It is widely reported that in the 1580s Queen Elizabeth I appointed an official Uncorker of Ocean Bottles and made it a crime for anyone else to open such bottles, which occasionally may have contained messages about enemy positions, or secret communications from spies. However, although the story has a certain romance, it seems likely to be a myth.

In 1714 – or some say 1784 – Chunosuke Matsuyama was shipwrecked with his crew of forty-four off a small island, while treasure-hunting in the Pacific. His plea for rescue arrived centuries too late, in 1935. Legend has it that the bottle was washed up on the very beach where Matsuyama grew up.

Meanwhile, beachcombing was becoming an acceptable leisure pursuit. By the mid-eighteenth century scholars and ladies of leisure, clutching notebooks and sketchpads and seeking interesting driftwood and items of natural historical interest, were a common sight on the beaches of Europe. One historian described beachcombing in England in the 1760s as ‘a full-fledged mania among people from all walks of life’.

In May 1859, Dr Livingstone left a message in a bottle at the mouth of the Zambezi River on the Indian Ocean in what is today Mozambique. He had just returned to the coast from his second expedition to the African interior, hoping to pick up some salt and other provisions before setting off once more. After waiting a week in vain for the errant paddle steamer containing his supplies, Livingstone addressed his letter to an unnamed ‘Commander of Her Majesty’s Ship’, the ship’s name also being left blank. He explained that the expedition would be leaving the following morning and that he would be placing the bottle ‘ten feet Magnetic North from a mark (+) cut on the beacon on the island off this harbour’: superfluous information, one would have thought, since anyone reading the letter would already have found the bottle. The beacon had been erected by the navy the previous year, and Livingstone had agreed with Admiral Grey that any passing man-o’-war would check its base for reports and letters. By the time the letter was found by HMS Persian, Livingstone and his companions were back in the interior on their way to discovering Lake Nyasa, the future Lake Malawi. The letter resurfaced in 1905 among the papers of Admiral Sir James Donnet, who may have been on the ship that retrieved the bottle. Eventually it was bought at Sotheby’s by the explorer Quentin Keynes, who was a serial collector.

In the 1950s Keynes had become fascinated by the quagga, a kind of semi-striped zebra presumed to be extinct. His worldwide searches failed to discover any remaining beasts, so he turned his attention to the giant sable antelope, and thence to the spotted zebra. By 1958 Keynes was so obsessed with the history of Dr Livingstone, and this bottle, that he made a special trip to the Zambezi, only to find that the island where the bottle had been buried had been washed away. However, the grandson of a guide of Livingstone’s directed him towards a nearby baobab tree, seventy-two feet in circumference, on which he was thrilled to discover that Livingstone had carved his initials. On Keynes’s death, his possessions, which included material on James Joyce, St Helena, elephants, the explorer Sir Richard Burton and the Galapagos islands – as well as the quagga and the dodo – were put up for auction. The letter, Lot 431, fetched £15,000.