children” is to find the works of art they need, and preserve those works until they “ grow [their] way” back to the future from which they started.

This, as we eventually learn, is the premise of Nalo Hopkinson’s science fiction story, “Message in a Bottle,” a parable about art and futurity. The story can be found in Hopkinson’s collection Falling In Love With Hominids (2015).The curators’ ruse for implanting themselves in the past may seem crazily over-elaborate, even for a science fiction story that posits the existence of time travel. But the story explains that it’s all due to budgetary constraints : “they wanted to send us here and back as full adults, but do you have any idea what the freight costs would have been? The insurance. Arts grants are hard to get in my world, too.” Neoliberal austerity still seems to exist in the future, and it leads to some gruesome consequences. It’s creepy to hear Kamla complain that, thanks to her original’s memories, she remembers what sex is like, “even though this body isn’t interested in adult sex,” and won’t attain puberty for another 50 years. Worst of all, Kamla and the other DGS kids face the prospect of being institutionalized on account of their anomaly. Some of them will “get abused… just like real children” all too frequently are.

The story’s narrator, though, is not Kamla, but Greg, an Indigenous Canadian artist. He continually collects all sorts of miscellaneous stuff, which he uses as raw material for his multimedia art installations. These works combine advanced computing technologies with “present-day historical artifacts” from the everyday lives of indigenous people in North America. The point is to get away from white people’s fetishization of “the iconic past” of native peoples, and to show instead how native peoples are as fully enmeshed in the hypermodern present of global capitalism—with its racism and uneven development—as everyone else. In an unstable, accelerating world, he feels, “art helps us know how to do change.”

When Greg learns of Kamla’s mission, he is seduced and excited by the thought that Kamla will take his own art with her into the future. Only this leads to one final distressing twist. It turns out that Kamla has come back in time, not to rescue Greg’s own art, but to get hold of a particular seashell that he randomly placed in one of his installations. In Kamla’s future world, they understand that “human beings aren’t the only ones who make art.” Other living beings do as well, even if “we don’t always know what they’re saying.” Indeed, it was “the nascent identity politics as expressed by artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,” like Greg, that led future art historians to this broader understanding. Kamla explains to Greg that the shell in his installation is a work of innovative genius, in which a mollusk “expresses a set of concepts that haven’t been explored before by the other artists of its species.” And so it is the seashell, and not his own work, that gives Greg a “ticket to the future.”

Hopkinson’s story suggests that art allows us to push beyond the boundaries of the self, and to embrace wider social, cultural, and even biological concerns. But art is never a panacea; like everything else in our lives, it is subject to painful compromises and constraints. Hopkinson captures this as much through the tone of her story, as through its content. “Message in a Bottle” seems light and humorous when you first read it; but its implications are deep and troubling.

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The Figure 8 Voyage

essay story about message in a bottle

Message in a Bottle–The Full Story

 Posted on May 20, 2020 by Randall

  5 Comments

Weeks ago I announced the discovery of a bottled message I posted to the uncertain mercies of an ocean delivery service late in the F8V. At the time I was short on details. Here are the details.

At 1:57 pm on April 15th of this year, I received the following email with the below photograph attached:

“Hello, today while cleaning a beach in the Berry Islands, I found this message in a bottle. Curious to know if Randall completed the circumnavigation? Interested in hearing his story, ~Deb”

essay story about message in a bottle

Why this communication gave me such a thrill I find hard to explain, but after its receipt, I ran around the house cheering as though a horse I’d bet on in the distant past had unexpectedly paid off.

Initially, I kept a careful record of message launches as Mo and I passed down the Pacific and then around the Southern Ocean, but by now (day 216), we were forty-four days from our second rounding of Cape Horn and fifteen days north of the line. For weeks the Atlantic trades had lulled me with their soft warmth, and I had become lazy.

For example, the report I filed on day 216 pontificated needlessly upon the finer points of celestial navigation, but neither it nor the log nor any photos memorialized the launch of this particular missive. Luckily, I recorded the position on the note itself.

But where had the bottle come ashore and under what circumstances found? Further correspondence with the discoverer, Deb Kremer, cruising with her husband Keith aboard M/V RightHand , revealed the answer:

“We were anchored near Hoffman’s Cay (in the Bahama’s Berry Island Group) and decided to clean that beach while we were waiting for a weather window. The approximate location of the discovery was 25° 38’ 44.26” N, 77° 44’ 50.89” W.

“Our friends, Eddie and Gail on Seaquel were helping us, and they are probably the reason I found the bottle.  My original intention was just to clear any items that could entangle turtles, but once we got started they, suggested we clean up everything.  

“The beach had a lot of debris (mainly plastic) and there wasn’t really any place for us to dispose of the trash, but once we got all of the lines, nets, and ropes moved high into the vegetation, we went back for the trash.

“The sight of an unbroken bottle was very rare (I had only seen one other bottle all day), but as I was walking to throw it into our trash pile, I noticed the cork.  

“That is what made me hold the bottle up to the light.  The glass was so dark I didn’t originally see the note.  I was so excited when I saw the scroll of paper! I called everyone over and sat on a rock to pry the cork out with my knife.  It’s always exciting to find a message in a bottle!

“What amazes me is that the bottle made it ashore in one piece.  That side of the island is very rugged with large rock outcrops every few hundred feet.

“I took a picture of the note and bottle right away…”

essay story about message in a bottle

How long the bottle took to achieve landfall is a matter of conjecture, but its route is another matter. From the point of drop at 19 37N and 54 19W to the point of discovery on a windward beach of Hoffman Cay is a rhumbline distance of 1,353nm. But that the bottle could maintain such a dedicated course seems highly unlikely.

essay story about message in a bottle

First off, if the bottle followed the easterly trade winds, it would have been pushed far to the west before hooking north, creating a path with the rough shape of a boomerang.

essay story about message in a bottle

A look at currents local to that ocean sector suggests an even more complex route, though the bottle still reached to the west before the trend to the north.

essay story about message in a bottle

One interesting feature of the trip taken by this bottle was that in order to achieve Hoffman Cay, it had to thread a pass, the North East Channel, without getting hung up on the reefs of either Great Abaco or Eleuthera Island, a clever trick given its mode of steerage.

essay story about message in a bottle

Though I don’t now recall the particulars of this send-off, the event was usually well documented, like the note and launch below from day seven out of San Francisco on the second F8V attempt.

essay story about message in a bottle

And then there was this “instructional” video produced on the occasion of the second bottle launch. At the time, I had hopes for a great number of retrievals, this based on the “bottle work” of my friend Matt, who has launched many messages in this manner and has a nearly ten percent retrieval rate.

With luck, this find is merely the first in a series, but the luck will have to be strong as most of the other bottles I sent on their merry way had much further to go before encountering a friendly, not to mention peopled, shore.

Many thanks to Deb Kremer for retrieving my message and caring enough to make contact. I am grateful.

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5 Comments on “ Message in a Bottle–The Full Story ”

Glad that there are cruisers out there to clean up after you.

Given that glass and sand are both silicon dioxide – bottles are a pretty inert thing to toss overboard… and possibly a ‘safe home’ for a marine organism 😉

Brilliant, serendipity is what makes life interesting and rewarding. I envy your adventures Randall.

That is totally awesome! Thank you for sharing such detail of the bottle adventure!Mark you it a pretty special bottle!

I wonder if the surge and winds of Hurricane Dorian (September 1-3 in the Bahamas) helped to overcome the reefs of Great Abaco and Eleuthera? There appears to be considerable overlap of your wind/current mapping, and the storm track.

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Study Like a Boss

Message in a bottle

Rolling waves gently brushed upon the sand and nipped softly at my toes. I gazed out into the oblivion of blue hue that lay before me. I stared hopefully at sun-filled sky, but I couldn’t help but wonder how I was going to get through the day. Honestly, I never thought in a million years that my daughter and I would be homeless. Oh, how I yearned for our house in the suburbs. A pain wrenched at my heart when I was once reminded again of my beloved husband, Peter. I missed him so much and couldn’t help but ask God why he was taken from us.

Living underneath Pier 14 was no life for Emily and me. I had to get us out of here and back on our feet. My stomach moaned angrily. I needed to somehow find food for us, but how? Suddenly, something slimy brushed up against my leg and pierced my thoughts. I jumped back and brushed the residue of sand of my legs. What was that? As my eyes skimmed the water in front of me, I noticed something spinning in the foam of the waves. Curiosity got the best of me and I went over to take a closer look. The object danced in the waves and eventually was coughed out onto the beach.

Emily! ” I called to my eight-year-old daughter who was, at that time, infatuated with a seashell that she found earlier that day. “Come here and see this! Mommy found something. ” Although I had no idea what that something was and I definitely didn’t know it would change my life forever. “What did you find, Mommy? Is it food? ” Emily came running down from the pier to see my finding. “Oh honey,” I answered, sadly acknowledging my daughter’s hunger, “ I wish it was. Actually, I’m not quite sure what it is. Help me clean it off, will you?

Emily and I began scrubbing the dilapidated, seaweed covered object in the warm waves of the Atlantic. “Wow, That’s not at all I expected. ” I answered as I rolled an old bottle in the water. “At least we can get some money for this at the recycling center. Not much, but if we collect enough bottles we could get some lunch! ” I looked hopelessly at the bottle. Darn! I was hoping for something else, anything else. Oh, God, please help us! “Mommy? ” Emily’s voice shattered my desperate thoughts. “There’s something in the bottle! ” “Oh Em,” I replied dubiously. ” It’s probably just some trash someone stuffed in the bottle.

I gazed into my daughter’s hopeful eyes and sighed. “Well I guess it wouldn’t hurt to look, eh? ” Somehow I managed to pry the worn lid off the bottle. Wow. This bottle must be 100 years old, I thought to myself while gazing at the worn, illegible lettering on the side. “What’s in it mom? ” Emily jumped up and down with excitement. I gazed one-eyed into the bottle. “Hmm,” I replied, fingering the paper out of the bottle’s stubborn neck. “I believe it’s a note of some sort. ” Holding the tattered top edge, I carefully unrolled the yellowed scroll-like piece of paper.

“Oh Em! I said astonishingly. “It’s a letter! Oh, I wonder who it’s to? ” “Read it Mommy, Read it! ” Emily shouted eagerly. It made me smile to see my little girl so happy. It had been such a long time since I saw such a smile painted across her angelic face. My eyes skimmed down the paper. Most of the words were quite legible, but sadly enough, they were written in a different language. “Oh honey, I wish I could read it to you, but the words, they are written in Italian or Span- -” Before I could finish my words, I noticed the name so diligently signed at the bottom of the letter.

It read “Christopher Columbus 18 September 1493. ” I couldn’t breathe. Could this be real? I laughed hysterically as I continuously scrolled my eyes up and down the letter. Then it dawned on me. If this is real, I could be rich. “Emily,” I managed to blurt through all my emotion, “Go put on your other outfit. We are going downtown. ” On the walk to the museum, my mind raced with the possibilities. Please God, let this be real. Not surprisingly, I was still very much in shock as Emily and I walked into the Florida State Museum of Fine History and Art.

I noticed a small, slightly chubby man with a goatee and glasses, huddled over a magnifying glass. We crossed the marble floor of the room, through the large columns that surrounded us on both sides. I tapped him softly on the shoulder. He looked up inquiringly. “Good day, Miss. Can I help you? ” I couldn’t find any words. Silently, I handed him the dilapidated paper. At first, he looked amused. “Is this some kind of joke? ” He retorted. Then he frowned and his face was consumed with concentration. “Where did you get this? ” “On the beach, by Pier 14,” I stammered nervously.

It was in a bottle. ” His eyebrows rose. “Do you have the bottle? ” I handed it to him wordlessly, wondering why he wanted it. He turned and walked into another room. I tried to follow him in, but he waived me away, promising to come right back. When he returned, his face was lit with excitement. The wrinkled paper was now nicely set in a glass frame. “Do you realize what you found? It’s a genuine note! I can’t believe it! I carbon dated the paper and compared the handwriting with our samples. Columbus wrote this nearly 500 years ago! Do you know what this means?

I thought I did. I paused. “Is it worth anything? ” I hoped that it was worth at least few thousand dollars. I bit my lower lip and prayed that it would at least pay for a warm meal for my daughter. He grinned. “Yeah, I would say so. At least $25 million or so. ” My jaw hit the floor. I couldn’t believe my ears. What a fairy tale! One day a pauper, the next day a princess! I didn’t even know what to say. I at least knew one thing. The hungry days that Em and I had suffered were over forever. My daughter would get to live the life she’s always deserved.

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Message In a Bottle

Avatar of Eleanie Campbell

Dear Mr. Somebody, I know that you are sitting alone on the shoreline watching the waves crash inland. Right now your soul is aching, your heart feels as if it is shattering into a thousand pieces and your tears are flowing freely like the Nile.

I know this is the day that you have chosen to make a decision that will affect others on a level you could never imagine. You feel that there is nowhere to turn and that no one cares for you. Trust me Mr. Somebody I understand what you are going through more than you know . I know because I have been there myself.

You are in pain that is beyond description to those who have not experienced what you are encountering at this moment. I know that you contemplating various means of finalizing your misery.

essay story about message in a bottle

Believe me, Mr. Somebody it will. At times you may feel unworthy. But remember that you are worthy and God loves you when no one else will. I know that he loves you because you have found this letter encased in a bottle, a letter that was written just for you.

Even though we may never meet, God has put it on my heart and directed me to compose this note and send it afloat. Therefore, as an obedient servant , I have obeyed.

So as you pull the heavy, cold metal away from your temple and toss it into the ocean, smile and make a joyful noise for the wonderful days ahead of you. Rejoice in a celebration that you are loved. Celebrate and catch God’s kisses that shower you with His grace, love, and blessings to live another day.

In closing, now that you have chosen to stay amongst us I pray that you do the same for someone else. Please write a simple letter in hopes of saving another just as you have been saved.

Sincerely, Mrs. Somebody

Avatar of Eleanie Campbell

Jerry Banks – 5 Day Interview

Dedicated To My Mom

The Sweetest Glance

Avatar of Kimberlly Albritton

I love this message of hope. It has given me a great idea for my writting group. I will definately be checking back to see what other words of encouragement you share in the future. Great Work Kim (EW)

Avatar of Shaye Gray

Dearest EL aka EW DIVA.. This is a very intriguing piece. Your talent is endless. Keep doing the darn thang sis. We’re all proud of you

Avatar of DeBorah Ann Palmer

El, Very Uplifting. Please keep sharing your words of wisdom and support.

Avatar of Laurean Brooks

Eleanie, I loved this story! What a message of hope and God’s love! Only He can give us true hope and a future.

I love your writing style, too. Keep writing. I’d love to read more.

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Wealth of Geeks

Message in a Bottle Review: Smashing the Jukebox Musical (And That’s a Good Thing)

T o anyone currently grinding his teeth at the sight of Message in a Bottle , the new tour of the West End dance show featuring the music of Sting, or to anyone thinking another frigging jukebox musical!? …we forgive you in advance for the reaction.

Jukebox musicals, of course, have become as plentiful on the Great White Way as pigeon dung, and often share similar quality. That doesn’t stop producers from littering Broadway and the West End with muiscals overstuffed with pop music hits and underwritten plots. On the contrary, it might add to the appeal: tourists love walking into a theater to see a show that affirms their fandom and offers no provocation to deeper thoughts or empathy.

Jukebox Smashed

Message in a Bottle , the UK dance musical making its North American premiere at the Hollywood Pantages violates that trend. Though set to an entirely prerecorded soundtrack of both solo hits by Sting and The Police, and though the performers do not utter a word on stage, the show invites the audience to feel and even think something about its content. That doesn’t make it groundbreaking, but in an era of ever-more-pandering Greatest Hits shows, it does make it a refreshing anomaly.

As directed and choreographed by Kate Prince, Message in a Bottle tells the story of a family living in a faraway desert country. Violence interrupts their idyllic life, and the rise of a dictatorship forces them to flee overseas to seek a new home. Once they arrive on land again, they endure life in a refugee camp almost as violent as the home they fled. Corruption, prostitution, and trauma all infect their minds as they struggle to hold on to love and hope that they will find peace and happiness again.

If the summary sounds general, it is: the dance nature of the show precludes any deep detail about the characters or their situations. Everything here happens in pantomime against minimalist sets. The production owes much to the lighting design by Natasha Chivers, which creates a mood to recontextualize Sting ’s music.

That doesn’t prevent Message in a Bottle from a few on-the-nose needle drops: “Roxanne,” of course, deals with one character forced into prostitution, while “Don’t Stand So Close To Me,” becomes a literalized comment on gang violence. That these obvious uses of songs don’t invite giggles from the audience testifies to the power of Prince’s direction. Message in a Bottle uses pop songs, but that doesn’t mean an audience can’t take them seriously. Other tunes fare much better. “Englishman in New York,” a tribute to queer scion Quentin Crisp, becomes a scene of culture shock. “The Bed’s Too Big Without You” evolves from a heartbreak ballad into one character’s post-traumatic stress nightmares.

Yet the great innovation here comes from Prince’s choreography. Like the greatest work of Jerome Robbins, the movement in Message in a Bottle somehow manages to convey character and plot. The dance reveals personality dynamics, both in how the performers dance with and against one another. Characters feel distinct, and their relationships have a specificity. Viewers come to know these characters and even care about them.  Message in a Bottle could have devolved into bombastic virtue signaling. As a credit to both Prince and her cast of extraordinary dancers, this story always feels sincere.

Message in a Bottle strikes a good balance between pop entertainment and avant-garde expressionism, blending the two into a performance both accessible and provocative. At a lean two hours, it never drags, and though Sting’s tunes feel radio-friendly as ever, the commitment of the cast injects them with newfound drama. Jukebox musicals don’t have a reputation for depth or challenging plots, but Message in a Bottle defies convention to tell a story with real emotional power that impresses and, above all, deserves to be seen.

Rating: 8 out of 10 Specs. 

Message in a Bottle plays at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre through February 11 before continuing on to the Buell Theatre in Denver (Feb. 13-25) and the Cadillac Theatre in Chicago (Feb. 28-Mar. 3.) A full list of cities and dates can be found on the official tour website.

Message in a Bottle Review: Smashing the Jukebox Musical (And That’s a Good Thing)

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The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger

I never thought i was the kind of person to fall for a scam..

Portrait of Charlotte Cowles

On a Tuesday evening this past October, I put $50,000 in cash in a shoe box, taped it shut as instructed, and carried it to the sidewalk in front of my apartment, my phone clasped to my ear. “Don’t let anyone hurt me,” I told the man on the line, feeling pathetic.

“You won’t be hurt,” he answered. “Just keep doing exactly as I say.”

Three minutes later, a white Mercedes SUV pulled up to the curb. “The back window will open,” said the man on the phone. “Do not look at the driver or talk to him. Put the box through the window, say ‘thank you,’ and go back inside.”

The man on the phone knew my home address, my Social Security number, the names of my family members, and that my 2-year-old son was playing in our living room. He told me my home was being watched, my laptop had been hacked, and we were in imminent danger. “I can help you, but only if you cooperate,” he said. His first orders: I could not tell anyone about our conversation, not even my spouse, or talk to the police or a lawyer.

Now I know this was all a scam — a cruel and violating one but painfully obvious in retrospect. Here’s what I can’t figure out: Why didn’t I just hang up and call 911? Why didn’t I text my husband, or my brother (a lawyer), or my best friend (also a lawyer), or my parents, or one of the many other people who would have helped me? Why did I hand over all that money — the contents of my savings account, strictly for emergencies — without a bigger fight?

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We want moore.

package-table-of-contents-photo

When I’ve told people this story, most of them say the same thing: You don’t seem like the type of person this would happen to. What they mean is that I’m not senile, or hysterical, or a rube. But these stereotypes are actually false. Younger adults — Gen Z, millennials, and Gen X — are 34 percent more likely to report losing money to fraud compared with those over 60, according to a recent report from the Federal Trade Commission. Another study found that well-educated people or those with good jobs were just as vulnerable to scams as everyone else.

Still, how could I have been such easy prey? Scam victims tend to be single, lonely, and economically insecure with low financial literacy. I am none of those things. I’m closer to the opposite. I’m a journalist who had a weekly column in the “Business” section of the New York Times. I’ve written a personal-finance column for this magazine for the past seven years. I interview money experts all the time and take their advice seriously. I’m married and talk to my friends, family, and colleagues every day.

And while this is harder to quantify — how do I even put it? — I’m not someone who loses her head. My mother-in-law has described me as even-keeled; my own mom has called me “maddeningly rational.” I am listed as an emergency contact for several friends — and their kids. I vote, floss, cook, and exercise. In other words, I’m not a person who panics under pressure and falls for a conspiracy involving drug smuggling, money laundering, and CIA officers at my door. Until, suddenly, I was.

That morning — it was October 31 — I dressed my toddler in a pizza costume for Halloween and kissed him good-bye before school. I wrote some work emails. At about 12:30 p.m., my phone buzzed. The caller ID said it was Amazon. I answered. A polite woman with a vague accent told me she was calling from Amazon customer service to check some unusual activity on my account. The call was being recorded for quality assurance. Had I recently spent $8,000 on MacBooks and iPads?

I had not. I checked my Amazon account. My order history showed diapers and groceries, no iPads. The woman, who said her name was Krista, told me the purchases had been made under my business account. “I don’t have a business account,” I said. “Hmm,” she said. “Our system shows that you have two.”

Krista and I concurred that I was the victim of identity theft, and she said she would flag the fraudulent accounts and freeze their activity. She provided me with a case-ID number for future reference and recommended that I check my credit cards. I did, and everything looked normal. I thanked her for her help.

Then Krista explained that Amazon had been having a lot of problems with identity theft and false accounts lately. It had become so pervasive that the company was working with a liaison at the Federal Trade Commission and was referring defrauded customers to him. Could she connect me?

“Um, sure?” I said.

Krista transferred the call to a man who identified himself as Calvin Mitchell. He said he was an investigator with the FTC, gave me his badge number, and had me write down his direct phone line in case I needed to contact him again. He also told me our call was being recorded. He asked me to verify the spelling of my name. Then he read me the last four digits of my Social Security number, my home address, and my date of birth to confirm that they were correct. The fact that he had my Social Security number threw me. I was getting nervous.

“I’m glad we’re speaking,” said Calvin. “Your personal information is linked to a case that we’ve been working on for a while now, and it’s quite serious.”

He told me that 22 bank accounts, nine vehicles, and four properties were registered to my name. The bank accounts had wired more than $3 million overseas, mostly to Jamaica and Iraq. Did I know anything about this? “No,” I said. Did I know someone named Stella Suk-Yee Kwong? “I don’t think so,” I said. He texted me a photo of her ID, which he claimed had been found in a car rented under my name that was abandoned on the southern border of Texas with blood and drugs in the trunk. A home in New Mexico affiliated with the car rental had subsequently been raided, he added, and authorities found more drugs, cash, and bank statements registered to my name and Social Security number. He texted me a drug-bust photo of bags of pills and money stacked on a table. He told me that there were warrants out for my arrest in Maryland and Texas and that I was being charged with cybercrimes, money laundering, and drug trafficking.

My head swam. I Googled my name along with “warrant” and “money laundering,” but nothing came up. Were arrest warrants public? I wasn’t sure. Google led me to truthfinder.com, which asked for my credit-card information — nope. “I’m in deep shit,” I texted my husband. “My identity was stolen and it seems really bad.”

Calvin wanted to know if I knew anyone who might be the culprit or if I had any connections to Iraq or Jamaica. “No,” I said. “This is the first I’m hearing about any of this, and it’s a lot to take in.” He asked if I had ever used public or unsecured Wi-Fi. “I don’t know. Maybe?” I said. “I used the airport Wi-Fi recently.”

“Ah,” he said. “That’s unfortunate. It’s how many of these breaches start.” I was embarrassed, like I’d left my fly unzipped. How could I have been so thoughtless? But also — didn’t everyone use the airport Wi-Fi?

Calvin told me to listen carefully. “The first thing you must do is not tell anyone what is going on. Everyone around you is a suspect.”

I almost laughed. I told him I was quite sure that my husband, who works for an affordable-housing nonprofit and makes meticulous spreadsheets for our child-care expenses, was not a secret drug smuggler. “I believe you, but even so, your communications are probably under surveillance,” Calvin said. “You cannot talk to him about this.” I quickly deleted the text messages I had sent my husband a few minutes earlier. “These are sophisticated criminals with a lot of money at stake,” he continued. “You should assume you are in danger and being watched. You cannot take any chances.”

I felt suspended between two worlds — the one I knew and the one this man was describing. If I had nothing to do with any of these allegations, how much could they truly affect me? I thought of an old This American Life episode about a woman whose Social Security card was stolen. No matter how many times she closed her bank accounts and opened new ones, her identity thief kept draining them, destroying her credit and her sanity. (It turned out to be her boyfriend.) I remembered another story about a man who got stuck on a no-fly list after his personal information was used by a terrorist group. It dawned on me that being connected to major federal offenses, even falsely, could really fuck up my life.

Calvin wanted to know how much money I currently had in my bank accounts. I told him that I had two — checking and savings — with a combined balance of a little over $80,000. As a freelancer in a volatile industry, I keep a sizable emergency fund, and I also set aside cash to pay my taxes at the end of the year, since they aren’t withheld from my paychecks.

His voice took on a more urgent tone. “You must have worked very hard to save all that money,” he said. “Do not share your bank-account information with anyone. I am going to help you keep your money safe.” He said that he would transfer me to his colleague at the CIA who was the lead investigator on my case and gave me a nine-digit case number for my records. (I Googled the number. Nothing.) He said the CIA agent would tell me what to do next, and he wished me luck.

essay story about message in a bottle

If it was a scam , I couldn’t see the angle. It had occurred to me that the whole story might be made up or an elaborate mistake. But no one had asked me for money or told me to buy crypto; they’d only encouraged me not to share my banking information. They hadn’t asked for my personal details; they already knew them. I hadn’t been told to click on anything.

Still, I had not seen a shred of evidence. I checked my bank accounts, credit cards, and credit score; nothing looked out of the ordinary. I knew I should probably talk to a lawyer or maybe call the police, though I was doubtful that they would help. What was I going to say — “My identity was stolen, and I think I’m somehow in danger”? I had no proof. I was also annoyed that my workday had been hijacked. It was 2 p.m., and I had already pushed back one deadline and postponed two work calls. I had to get myself out of this.

The next man who got on the line had a deeper voice and a slight British accent flecked with something I couldn’t identify. He told me his name was Michael Sarano and that he worked for the CIA on cases involving the FTC. He gave me his badge number. “I’m going to need more than that,” I said. “I have no reason to believe that any of what you’re saying is real.”

“I completely understand,” he said calmly. He told me to go to the FTC home page and look up the main phone number. “Now hang up the phone, and I will call you from that number right now.” I did as he said. The FTC number flashed on my screen, and I picked up. “How do I know you’re not just spoofing this?” I asked.

“It’s a government number,” he said, almost indignant. “It cannot be spoofed.” I wasn’t sure if this was true and tried Googling it, but Michael was already onto his next point. He told me the call was being recorded, so I put him on speaker and began recording on my end, too. He wanted to know if I had told anyone what was going on.

I admitted that I had texted my husband. “You must reassure him that everything is fine,” Michael said. “In many cases like this, we have to investigate the spouse as well, and the less he knows, the less he is implicated. From now on, you have to follow protocol if you want us to help you.”

“I don’t think I should lie to my husband,” I said, feeling stupid.

“You are being investigated for major federal crimes,” he said. “By keeping your husband out of this, you are protecting him.” He then repeated the point Calvin had made about my phone and computer being hacked and monitored by the criminals who had stolen my identity.

By that point, my husband had sent me a series of concerned texts. “Don’t worry. It will be okay,” I wrote back. It felt gross to imagine a third party reading along.

Michael snowed me with the same stories Calvin had. They were consistent: the car on the Texas border, the property in New Mexico, the drugs, the bank accounts. He asked if I shared my residence with anyone besides my husband and son. Then he asked more questions about my family members, including my parents, my brother, and my sister-in-law. He knew their names and where they lived. I told him they had nothing to do with this. In fact, I was now sure I wanted to consult a lawyer.

“If you talk to an attorney, I cannot help you anymore,” Michael said sternly. “You will be considered noncooperative. Your home will be raided, and your assets will be seized. You may be arrested. It’s your choice.” This seemed ludicrous. I pictured officers tramping in, taking my laptop, going through our bookshelves, questioning our neighbors, scaring my son. It was a nonstarter.

“Can I just come to your office and sort this out in person?” I said. “It’s getting late, and I need to take my son trick-or-treating soon.”

“My office is in Langley,” he said. “We don’t have enough time. We need to act immediately. I’m going to talk you through the process. It’s going to sound crazy, but we must follow protocol if we’re going to catch the people behind this.”

He explained that the CIA would need to freeze all the assets in my name, including my actual bank accounts. In the eyes of the law, there was no difference between the “real” and the fraudulent ones, he said. They would also deactivate my compromised Social Security number and get me a new one. Then, by monitoring any activity under my old Social Security number and accounts, they would catch the criminals who were using my identity and I would get my life back. But until then, I would need to use only cash for my day-to-day expenses.

It was far-fetched. Ridiculous. But also not completely out of the realm of possibility. “Do I have any other options?” I asked.

“Unfortunately, no,” he said. “You must follow my directions very carefully. We do not have much time.”

He asked me how much cash I thought I would need to support myself for a year if necessary. My assets could be frozen for up to two years if the investigation dragged on, he added. There could be a trial; I might need to testify. These things take time. “I don’t know, $50,000?” I said. I wondered how I would receive paychecks without a bank account. Would I have to take time off from work? I did some mental calculations of how much my husband could float us and for how long.

“Okay,” he said. “You need to go to the bank and get that cash out now. You cannot tell them what it is for. In one of my last cases, the identity thief was someone who worked at the bank.”

Michael told me to keep the phone on speaker so we would remain in contact. “It’s important that I monitor where this money goes from now on. Remember, all of your assets are part of this investigation,” he said. Then he told me that one of his colleagues would meet me at my apartment at 5 p.m. to guide me through the next steps.

“You can’t send a complete stranger to my home,” I said, my voice rising. “My 2-year-old son will be here.”

“Let me worry about that,” he said. “It’s my job. But if you don’t cooperate, I cannot keep you safe. It is your choice.”

It’s impossible to explain why I accepted this logic. But I had been given marching orders and a deadline. My son would be home soon, and I had to fix this mess. I put on sneakers in case I needed to run. I brought a backpack for the cash. I felt both terrified and absurd.

It was jarring to see trick-or-treaters in my Brooklyn neighborhood, people going about their lives. The air was crisp, and dead leaves swirled on the ground. I was on high alert for anyone who might be following me. At one point, a man in sunglasses and a hoodie trailed me for a few blocks. At Michael’s suggestion, I ducked into a parking garage until he passed.

When I reached the bank, I told the guard I needed to make a large cash withdrawal and she sent me upstairs. Michael was on speakerphone in my pocket. I asked the teller for $50,000. The woman behind the thick glass window raised her eyebrows, disappeared into a back room, came back with a large metal box of $100 bills, and counted them out with a machine. Then she pushed the stacks of bills through the slot along with a sheet of paper warning me against scams. I thanked her and left.

Michael was bursting with praise. “You did a great job,” he said. “I have to go for a moment to see about the details of your case; I’m going to have you speak to my colleague if you have any questions.” He put a woman on the line. She was younger, with an accent I couldn’t identify. She told me to go home and await further instructions.

As I walked back to my apartment, something jolted me out of my trance, and I became furious. No government agency would establish this as “protocol.” It was preposterous. “I need to speak with Michael,” I told the woman on the phone. He got on right away. “I don’t even believe that you’re a CIA agent,” I said. “What you’re asking me to do is completely unreasonable.”

He sighed. “I’m sending you a photo of my badge right now,” he said. “I don’t know what else to tell you. You can trust me, and I will help you. Or you can hang up and put yourself and your family in danger. Do you really want to take that risk with a young child?”

My Two Cents

How to protect yourself against scams, what charlotte cowles wishes she’d known..

I waited for a stoplight at a busy intersection. I could see my apartment window from where I stood. My son was playing inside with a neighbor’s daughter and their nanny. A picture of Michael’s badge appeared on my phone. I had no way of verifying it; it could easily have been Photoshopped. “I don’t trust you at all,” I said to Michael. “But it doesn’t seem like I have any other choice.”

When I got home, Michael told me to get a box, put the cash in it, take a picture of it, then tape it shut. I found a floral-printed shoe box that had once contained a pair of slippers I’d bought for myself — a frivolous purchase that now seemed mortifying. Michael told me to label it with my name, my case number, my address, a locker number he read to me, and my signature. Then he directed me to take another picture of the labeled box and text it to him.

“My colleague will be there soon. He is an undercover CIA agent, and he will secure the money for you,” he said. What exactly would that entail? I asked. “Tonight, we will close down your Social Security number, and you will lose access to your bank accounts,” he explained. “Tomorrow, you’ll need to go to the Social Security office and get a new Social Security number. We’ll secure this money for you in a government locker and hand-deliver a Treasury check for the same amount. You can cash the check and use it for your expenses until the investigation is over.”

“Why can’t I just use this cash?” I asked. “Why do you have to take it and give me a check?”

“Because all of your assets under your current identity are part of the investigation,” he said. “You are being charged with money laundering. If we secure this cash and then issue you a government check under your new Social Security number, that will be considered clean money.”

“I’ll need to see your colleague’s badge,” I said. “I’m not just going to give $50,000 of my money to someone I don’t know.”

“Undercover agents don’t carry badges,” he said, as if I’d asked the CIA to bring me a Happy Meal. “They’re undercover. Remember, you are probably being watched. The criminals cannot know that a CIA agent is there.”

In a twisted way, this made some amount of sense to me. Or maybe I had lost my grip on reality so completely that I was willing to resign myself to this new version of it. Most important, I didn’t know what else to do. Even if Michael wasn’t working for the CIA (which struck me as more and more likely), he was sending a man to our address. I felt a sickening dread that he might ask to come inside. If giving him this money would make him go away, I was ready to do it. I’d been on the phone for nearly five hours. I wanted to take my son trick-or-treating. I was exhausted.

Michael seemed to sense that I was flagging and asked if I’d had lunch. I hadn’t. He told me to eat something but keep him on the line; his agent was on the way to my address but running late. “You can meet him outside if that would make you more comfortable,” Michael said, and I felt relieved. While I gnawed on a granola bar at my desk, he got chatty and asked about my job. I told him I was going to Washington, D.C., later that week. “Oh, great. You could come to my office in Langley,” he said. “Where are you staying?”

A little after 6 p.m., Michael told me to go downstairs. His colleague was arriving. My husband had just come home from work and was reading to our son. “What’s going on? Is everything okay?” he asked as I put my coat on. I motioned to the phone and shushed him. Then I whispered, “I have to go downstairs and meet a guy who’s helping with the identity-theft case. I’ll explain more later.” He frowned and silently mouthed, “What?” I told him I had to go.

I met the SUV at the curb and put the money in the back seat. It was 6:06 p.m. Even if I’d tried to see who was driving, the windows were tinted and it was dusk. He maybe wore a baseball cap. When I turned around, I could see the backlit faces of my husband and son watching from our apartment nine stories above.

As I walked back inside, Michael texted me a photo of a Treasury check made out to me for $50,000 and told me a hard copy would be hand-delivered to me in the morning. He was working on setting up my appointment with the Social Security office. “You will receive a confirmation text shortly,” he said. “Stay on the line until you do.” I felt oddly comforted by this. An appointment would give me something legitimate, an actual connection to a government agency.

I took my son trick-or-treating, my phone on speaker in my pocket. I felt numb, almost in a fugue state, smiling and chatting with my neighbors and their kids. At one point, I checked to see if Michael was still there; his female colleague answered and said he’d be back soon. Then, when we got home and I checked again, the line was dead. I panicked and called back. The woman answered. “Michael is busy,” she said. “He’ll call you in the morning.”

I was confused. Did this mean I didn’t have a Social Security number at all anymore? I pictured myself floating, identity-less. “Do I have an appointment at the Social Security office?” I asked.

“Michael will call you tomorrow,” she repeated. “He hasn’t been able to secure your appointment yet. The Social Security office is closed now.”

I went into my bedroom and shut the door, feeling my face grow hot. I had a physical sensation of scales falling from my eyes; the room shimmered around me, spots raining from the ceiling. I saw the whole day peel away, like the layers of an onion — Michael, the FTC officer, the Amazon call — revealing my real life, raw and exposed, at the center. “Oh my God,” I said, my hands tingling. “You are lying to me. Michael was lying. You just took my money and I’m never getting it back.” That wasn’t true, the woman said. She understood that I was upset. She was sorry. Everything would be fine. “You’re a fucking liar,” I hissed, and hung up.

Through choking sobs, I told my husband what had happened. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked, incredulous. “I would have stopped you.” That I’d been trying to protect him suddenly seemed so idiotic I couldn’t even say it out loud. Our son looked on, confused. “Mama’s sad,” he announced, clinging to my leg. We put him to bed and then I called my parents and my brother. At their urging, I called 911. Around 10:30 p.m., three police officers came over and took my statement. I struggled to recount what I’d done; it seemed like a bad dream. I felt like a fool.

“No government agency will ever ask you for money,” one cop informed me, as if I’d never heard it before. I wanted to scream, “I know. ” Instead, I said, “It didn’t really feel like he was asking.”

The police told me not to worry; the scammers wouldn’t be back. “They got what they wanted,” another officer said, as though it would reassure me. I gave them the photos and recordings I had. They promised to check traffic cameras for the car that had taken the money.

When I woke up the next morning, a few seconds passed before I remembered the previous day. I was my old self, in my old bed, milky dawn light on the walls. Then it all came crashing back, a fresh humiliation, and I curled into the fetal position. I felt violated, unreliable; I couldn’t trust myself. Were my tendencies toward people-pleasing, rule following, and conflict aversion far worse than I’d ever thought, even pathological? I imagined other people’s reactions. She’s always been a little careless. She seems unhinged. I considered keeping the whole thing a secret. I worried it would harm my professional reputation. I still do.

In the days that followed, I kept revisiting the fake world of that afternoon, slipping through a portal into an alternate life. I would get paranoid that someone was reading my texts, watching me as I took my son to school, or using my Social Security number to wire money and rent cars. It was a relief that I wasn’t actually in trouble with the law, but then again — I’d lost $50,000 and I wasn’t getting it back. I checked my accounts and credit cards obsessively. I called my bank. They gave me instructions to freeze my credit, file reports with the FBI and FTC, and run anti-virus software on my laptop to check for malware, which I did. I cried a lot. My husband felt helpless; he still doesn’t like to talk about it. Instead, he researched new locks for our doors and looked into security cameras. One night I shook him awake, convinced that someone was trying to break in. “It’s only the wind,” he said. “We’re safe.”

Fifty thousand dollars is a lot of money. It took me years to save, stashing away a few thousand every time I got paid for a big project. Part of it was money I had received from my grandfather, an inheritance he took great pains to set up for his grandchildren before his death. Sometimes I imagine how I would have spent it if I had to get rid of it in a day. I could have paid for over a year’s worth of child care up front. I could have put it toward the master’s degree I’ve always wanted. I could have housed multiple families for months. Perhaps, inadvertently, I am; I occasionally wonder what the scammers did with it.

Because I had set it aside for emergencies and taxes, it was money I tried to pretend I didn’t have — it wasn’t for spending. Initially, I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to afford my taxes this year, but then my accountant told me I could write off losses due to theft. So from a financial standpoint, I’ll survive, as long as I don’t have another emergency — a real one — anytime soon.

When I did tell friends what had happened, it seemed like everyone had a horror story. One friend’s dad, a criminal-defense attorney, had been scammed out of $1.2 million. Another person I know, a real-estate developer, was duped into wiring $450,000 to someone posing as one of his contractors. Someone else knew a Wall Street executive who had been conned into draining her 401(k) by some guy she met at a bar.

I felt a guilty sense of consolation whenever I heard about a scam involving someone I respected. If this could happen to them, maybe I wasn’t such a moron. As a journalist, it’s my instinct to research and talk to experts, so I dove into books and podcasts about scams, desperate to make sense of my own. I had known that fraud was on the rise but was shocked to learn the numbers — financial losses ballooned by more than 30 percent in 2022. I read that self-laceration is typical; half of victims blame themselves for being gullible, and most experience serious anxiety, depression, or other stress-related health problems afterward. I heard about victim support groups. I went to therapy.

When I discovered that Katie Gatti Tassin, a personal-finance expert who writes the popular Money With Katie newsletter, lost $8,000 five years ago to a grandmotherly-sounding woman pretending to call from Tassin’s credit union, I called her to ask how she’d coped. “Everyone was so patronizing,” she told me. “The response was basically ‘It’s your fault that this happened.’”

If I had to pinpoint a moment that made me think my scammers were legitimate, it was probably when they read me my Social Security number. Now I know that all kinds of personal information — your email address, your kids’ names and birthdays, even your pets’ names — are commonly sold on the dark web. Of course, the scammers could also have learned about my son from a 30-second perusal of my Instagram feed.

It was my brother, the lawyer, who pointed out that what I had experienced sounded a lot like a coerced confession. “I read enough transcripts of bad interrogations in law school to understand that anyone can be convinced that they have a very narrow set of terrible options,” he said. When I posed this theory to Saul Kassin, a psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who studies coerced confessions, he agreed. “If someone is trying to get you to be compliant, they do it incrementally, in a series of small steps that take you farther and farther from what you know to be true,” he said. “It’s not about breaking the will. They were altering the sense of reality.” And when you haven’t done anything wrong, the risk of cooperating feels minimal, he added. An innocent person thinks everything will get sorted out. It also mattered that I was kept on the phone for so long. People start to break down cognitively after a few hours of interrogation. “At that point, they’re not thinking straight. They feel the need to put an end to the situation at all costs,” Kassin said.

I wondered how often scammers are caught and about the guy who’d driven the car to my apartment. But when I asked experts, they doubted he’d be a meaningful lead. One pointed out that he might have been a courier who was told to come pick up a box.

I still don’t believe that what happened to me could happen to anyone, but I’m starting to realize that I’m not uniquely fallible. Several friends felt strongly that if the scammers hadn’t mentioned my son, I would never have fallen for this. They’re right that I’d be willing to do — or pay — anything to protect him. Either way, I have to accept that someone waged psychological warfare on me, and I lost. For now, I just don’t answer my phone.

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  1. Message In A Bottle Telling Stories In A Digital World

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  3. Creative Writing Idea Create a Message in a Bottle by Wise Guys

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  4. Message in a Bottle

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  5. Message in a bottle writing template

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  6. Fisherman Discovers Message in a Bottle With Heartbreaking Story Behind

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  1. I FOUND A MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE…

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  3. READ ESSAY/STORY/ARTICLE WITH CORRECT PRONUNCIATION. 😎

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COMMENTS

  1. Narrative Writing

    A letter has been found in a bottle and it reads, "I am alive. Follow the signs. Find me." The protagonist does indeed follow the signs, and what he finds will shock you…Use these writing example to generate discussion from your class. Ask them how they could use a similar story line or different ways in which they could alter the story's ending.

  2. 12 Amazing Message-In-A-Bottle Stories

    1. A bittersweet reminder A simple brown bottle plucked from the Baltic Sea by a fisherman gave one woman a glimpse of the grandfather she had never met. Fisherman Konrad Fischer (shown above)...

  3. PDF Message in a Bottle

    "I am alive. Follow the signs. Find me." stood in awe, staring at the paper as if it was alive. What did it mean? Was this some kind of joke? At that moment, the wind died, and the waves fell silent. It was as if the ocean was talking to me. A path in the sand led me off the beach and into the forest.

  4. The Message in the Bottle Critical Essays

    The behaviorists, led by B. F. Skinner, insist that the language act is no different from any other response that an inclusive world requires of its captive creatures. Thus, in behavior theory,...

  5. Cast Away: 5 Amazing Stories of Messages in Bottles

    1. A Ticket to Freedom During a 1979 cruise to Hawaii, Dorothy and John Peckham passed the time by writing notes and throwing them overboard inside empty champagne bottles. They asked anyone who...

  6. Message in a bottle: 10 famous floating note discoveries

    Jonathan to Mary FOUND BY: Matea Medak Rezic in Croatia, 2013SENT BY: Jonathon (identity unknown) from Nova Scotia, Canada, 1985TIME AT SEA: 28 years A 23-year-old kite surfer, Matea Medak Rezic, stumbled across a half-broken bottle while clearing debris from a Croatian beach at the mouth of the Neretva river in the southern Adriatic.

  7. A Summary and Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's 'MS. Found in a Bottle'

    Poe won $50 for the story. By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) 'MS. Found in a Bottle' is one of Edgar Allan Poe's sea stories, and one of his earliest works of fiction: it was published in 1833, when Poe was still in his early twenties. The story recounts an unnamed narrator's experiences at sea, following a storm and shipwreck.

  8. Message In A Bottle Summary

    Message in a Bottle is a 1998 romance novel, the second written by American author Nicholas Sparks. Theresa Osborne is grieving the end of her eight-year marriage. One day, she finds a bottle on the shore containing a letter and is shocked by the passion and love expressed in the letter.

  9. The Message in the Bottle Analysis

    Despite the book's origin as separate essays written over a longer period (resulting in a certain amount of repetition), The Message in the Bottle is intended as a coherent whole. The first and...

  10. Message In A Bottle movie review (1999)

    Written by. Gerald Dipego. "Message in a Bottle'' is a tearjerker that strolls from crisis to crisis. It's curiously muted, as if it fears that passion would tear its delicate fabric; even the fights are more in sorrow than in anger, and when there's a fistfight, it doesn't feel like a real fistfight--it feels more like someone thought the ...

  11. Message in a Bottle: The History, and the Stories You Never Knew

    For fans of pop culture (and especially the nostalgic kind), the idea of a Message in a Bottle probably conjures thoughts of the 1998 Nicholas Sparks novel. Or maybe it's the 1999 romantic drama film based on the same story, starring Kevin Costner, Paul Newman and Robin Wright. To others, the concept instantly evokes the hit 1979 song by The Police, and you may find yourself already humming ...

  12. Message in a Bottle Short Story

    Sarah had always dreamed of finding a message in a bottle, and quickly picked it up before the surf could wash it away again. She didn't want to risk dropping whatever was in the bottle into the ocean so she ran back to her apartment before opening it.

  13. The History of Messages in a Bottle -- New York Magazine

    1913. A message in a bottle that reads "From Titanic. Goodbye all. Burke of Glanmire, Cork" washes ashore in Dunkettle, Ireland. 1915. As the ocean liner Lusitania is sinking—after being ...

  14. The romance and history of the message in a bottle

    The first documented messages in bottles were released in 310BC by the Greek philosopher Theophrastus, in an attempt at proving his theory that the Atlantic Ocean flowed into the Mediterranean. Bottles have continued to be used for the same purpose, to study currents, into the 20th century. Until the invention of the wireless telegraph, bottles ...

  15. Message in a Bottle: My 400 Writing Prompts

    3 min read · Feb 7, 2018 -- *While at the beach you decide to write a message in a bottle. What would it say? Who would you like to find it? 1/400* Keeping something for so long after you know...

  16. Message In A Bottle

    Original writing Message In A Bottle Jeanette Winterson Fri 10 Aug 2007 19.29 EDT Every solid thing had turned into its watery equivalent. The rain fell in long, straight chains, each drop linked...

  17. Nalo Hopkinson's Message in a Bottle

    This, as we eventually learn, is the premise of Nalo Hopkinson's science fiction story, "Message in a Bottle," a parable about art and futurity. The story can be found in Hopkinson's collection Falling In Love With Hominids (2015).The curators' ruse for implanting themselves in the past may seem crazily over-elaborate, even for a ...

  18. Message in a Bottle-The Full Story

    It's always exciting to find a message in a bottle! "What amazes me is that the bottle made it ashore in one piece. That side of the island is very rugged with large rock outcrops every few hundred feet. "I took a picture of the note and bottle right away…". The bottle and its message just after discovery by Deb Kremer.

  19. Message in a bottle

    Message in a bottle. This bottle and its contents (sample postcard and insert shown above) were launched in 1959 by the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey and were found in 2013. [1] A message in a bottle (abbrev. MIB [2]) is a form of communication in which a message is sealed in a container (typically a bottle) and released into a ...

  20. Message in a bottle Essay

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