Latest news with #MarkDoucette
Fox News
4 days ago
- General
- Fox News
Message in bottle from 1983 washes up on remote island with historical contents intact
A peculiar message in a bottle recently surfaced on the shores of a remote Canadian island. The discovery was announced by the Sable Island National Park Reserve in a May 23 Facebook post. The small island is located off the waters of Nova Scotia. In the post, park officials said the bottle was discovered by Mark Doucette, an archaeology technician from Potlotek First Nation, a community of Mi'kmaq Native Americans. "The message is very faded, but we could make out that the bottle was sent to sea Jan. 14, 1983, from a resupply ship operating near Sable Island," the post noted. Speaking to Fox News Digital, Parks Canada representative Jennifer Nicholson said that, after opening the bottle, the first thing officials noticed was its strong smell. "Well, first off, you could still smell the gin!" she recalled. "Even 40 years later, that hadn't faded." The gin dissolved some of the ink on the letter, but it was still faintly visible. Nicholson said that the paper was still damp from being in the bottle for four decades. "As it dried, you could make out more of the message – and you could see the impressions left behind by the pen," she said. The letter had scant details about the ship it was sent from, which required some research from park officials. "It was a little hard to make out the ship's name at first. You could tell it ended with 'Sea Hunter,'" Nicholson said. "We did a little bit of digging, and one of the archaeologists found that there used to be a resupply ship called the Wimpey Sea Hunter. It was a British supply ship built in Devon in 1982." She added, "There were crew names on the back as well. We haven't been able to track any of the crew down after this time. But if they're out there, we'd love to hear from them!" The bottle also contained a two-dollar bill from 1974, which featured a portrait of young Queen Elizabeth. "We've had appliances like TVs and fridges wash up on the beach – fridges especially." "The Bank of Canada replaced the two-dollar bill with the [two-dollar coin] in 1996, and some of our Sable team had never seen a two-dollar bill before," Nicholson noted. It's not unheard of for similar bottles to wash up on Canadian shores. Nicholson said that one message in a bottle is usually found in Nova Scotia per year. "A lot of them are from the 1980s," she said. "The oldest one my colleagues found was set to sea in the 1930s from a boat that was sailing from the U.K. to North America … that was really neat. " Other than that, Nicholson said park officials have seen "almost everything" wash up on shores. "We've had appliances like TVs and fridges wash up on the beach – fridges especially, because they have a lot of insulation, so they float," she said. "We've had things with Russian labels washing up. We found a little pill container that was from France. And a lot of the typical waste you would imagine – plastic water bottles, other single-use plastic items." For now, the bottle has been sent to the Parks Canada archives for further study and preservation. Bottles containing decades-old messages are often found across the world. In 2023, a French man stumbled across one that was sent by a Massachusetts fifth grader in 1997. In 2021, a 108-year-old message in a bottle was found at a Ford construction site in Michigan.
CBC
03-06-2025
- General
- CBC
Q&A: Message in a bottle from 1983 found on Sable Island
Social Sharing A Parks Canada archaeology technician on Sable Island recently found a message in a bottle that contained a note and an old Canadian $2 bill. It happened in mid-May on the sliver of land about 300 kilometres southeast of Halifax. Parks Canada says a message in a bottle is usually found once a year on the island — give or take. Sarah Medill is an operations co-ordinator for Parks Canada on Sable Island. She spoke to CBC's Information Morning Cape Breton. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Tell us the story of this message in the bottle. In mid-May, Mark Doucette — an archaeologist out here working on another project — found this bottle in the area where they were working, and he brought it back to the parks team and we brought it back to the station. And so we tend to make a little bit of a deal when we find things like this on the island and invited everybody who was here. So I think there was about eight people on the island at the time to come for the opening and the unveiling. You make it a bit of a thing? We do make it a bit of a thing. It's always kind of an exciting find because you never know what's going to be inside or what the message is going to be. Let's start from the outside. Tell us about the bottle and what kind of shape was it in when Mark found it? You could actually still recognize it as a Gordon's gin bottle. And so it still had sort of the embossment of the name on it but like a lot of the bottles on Sable Island — they don't break because there's no rocks on the island or around the island. They come up intact, but they do get quite sandblasted. It was a little hard to see into the bottle, but you could definitely tell that there was something inside it. And they had screwed the cap back on and then sealed it up with electrical tape. And even that was still relatively intact, so the condition was pretty good. What was in it? When we opened it up, there was definitely a rolled-up note and in the rolled-up note was also a Canadian $2 bill … Actually, the first thing you noticed when you opened it, you could actually still smell the gin. Really? Yeah, it still had a very alcoholic aroma to it. And unfortunately the gin also made some of the writing on the letter that they wrote a little hard to make out. And so some of the letters were missing, but we were able to eventually make out that one side said "We're from the crew of the Wimpy Seahunter supply ship" and then it provided a date. So they set it ashore sometime near Sable Island on Jan. 14, 1983. "Congratulations" was written on [the note] as well … on getting your two dollars. Where did they set it adrift? Well, it would have been somewhere around Sable Island, it implies anyway. So a supply ship around that time, there was offshore oil and gas platforms on the island. So this was probably a resupply ship for those or a support ship. So that bottle has been around for 42 years with that message in it? Exactly. I wonder how long it's been on the island, because the sand fills in and comes off, right? Yeah, it does. And who knows, it could have come ashore fairly recently or bobbed around for a little while shortly after they released it. The sand will sometimes bury things and then other storms will expose them again. The area where the bottle was found was on the north side of the island. So when you think of Sable Island, you kind of imagine it as a big smile and a crescent shape. And so the north side of the island is on the inside of that crescent and it sort of almost acts as a basket for catching things out of the ocean. So it's sort of mixed in with a lot of other stuff. So do you know anything about that? What did you say the name of the vessel was? So it was a little hard to make out originally because the W was missing and what turned out to be a P was sort of written looking like an R. So initially we were like looking at the IM ray Seahunter. But then once the note dried again, it was still a bit damp with the leftover gin. You could see the impressions for the W and some searching online, we did see that there was a boat called the Wimpy Seahunter that was in the area in the '80s, early '80s. You said there have been other finds like this? We find a message in a bottle about once a year on the island, give or take. And in the last probably 10 years, we've had one that was set adrift as early as in the 1930s. And that was from a boat that was travelling from somewhere in the U.K. to North America. And the person who wrote the message sounded like they were moving from Scotland to somewhere in North America at the time. It was written on the ship's sort of information sheet, so that was fairly interesting too. And it was the vessel, I believe it was called the Caledonia. And so that was only found probably six or seven years ago and but you know, sent to sea in the 1930s. What's another one? We had a group of maybe Grade 6 students in Massachusetts that set a bottle adrift with just little hellos and messages, and we think that was maybe a school project just to see if something was returned. What are you gonna do with your $2 Canadian bill? As far as I know, I think the archaeologists took the note in the bottle and the $2 bill back with them. It'll probably go to archives for a bit anyway.
