They all sign their names to the document, one of the sailors drains the last drop of brandy from the flask, and then they slide the roll of paper into it, plug up the neck and seal it with tar. ‘Now we will die,’ announces the doctor and hurls the torch overboard. In the ensuing darkness all kneel down to pray, except for the doctor, silhouetted against the swirling snowflakes. The water rises to the shoulders of the kneeling men. As the doctor leads the prayers, each crew member cries ‘Your will be done’ in his own language. At the last response, there is only silence. The doctor lowers his eyes. He sees that all the men’s heads are under water; not one had been raised. In their remorse, they had let themselves drown on their knees. The doctor takes the flask and raises it above his head. The ship sinks, and as he begins to disappear beneath the waves, the doctor continues to murmur the rest of the prayer. His chest remains above the water for a moment, then only his head, then there is just his arm holding the flask, as though showing it to infinity.

The arm disappears. The sea is now still and calm and the sinking ship scarcely leaves a ripple on its oily surface. The snow continues to fall.

But something floats on in the silent sea, moving on the current in the shadows. It is the sealed flask floating safely in its willow casing. Eventually this message in a bottle will reveal the identity of the sailors’ young victim, and he will take up his rightful position in the House of Lords.

The grandfather of all these nineteenth-century ocean lovers was Jules Michelet (1798–1874), who wrote in his Journal that he conceived the idea of his major work, The Sea, as he pulled out from his wife after sex. Pages and pages of vividly described waves, beaches, currents and storms followed. He spoke of the ocean as a ‘sea of milk’, whitish and viscous, which hinted at its non-translucent, life-giving, seminal or maternal properties. But he did have a worthy respect for the sea as an immovable frontier between two spheres of existence, an invisible obstacle that had provided an unfranchizable transparent wall for the letter-writer too: ‘Water, for all terrestrial beings, is the non-breatheable element, the element of asphyxiation. It is the fatal, eternal barrier, that irremediably separates the two worlds.’ In a similar way the bottle with its letter was now separated from its sender by its journey through the water.

The Professor had been right. Not only was the language of the letter-writer influenced by Hugo and his contemporaries, but the whole ‘letter-in-a-bottle’ concept was very close to the hearts of these bearded men. Eleven years before Hugo’s Man who Laughs, Alfred de Vigny, soldier and son of a soldier, wrote a long poem called Letter in a Bottle, with the subtitle Advice to an Unknown Young Man.

It tells of a young captain whose ship is out of control. No vessel appears to save them, night falls, he is resigned to his fate. He writes a note: