On October 9, the tide at Western Australia’s Wharton Beach washed up a Schweppes glass bottle holding two water-logged letters dated 15 August 1916. The find came during one of the Brown family’s regular shoreline clean-ups.
“We do a lot of cleaning on our beaches, so we never pass by a piece of rubbish,” said Deb Brown, according to the Associated Press. After drying the papers for several days, she separated them with surgical scissors and found two pencil-written messages that remained legible.
The letters had been written by Privates Malcolm Alexander Neville, 27, and William Kirk Harley, 37, while they sailed to the Western Front aboard the troopship HMAT A70 Ballarat. Both men asked any finder to forward the notes: Neville to his mother, Robertina Neville of Wilkawatt, South Australia, and Harley to whoever discovered his message because his own mother had died.
“Having a real good time, food is real good so far, with the exception of one meal which we buried at sea,” Neville wrote, adding that the ship was “heaving and rolling” but that the soldiers were “as happy as Larry.” ABC News Australia reported that Wilkawatt later became a ghost town. Harley, giving his position as “Somewhere in the Bight,” added, “May the finder be as well as we are at present.”
The two men left Adelaide on 12 August 1916 with reinforcements for the 48th Australian Infantry Battalion. Neville was killed in action in France in April 1917 at age 28. Harley survived despite two wounds and died in Adelaide in 1934 from cancer his family linked to gas exposure, the Associated Press reported.
Relatives received the letters after Deb Brown traced them online. “We just can’t believe it. It really does feel like a miracle,” said Ann Turner, Harley’s granddaughter, according to reporters. Herbie Neville, Malcolm’s great-nephew, called the discovery “unbelievable” and said the note offered an intimate glimpse of an uncle known only through family stories.
Oceanographer Charitha Pattiaratchi of the University of Western Australia said currents could have carried the bottle to Wharton Beach within weeks, after which it likely stayed buried in sand for decades.
Brown mailed the original notes to the families but kept the empty bottle and the brief covering letter addressed “To the Finder.” “If it had stayed exposed to the sun, we never would have been able to read it,” she said, according to the Associated Press.
The preparation of this article relied on a news-analysis system.