Titanic victim's tragic message in a bottle - and love potion letter that led to marriage
dailystar.co.ukGreeks began the habit in the third century BC to study water currents, it’s reckoned more than six million messages have been put in bottles and dropped in the ocean.Now, one plopped into the North Sea by eight-year-old schoolgirl Joanna Buchan from Aberdeenshire in 1996 has been found 800 miles away in Norway - 25 years later.Here James Moore looks at more amazing stories…In 1784 Japanese sailor Chunosuke Matsuyama and 43 others were shipwrecked on a South Pacific island.
He carved a message into a piece of coconut wood, put it in a bottle, and set it adrift hoping for help. Sadly, they were never rescued, but the bottle was found in 1935, washed up in the village of Hiraturemura in Japan where Matsuyama had been born.Lovelorn Swedish sailor Ake Viking put a message in a corked bottle in 1956 “to someone beautiful and far away.” Two years later he received a letter from a Sicilian girl called Paolina, who wrote: “I am not beautiful, but it seems so miraculous that this little bottle should have travelled so far and long to reach me that I must send you an answer.” The pair eventually married.While on a 1979 cruise to Hawaii, Americans Dorothy and John Peckham tossed a champagne bottle off the ship with a note inside asking the finder to write back.
They eventually got a note back from Vietnamese man Hoa Van Nguyen. He picked it up 9,000 miles away, while floating in a tiny boat trying to flee the country’s communist regime.
He told the Peckhams the find had given him the strength to carry on and would later settle in the US with the couple’s help.When fisherman Steve Gowan hooked an empty ginger beer bottle off the Essex coast in 1999 he found a love letter inside written in 1914 by Private Thomas Hughes to wife.
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