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‘World’s oldest message in a bottle’ washes up nearly 150 YEARS later – with puzzling riddle on handwritten note
The bottle had travelled a surprising distance
THE "world's oldest" message in a bottle has washed up nearly 150 years after it was thrown into the ocean - with a puzzling riddle inside.
Greeting card designer Amy Smyth Murphy, 49, was walking along a beach in New Jersey earlier this month when she spotted an unusual looking object at the water's edge.
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She picked up the green vessel and to her surprise saw paper inside.
Amy told the : "I just thought, 'This is so peculiar. What is this?'"
She took it home and opened the bottle using a corkscrew, with her niece then using tooth picks to pry the paper message out.
Amy said: "It took us I would say maybe 48 hours to really understand what it said, but if you stare at it long enough, you can kind of start to see it."
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They were then able to decode the difficult to read handwritten note which said: "Yacht Neptune off Atlantic City, New Jersey. Aug. 6 - 76."
Despite the bottle being missing in the ocean for 148 years, it was found just 15 miles from where it was released, if the note is accurate.
Amy began to do some digging on exactly how old the find could be.
She found an identical Barr & Brother Philadelphia bottle on one online valuation site dated pre-1900.
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Other similar bottles on the site were from the 1870s.
The note itself was written on the back of a business card for a well known Philadelphia instrument company called W.G. & J Klemm dating back to the 1800s.
I tossed a message in a bottle into the sea when I was 10 - now 37 years later I’ve received the most incredible reply-
Amy said: "I would love to find who was sailing on the ship, who was the captain, where was it going?
"Was it for pleasure? Was it business? All those types of questions."
She revealed she had found an article from 1874 which names Captain Samuel Gale of Atlantic City as the owner of the Neptune.
Gale had "just built a splendid yacht, which he christened 'Neptune,' after the Neptune Club of this city", she said.
Neptune was a popular pleasure cruise which drew scores of day trippers thanks to Gale's charismatic persona, according to his obituary.
Amy said: "From the reactions so far that I've had, everyone really likes the mystery of it.
"Let's see how much info we can get out of this one bottle and the history of it and how it connects to Philadelphia and South Jersey."
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