Dear friend, we live on an island. We came here a year ago . . . the lighthouse keeper’s family is very kind . . . Is the war finished? . . . We wait for peace and friendship.

It was not until 2003 that a Swiss tourist visiting a beach on the Swedish mainland discovered it.

In 1948, Dean Bumpus of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts spotted the scientific possibilities of bottle travel by pioneering a major study of coastal circulation off the Eastern United States, throwing as many as 20,000 bottles into the Atlantic.

In 1954 A. W. Fawcett, managing director of Guinness Exports Ltd, based in Liverpool, devised the first of two advertising ‘bottle-drops’ in which 50,000 specially sealed Guinness^® beer bottles, empty except for certificates and booklets, were dropped from merchant ships at eleven different locations in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Buoyed up by the success of this venture, and to celebrate the two-hundreth anniversary of the first Arthur Guinness brewery in Dublin, a few years later Mr Fawcett organized the dropping of some 150,000 specially embossed bottles into the Atlantic Ocean from thirty-eight different ships over a period of six weeks, starting on 14 July 1959. Each bottle contained a small number of documents, including a certificate ‘from the office of King Neptune’. There was also a little booklet telling the story of the Guinness brand, a special gold-coloured 1759–1959 label, and some instructions on how to turn the bottle into a table-lamp for those so inclined. Some of the bottles contained other items such as an advertisement for Ovaltine (which helped to sponsor the bottle-drop) or a notice about the ship that dropped it. The press office concludes happily, ‘As bottles from both bottle-drops are still turning up today we can definitely say that these are our longest-running advertising promotions!’

In 1956, Martin Douglas went out in his powered yacht off the Florida coast and was never seen again. Two years later a jamjar washed up on Avoca Beach, north of Sydney, Australia. Inside was a hastily penned will, written on successive blank cheques torn out of Douglas’s chequebook, along with an unemotional summary of his increasingly desperate situation:

Should this note be found, please forward it to my wife, Alice Douglas, at Miami Beach, Florida. No doubt you’re wondering what became of me. I got blown out into the water due to engine trouble.

In 1979, the pop group Police released their hit single ‘Message in a Bottle’. They send ‘an SOS to the world’, and for a year no one answers. Then, suddenly, ‘a hundred billion bottles’ arrive on the beach; the lonely cry for help, linked to the catchy tune, evoked a powerful response in the millions who bought the record.

In 2002 a solitary woman walking her dogs on a beach in Kent discovered a blue Evian bottle with a message from another lonely woman.

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