The Life-and-Death History of the Message in a Bottle

100-year-old messages from the sea reveal clues to the fate of missing vessels and poignant farewells from stricken sailors.

One Thursday morning in late June 1899, an 11-year-old boy named William Andrews was playing on the beach at Ilfracombe in Devon, England. There he spotted a small tin floating in the water. The quarter-pound tin was marked “coffee and chicory”, and was tied up with a piece of cork for buoyancy. Inside the tin was a note, written in pencil on a page torn from a pocket diary. The note was signed by able seaman R. Neel and addressed to Mrs. Abigail Neel in Cardiff, Wales. It read as follows:

“To my wife and children. The Stella is going down as I pen my last words. If I do not survive, go to my brother. Goodbye, my loved ones, goodbye.”

This was just one of hundreds of messages in bottles, boxes and tins washed up from the sea onto British and other shores in 1899, and one of thousands found during the busy Victorian and Edwardian steam and sail seafaring eras. These messages from the sea told tales of foundering ships, missing ocean liners and shipwrecked sailors, and contained moving farewells, romantic declarations, and intriguing confessions. Some solved mysteries of lost vessels and crews, while others created new mysteries yet to be solved.

The message found by William Andrews was passed to his local newspaper. It was published in the next day’s edition and, over the next few days, in scores of other newspapers across Britain. Messages in bottles were popular news items for the press of the day. Major newspapers such as the Times of London and the New York Times often printed such messages, as did hundreds of national and regional newspapers across the world. Some published them in regular columns, often headlined “Messages from the Sea”.

“Of all the tales of the sea,” remarked the Sheffield Evening Telegraph in 1893, “none are more pathetic than those which every now and again are related in curt language in the news columns of the daily press of the finding of messages written by those who far away at sea, the victims of some disaster, recognize the hopelessness of their position, and see on the horizon the dawn of eternity.”

The full meaning of able seaman Neel’s message became clear shortly after it was published. The Stella was a British passenger ferry that sailed between Southampton and the Channel Islands. It was wrecked in fog on the Casquets, north of Guernsey, in March 1899 with the loss of around 105 passengers and crew. No official passenger list was kept, and it was unknown whether an R Neel was on board. Inquiries made at the given address in Cardiff found that a man named Neel had formerly lived there, but “was supposed to have gone to Bradford”, where nothing else was known of him. Mrs. Abigail Neel could not be traced.