In 1866, sailors on a German ship called Paula threw a bottle with a message into waters
hundreds of miles off the western coast of Australia. One hundred and thirty-one years later,
the bottle was found on an Australia island.
It's believed to be the oldest-known message in a bottle, in terms of the amount of time that
has passed between when it was written and when it was found. Before this discovery, Guinness
World Records said that the oldest was 108 years old, found in Germany in 2015. Australian and
German researchers worked together to check whether the note is real or not.
Tonya Illman was walking on the beach in January when she spotted the old bottle. "I picked
it up thinking it might look nice on display in my home," Illman says, according to an account on
her husband's website. The bottle was partially filled with wet sand. Shortly after, Illman's
son's girlfriend poured out the contents and found a tightly rolled note covered in a piece of
string.
Too damp to open initially, according to the account, the group waited for it to dry and were
amazed to see that it was carefully handwritten in German. "The first thing that caught my eye
was the year 1866," said Illman's husband Kym. "It seemed totally unlikely to us that the note
and bottle could have lasted that long."
The pair reached out to the Western Australia Museum, which set out to study the document.
"Extraordinary finds need extraordinary evidence to support them, so we contacted colleagues in
Germany for help to find more information," Ross Anderson, who is in charge of works of art in
the museum, said in a statement.
But this message is no SOS or love letter.