There is an irresistible charm associated with a letter in a bottle; the frivolous way it travels, driven by the currents, the wind and pure chance; the incongruity of its appearance, a tiny solid element in its vast watery setting. Its transparency immediately reveals that there is something inside, written by one person to whoever may be out there. The hopeful optimism, against all the odds, that a soul mate might find it washed up somewhere on a distant shore. And, in this case, the desperation that must have driven the mother to write her letter and fling it out into the sea. A mother reduced to casting forth letters to her dead son. Letters from one unknown person to another.

The concept of a letter in a bottle certainly implies that such a letter is written in the hope that someone will find it. In the library I found an article on how to create the perfect letter in a bottle. Ed Sobey, an oceanographer and sea-ice specialist, has researched the subject and analysed the best methods of ensuring the bottle floated at the correct angle and level in the water:

Take a small soda bottle. The type with the screw-on lid is best. The first step is to ballast the bottle. Put some dry sand in the bottle, and place it in a bucket of water. Find the amount of sand necessary to weight the bottle without sinking it. The bottle should float, neck down, with only ½in. of freeboard when in the ocean. Fresh water and salt water have different densities, so if the bottle floats correctly in fresh water, more sand will be needed to make it float properly in sea water . . . Screw on the original lid or place a rubber stopper or bottle top on the bottle. As an added measure, dip the cap and bottle neck in liquid paraffin.

Through the years people have turned to bottles to test ocean currents, to transmit news, to spread the Gospel, to advertise their products, to send messages of love and hope, and to launch pleas for rescue. Over a period of nearly twenty years Dutch beachcomber Wim Kruiswijk analysed 435 bottles that washed up on to Holland’s coasts. Seventy-five per cent of these contained requests for pen pals or simply a return address. Of the remainder:

36 contained jokes

27 – religious pamphlets

12 – love letters

10 – ‘messages related to sociological studies’

9 – drawings

4 – pornographic letters

3 – requests for help

2 – advertisements

1 – a letter protesting about pollution

Would Kruiswijk have classified the letter to Maurice as a love letter, a request for help, or a matter ‘related to sociological studies’?

The earliest recorded letter in a bottle was around 310 BC when the Greek philosopher Theophrastus threw sealed bottles into the Mediterranean in an effort to prove that the inland sea was linked to the Atlantic. There was no recorded response.

In the 1490s, Christopher Columbus noted in his log that on the trip back to Spain after the discovery of the New World he was caught in a terrible storm. Afraid that the important news of his discovery might be lost, he wrote a short report, accompanied with a note requesting the finder to send it on to the Spanish Queen, sealed it into a cask and had it thrown overboard. It was lucky that the storm abated, and Columbus survived, because his message did not arrive.