A LONG DRIFT.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 109, 16 January 1912, Page 8

A LONG DRIFT.

OVER TEN YEARS. BOTTLE'S WANDERINGS COME TO AN END. Auckland, Saturday. A letter that had a long journey was cast ashore in a bottle at Port Waikato, Auckland, on Boxing Dav, Claude Dc :! being the finder. 'i" i letter was addressed to "Lieut( it Hubert,. Groynne .Smith, sth Inyorial Yeomanry, Lord' Methuen'g column, South African field force, South Africa." v .•

, According to the. enclosure the letter ; was thrown overboard in the Indian : ocean from the White Star liner Moravian by R. W. Read, of the Daily Mail office, London, on December 30, 1901. Mr. Read, who is now living in Auckland, writes: "Apparently this bottle bears true and unmistakable signs of having spent a prolonged period in the sea; but in these days, when hoaxes with bottles and ' messages from the deep'are so frequently attempted, may I here state that this bottle and its contents are in every sense genuine. u BOTTLE'S VOYAGE STARTS. "One letter was written to a friend now in Worcester, England, then a member of the South African field force, and one for my own information concerning ocean currents. The letter were written and placed in the bottle by me. The bottle was corked and sealed with boiling pitch. I think by the quartermaster of the Moravian, and finally despatched long solitary voyage by me. "In carrying on scientific researches on my own behalf, and on a sadly limited scale, I usually despatched, a 'bottle containing one or morn letters daily, the number despatched must have been about thirty. Up to the present time I have heard of only two of my little lot reaching land. Strange to say, both were beached within, relatively speaking, a few miles of one another, hilt the first' was nine years before the second. The first containing a letter to a nephew in Scotland, came ashore at Raglan. The precise point of landing I could never learn, the said nephews having always failed to supply to requisite information. -Now No. 2 has finished what must have 1 been a dready voyage near Waikat( Heads. ; THE WARATAH'S LIFEBUOY. "AH this, to my mind, hears on the question: Was the lifebuoy found at Wamku from the s.s. Waratah which disappeared more than two years ago 5 Like the captains interviewed by the Star, I am inclined to believe that the answer to the question must be in the affirmative. "As to the reason, without going beyond, say, Cape Agulhas, the most southerly point of Cape Colony, it may

be said that from the south of South Africa a broad, fairly rapid current flows eastward, in a sense, through (he waters of the South Indian Ocean. That current strikes partly upon the shores of West Australia, and partly upon the west coast of New Zealand, while a great volume deflected southwards continues its course to impign on South America; but the theory is that the Waratah was lost on the east coast of South Africa—that is, before it reached the current in question. Here, again, the ocean rivers explain why, down off the east coast of South Africa, flows what is known as the Mozambique current, which off Cape Agulhas meets and mingles with its greater current from the Atlantic. The current continues its course without interruption to the shores ■■of New Zealand.

"The whole subject, you will.observe, is one of great interest and importance. Many more wonderful things have occurred through the'Stgency of*the ocean rivers that the floating to New Zealand in two years of a lifebuoy, or,even the travelling thither of my wonderful marine letter-carrier.

, "My bottle, I think, may have made the journey across more than once, owing to the deflecting of the current off Australia, back into the Indian Ocean."