World War I Message in a Bottle Found in Australia and Delivered to Families More Than a Century Later

Australian soldiers slipped the letters into a bottle, closed the cap, and pitched it overboard from a ship in the Pacific Ocean as World War I battlefields beckoned them both.

The bottle was a time capsule that would be delivered by fate—and it arrived for overjoyed ancestors last month—more than 100 years after the bottle first hit the water.

On October 9, Peter Brown and his daughter Felicity found the Schweppes-brand bottle resting just above the waterline at Wharton Beach on the south coast of Western Australia. The Brown family frequently walks the beach and helps to clear garbage, but this piece was much more treasure than trash.

Nestled inside the bottle were letters written by two Army privates, Malcolm Neville and William Harley, originally dated August 15,1916.

Back then, Neville was 27 and Harley was 37. They were on board the ship HMAT A70 Ballarat and were leaving Adelaide on a mission to reinforce Australia’s 48th Infantry Battalion in World War I.

As the ship rocked back and forth on familiar waters, the soldiers wrote down messages that were soon swallowed by the sea. Surprisingly, their words were still legible when the letters reemerged weeks ago.

Neville’s letter from “somewhere at sea” requested that the finder send its contents to his mother in South Australia.

“We’re having a real good time, food is real good so far, with the exception of one meal which we buried at sea…The ship is heaving and rolling, but we are as happy as Larry”—which is a well-known Australian expression of contentment.

Credit: Debra Brown

Meanwhile, Harley wrote, “may the finder be as well as we are at present.”

The bottle was in “pristine condition” without a single barnacle, said Deb Brown who worked to retrieve the letters from the bottle.

“If it had been exposed for that long, the paper would’ve disintegrated from the sun,” opined Brown, who thinks the bottle got buried in a sand dune soon after it was tossed overboard, until it broke free and gave unsuspecting family members a new connection to their ancestors.

Once Brown removed the letters from the bottle, she used an internet search pairing Neville’s last name with his hometown in the letter (Wilkawatt) and soon found a Facebook page for his great-nephew Herbie.

“It’s been unbelievable,” Herbie said in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “It’s sort of brought us all closer together. It really has.”

Read the entire article on the Good News Network website here:

External Web Site Notice: This page contains information directly presented from an external source. The terms and conditions of this page may not be the same as those of this website. Click here to read the full disclaimer notice for external web sites. Thank you.