World's oldest message in a bottle discovered on WA beach
What's believed to be the world's oldest known message in a bottle has been discovered by a Perth family on a West Australian beach!
Tonya Illman found the 132-year-old gin bottle covered in sand near Wedge Island in January.
Inside, she found a roll of paper printed in German and dated to 12 June 1886, which was authenticated by the Western Australian Museum.
The bottle had been thrown overboard from the German sailing ship Paula in 1886 as it crossed the Indian Ocean, 950km from the Australian coast, according to Ross Anderson, the museum’s assistant curator of maritime archaeology.
At the time, German ships were conducting a 69-year experiment that involved throwing thousands of bottles into the sea to track ocean currents.
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