Waterlogged

Our human impulse to launch our words into water and space

When my prior water post was about to launch from earth to start looking for water in outer space, I knew that yet again, this verbose writer was going to need a Part 2. So here’s another take on water, not only as a theme that inspires so many metaphorical words but how we humans literally love to throw our bottles of words into it.

Why and when did this impulse to hurl our pithy messages into the sea begin? According to a roundup in New York Magazine, the earliest known tempest-tossed bottle dates to 310 B.C., care of Greek philosopher Theophrastus, among Aristotles’ pupils, who wanted to see if the Atlantic Ocean flows into the Mediterranean.

Next comes this weird blip in the 1500s, when “Queen Elizabeth appoints a royal ‘Uncorker of Ocean Bottles’ and makes the unauthorized opening of an ‘ocean bottle’ a capital crime.” They say the Queen held the flow of information under such tight control that she did this to ensure no inside intel on her military ships would get into the wrong hands.

Sadly, this oddity gets dubbed poppycosh by a guy who ought to know. Clint Buffington is so obsessed with bottle messages he calls himself the Message in a Bottle Hunter, and his blog is an exhaustive compendium of histories, stories and news—and a photo museum—should you want to dig deeper into the subject. Re: the “Uncorker,” he says, this is decidedly the stuff of legend, or namely fiction from French novelist Victor Hugo:

If you would like to read Victor Hugo’s 1869 novel, The Man Who Laughs, you can do so at your own peril here. It is a slog. And it is worth repeating: This is a novel, a work of fiction. The events in it did not actually happen outside of Victor Hugo’s head. These people did not exist.

In the novel, the Duchess Josiana presides over a royal court (she is the fictional illegitimate daughter of King James II). A somewhat comical character called Barkilphedro comes to her, seeking to be appointed “Uncorker of the Bottles of the Ocean”. He basically wants a title and a salary, because he is a bit of a vagrant in the court. Josiana finds the request amusing and the two banter for a while. During their banter, Barkilphedro reels off this story about Queen Elizabeth appointing an Official Uncorker of Ocean Bottles in what is clearly an attempt to make Josiana jealous, to make her think, “Well, if Queen Elizabeth did it, then, by God, I will too!” So she does, and Barkilphedro becomes her Official Uncorker of Ocean Bottles.

Royal Uncorkers or not, the popularity of floating messages seems to have peaked from the 1800s to the early 1900s, when newspapers would publish found sea-notes in regular columns.

Predating the invention of wireless telegraph technology in the late 1890s, it would be the only way to get a message out from a ship. And even after that, a telegraph wasn’t always possible, like when you’re about to go under. This historic bit washes ashore in Dunkettle, Ireland, 1913:

From Titanic. Goodbye all. Burke of Glanmire, Cork

The oldest known message in a bottle was discovered in 2018 on the beach of an Australian island. The gin bottle waited 131 years between being tossed from a German boat in 1886 off the Australian coast and getting discovered by someone who happened upon it in great condition with a little note tightly rolled and still readable inside. Nothing more romantic like a love note or an SOS, just the date, coordinates of the ship, name of ship, home port, and travel route, with a space on the back for the finder to write their when/where and return to the Germany Naval Observatory or a nearby German consulate office. It was part of a study on currents that had sailors tossing thousands of bottles in oceans from 1864-1933 with 600 returned, the last in 1934 in Denmark. This particular bottle likely submerged itself only a year after its journey and sat, buried, for all those other years.

Hamlyn, Charlotte, 2018; Oldest-known message in a bottle found on WA beach 132 years after being tossed overboard.

Then there’s the story of Gordon Smith who died of a brain hemorrhage at 57 in 2012. He loved to travel so his wife put his ashes and $2 in a plastic water bottle with a note saying, “My husband Gordon Scott ‘Skinny’ Smith loved to travel. Call and tell me where he is.” By 2013, the note had been kicking around Florida, having been discovered a few times and traveling a total of 80 miles to be sent back out again with an additional note and a new $1.

These two not-so-far-travelled tales have me thinking that the Germans must have discovered in their nautical experiments that these notes don’t end up going very far, but there are quite a few intrepid ones: a note that went from Vermont to Portugal (2,400 miles across the Atlantic), or 9,000 miles for a single journey of Dr. Who postcard that went from England to Australia, or the record: nearly 16,000 miles logged for another German note that floated for six years after being collected and tossed back.

Where can I throw a bottle so it goes the furthest? ChatGPT says:

The distance that a message in a bottle travels in the ocean depends on many factors, such as the location it is thrown, the time of year, and the weather conditions. One location that is known to have long-distance ocean currents is the Gulf Stream, which runs from the Gulf of Mexico towards the coast of Europe. Another location is the North Atlantic Drift, which flows from the Caribbean to the coast of Europe. If you want to throw a message in a bottle in the ocean, these locations would be a good place to start. However, please keep in mind that it is illegal to throw anything into the ocean and it can harm marine life. Would you like me to look for more information about ocean currents?

Well isn’t that GPT always so aimed to please, even if it means aiding in breaking the law! Tossing your trash out to sea is essentially literary littering, yet usually with the hope that it will somehow boomerang into human hands again.

These small (relatively harmless) gestures of asserting ourselves into the unknown, hoping to connect to some distant finder, extend our boundaries of space and time, defy death, bring us in the extreme to the Message in a Bottle project currently collecting names to send to deep space, no littering required since it will all be etched on microchips. U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón wrote the poem In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa to make the journey 1.8 billion miles, over six years starting in Oct. 2024 to Jupiter’s moon aboard the Europa Clipper, set to collect data so scientists can search for water-based life forms under the icy crust. From NASA:

Water connects Earth and Europa, the two ocean worlds NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft travels between on its journey. The existence of a vast ocean on a moon of Jupiter—which the Europa Clipper mission is equipped to decisively confirm and characterize—is what makes Europa such a promising place to better understand the astrobiological potential for habitable worlds beyond Earth.

I signed my name, my kids will sign theirs so I’m not so alone in the crowd, and you can too for free to get an image with your name in the bottle and look at the participation map, at the optional cost of getting future spacecraft updates. The marketing is intended to increase interest in such missions and the space program in general—so count me in.

In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa

Arching under the night sky inky
with black expansiveness, we point
to the planets we know, we

pin quick wishes on stars. From earth,
we read the sky as if it is an unerring book
of the universe, expert and evident.

Still, there are mysteries below our sky:
the whale song, the songbird singing
its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.

We are creatures of constant awe,
curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom,
at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.

And it is not darkness that unites us,
not the cold distance of space, but
the offering of water, each drop of rain,

each rivulet, each pulse, each vein.
O second moon, we, too, are made
of water, of vast and beckoning seas.

We, too, are made of wonders, of great
and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds,
of a need to call out through the dark.

As a writer bursting with “small invisible worlds,” I think anything I’ve ever had the gumption to share is a message in a bottle of sorts. Words formed and tossed out with the great hope that they will float, or fly, direct into the hands and eyes—and then heart and mind—of some Good Reader Who Gets It.

If found on friendly shores or habitable planets, no need to return to any consulate, just leave a reply in the comments.