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A message in a bottle found during a beach clean-up in Australia turned out to contain letters from two World War I soldiers who launched their bottle 109 years earlier.
Debra Brown said she and her family were cleaning up along the shoreline in Wharton Beach when her daughter found a bottle containing letters from Malcolm Alexander Neville and William Kirk Harley, soldiers serving in World War I in 1916.
Neville’s letter showed he came from Wilkawatt, South Australia, and Brown was able to use Facebook to contact Herbie Neville, the soldier’s great nephew.
The elder Neville was 28 years old when he was killed in action in France just a few months after writing his message in a bottle. Herbie Neville said he knew of his great uncle Malcolm from stories he heard from his aunt, who is now 101.
“It’s been amazing how much has come to the surface in his short time in WWI,” Neville told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.
Brown was also able to contact family members of Harley, who later returned home from the war.
“We are all absolutely stunned. There are five grandchildren who are still alive,” granddaughter Ann Turner said. “We’re all in constant contact since it happened and we just can’t believe it. We do very much feel like our grandfather has reached out to us from the grave.”
University of Western Australia coastal oceanography professor Charitha Pattiaratchi said its possible the bottle containing the messages was only in the water for a couple of weeks after being launched from the Great Australian Bight.
“It probably would have been a few weeks, it could have even been a month before it actually got to Wharton Beach,” she said. “Once it got to the beach it could have stayed there and got buried in the sand, so it could have been there for 100 years.”
Another message in a bottle dating back an even greater amount of time was uncovered last year by an engineer conducting an inspection at a 209-year-old Scottish lighthouse.
Ross Russell, a Northern Lighthouse Board mechanical engineer, removed some panels in a cupboard at Corsewall Lighthouse, located at the northern tip of the Rhins of Galloway, and spotted a bottle hidden inside the wall.
Inside was a note dated Sept. 4, 1892, bearing the names of three engineers who had installed a light at the top of the 100-foot lighthouse as well as the names of three lighthouse keepers.
