A message in a bottle tossed in the sea in Germany 101
years ago, believed to be the world’s oldest, has been presented to the sender’s
granddaughter in Germany on Monday.
A fisherman pulled the bottle with the scribbled message
out of the Baltic off the northern city of Kiel last month, Holger von Neuhoff
of the International Maritime Museum in the northern port city of Hamburg said.
“This is certainly the first time such an old message in
a bottle was found, particularly with the bottle intact,” he said.
Researchers then set to work identifying the author and
managed to track down his 62-year-old granddaughter Angela Erdmann, who lives
in Berlin. “It was almost unbelievable,” Erdmann told German news agency DPA.
She was first able to hold the brown bottle last week at
the Hamburg museum. Inside was a message on a postcard requesting the finder to
return it to his home address in Berlin. “That was a pretty moving moment,”
Erdmann said. “Tears rolled down my cheeks.”
Von Neuhoff said researchers were able to determine based
on the address that it was 20-year-old baker’s son Richard Platz who threw the
bottle in the Baltic while on a hike with a nature appreciation group in 1913.
A Berlin-based genealogical researcher then located
Erdmann, who never knew Platz, her mother’s father who died in 1946 at the age
of 54.
The Guinness World Records had previously identified the
oldest message in a bottle as dating from 1914. It spent nearly 98 years at sea
before being fished from the water.