In 1902, the polar explorer Evelyn Baldwin wrote in Norwegian and English: ‘Five ponies and 150 dogs remain. Desire hay, fish and 30 sledges. Must return early in August. Baldwin.’ The bottle containing his message was not picked up until 1948, by a Russian fisherman, but by then Baldwin was long – and safely – returned.

On 9 September 1914, Private Thomas Hughes, aged twenty-six, of Stockton-on-Tees wrote to his wife, Elizabeth, as he left for the battlefields of France.

Dear Wife,

I am writing this note on this boat and dropping it into the sea just to see if it will reach you.

If it does, sign this envelope on the right hand bottom corner where it says receipt. Put the date and hour of receipt and your name where it says signature and look after it well.

Ta ta sweet, for the present. Your Hubby.

He added a covering note asking the finder to forward the letter, slid it into a green ginger-beer bottle with a screw-on rubber top, and threw it into the English Channel. Two days later the Second Durham Light Infantry came under fire and Hughes was killed. His matter-of-fact little message drifted for eighty-five years until it was found by a Thames fisherman, Steve Gowan. Intrigued by the story, Gowan discovered that although Elizabeth had died twenty years earlier in New Zealand, the Hugheses’ daughter, who had been only two when the letter was written, was still alive and able to receive the message from her dead father hand-delivered by the fisherman.

In May 1915, as the torpedoed Cunard liner Lusitania sank, a passenger wrote the following message in a bottle: ‘I am still on deck with a few people. One is a child. The last boats have left. We are sinking fast. The orchestra is still playing bravely. The end is near. Maybe this note . . .’ Here the message broke off abruptly. Maybe this note will be found by rescuers in time? Maybe this note will preserve our memory?

Probably the first occasion when an evangelist took seriously the message in Ecclesiastes – ‘Cast thy bread upon the waters, for thou shalt find it after many days’ (11:1) – occurred in April 1940. George Phillips of Puget Sound, Washington, was on the beach one day ‘and I saw the tide carrying driftwood. Why couldn’t I spread the gospel in the same way?’ As an alcoholic, Phillips was of course familiar with sources of used spirits bottles and he gave up his work in real estate and the used-car business to concentrate full time on his preaching-by-bottle efforts. In a pleasing irony the objects that once contained what he now perceived as the vice of alcohol were used to carry the Word of the Lord. He sent off some 40,000 bottles, and received 1,500 answers. His messages, dubbed Gospel Bombs, travelled as far afield as the Pacific Coast, Australia, Mexico, Hawaii and New Guinea.

In 1943, Maja Westerman fled Nazi-occupied Estonia and took refuge on the island of Gotska Sandoen, an island so isolated that it still has no proper wharf and visitors must leap from the boat to shore. Cut off from news, Maja sent a message in a bottle requesting information about the war: