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:

Today the current is dragging us eastwards, we are lost, on to Tierra del Fuego. Our death is certain. We should go north. Herewith I attach my journal with some studies of new constellations from distant latitudes. Where it lands, is in God’s hands.

As the vessel begins to spin towards its destruction, the captain places his notes in an old champagne bottle, its green neck yellowed by ancient bubbles, from Rheims. He remembers when he toasted his friends from this bottle. Of three hundred crew members, only ten remain. The water is already up to his knees and soon it reaches his shoulders . . . Like the ship’s doctor in Hugo’s novel, he lifts one bare arm towards the sky. As his boat sinks, he throws the bottle. He smiles as he imagines the fragile glass carrying his name and his thoughts to port. A new star will be named after him, and he is happy to think that with his bottle he has tricked death.

The young captain’s bottle floats along in the ocean, surviving currents, icebergs, black sea horses. Once, in the calm sea of the Pacific, amid blue waves, a boat passes. The bottle is spotted, a small dinghy is launched to pick it up. But suddenly, from afar, comes the gunfire of pirates. The dinghy is summoned back urgently to the ship, and she sails on swiftly to escape capture. Our hopes – the readers’ hopes – were raised and now they are dashed.

Alone in the ocean, lost like an invisible dot in a moving desert, the bottle floats on, its neck now covered with algae and wrack.

At last the winds blow from Florida and bring the bottle to France – where else? – and its rainy shores. A fisherman spots it trapped beneath some rocks and runs to find a wise man to explain his catch.

The wise man explains that the information in the bottle is the elixir of science, of knowledge, for ‘The true God, God almighty, is the God of ideas.’

The young captain had done well to consign his knowledge to the waves, and the poem ends:

Let us throw the letter into the sea, the teeming sea:

God will gently guide it to harbour.