MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE


PROLOGUE
The bottle was dropped overboard on a warm summer evening,
a few hours before the rain began to fall. Like all bottles,
it was fragile and would break if dropped a few feet from the
ground. But when sealed properly and sent to sea, as this one
was, it became one of the most seaworthy objects known to
man. It could float safely through hurricanes or tropical
storms, it could bob atop the most dangerous of riptides. It
was, in a way, the ideal home for the message it carried
inside, a message that had been sent to fulfill a promise.
Like that of all bottles left to the whim of the oceans,
its course was unpredictable. Winds and currents play large
roles in any bottle's direction; storms and debris may shift
its course as well. Occasionally a fishing net will snag a
bottle and carry it a dozen miles in the opposite direction
in which it was headed. The result is that two bottles
dropped simultaneously into the ocean might end
up a continent apart, or even on opposite sides of the
globe. There is no way to predict where a bottle might
travel, and that is part of its mystery.
This mystery has intrigued people for as long as there
have been bottles, and a few people have tried to learn more
about it. In 1929 a crew of German scientists set out to
track the journey of one particular bottle. It was set to sea
in the South Indian Ocean with a note inside asking the
finder to record the location where it washed up and to throw
it back into the sea. By 1935 it had rounded the world and
traveled approximately sixteen thousand miles, the longest
distance officially recorded.
Messages in bottles have been chronicled for centuries and
include some of the most famous names in history. Ben
Franklin, for instance, used message-carrying bottles to
compile a basic knowledge of East Coast currents in the
mid-1700s-information that is still in use to this day. Even
now the U.S. Navy uses bottles to compile information on
tides and currents, and they are frequently used to track the
direction of oil spills. The most celebrated message ever
sent concerned a young sailor in 1784, Chunosuke Matsuyama,
who was stranded on a coral reef, devoid of food and water
after his boat was shipwrecked. Before his death, he carved
the account of what had happened on a piece of wood, then



sealed the message in a bottle. In 1935, 150 years after it
had been set afloat, it washed up in the small seaside
village in Japan where Matsuyama had been born.
The bottle that had been dropped on a warm summer evening,
however, did not contain a message about a shipwreck, nor was
it being used to chart the seas. But it did contain a message
that would change two people forever, two people who would
otherwise never have met, and for this reason it could be
called a fated message. For six days it slowly floated in a
northeasterly direction, driven by winds from...

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