CARRIED BY SEA

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 228, 19 May 1932, Page 2

CARRIED BY SEA

UNIQUE EXPERlMENT WITH MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE FIVE YEARS AFLOAT A message in a bottle, that romantic old forlorn hope of derelict ships and castaway mariners, has been made the subject of a unique experiment. During the week a Sydney man received from London a document which spent five years fioating in a i bottle in the Pacific. The document, which is little the worse for its long immersion and the- | 2,000 or more miles it has travelled, j was originally thrown overboard from B the motor-liner Aorangi, 100 miles | east of Sydney, on November 12, i 1926. ( The message, written on the back of a prospectus of the Adventurers' Club of Long Beach, California, which was affiliatecl with the famous Savage Club of London, the Adventurers' Club of New York, the Legion of Frontiersmen all over the world, and with Sydney through a branch opened there about the time the message was first submerged, reads as follows : — "This bottle was thrown overboard by the Adventurers of the World aboard R.M.M.S. Aorangi, in the interest of exploration, on November 26, 1926, by Colonel Edward P. Bailey, in latitude 33 degrees 57 minutes south, and longitude 152 degrees 50 minutes east. Any one finding, please return to Colonel Bailey, c/ o Captain Colin S. Bailey, 66 Belmont Road, Mosman, Sydney, or the Explorers' Club, New York, U.S.A. Yours in the spirit of adventure. Edward P. Bailey." Eighteen months later, according to various hieroglyphics inscribed upon its face and back, it was found by Mr. J. Stevenson, of Urangan, via Mai'yborougli, on the back beach of Frazer Island, 'on the Northern Queensland coast, 650 miles from where it was first submerged. On receipt of it, Captain Colin S. Bailey gave it to another party to be submerged again, and, in May, 1929, together with some correspondence from him in connection with the find, it v/as east adrift by Mr. G. Fraser, 1,000 miles from Honolulu, on the way to Vaneouver. In November of last year it was picked up in Cheumainus, a small timber port on Vaneouver Island, hy Georges Forster, a French-Cariadian fisherman, and sent to the Savage Club, London. '