Sending a message in a bottle is something we have all heard about. Of course if you do poke a note into a bottle and cork it tightly, you don’t really expect it to be delivered in a timely fashion to the addressee do you?
Well, in wartime soldiers often threw messages in bottles off the transport ships as they were steaming away from home as a last communication to their family or country.
It is hard to imagine what those soldiers felt as they tossed their note into the briny deep. Did they expect that their loved ones would actually get the message intended for them, or was it just a last farewell when they really didn’t expect to return?
Warrnambool Standard 11 Mar 1916 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article73872772
Surprisingly a fair few of those messages sent by bottle post did make it to dry land, there are a good many articles in the newspapers mentioning the discovery of them.
I suppose that once it became known that soldiers were sending messages this way beach goers would have been more inclined to look out for the washed up bottles.
I wonder if any bottles still containing the now-ruined messages are buried in sand dunes along the coast? I would be interested to know the amount of messages sent and the amount of messages that made it to shore.
I was also interested in the reference to the girl who had been caught masquerading as a soldier and sent home. It immediately bought to mind Monstrous Regiment, a book by the wonderful Terry Pratchett. No, don’t look it up on Wikipedia, just read it. (The Wikipedia entry is just one massive spoiler alert.)
Buried words and Bushwa. 
I’m an ardent fan of Terry Pratchett and have all his books to read ad re-read as the mood takes me. I was always convinced that he based the story of The Monstrous Regiment on the true story of James Grey.
James Gray was born Hannah Snell in 1723 in Worcester, England. As a child she played soldiers, but was otherwise seen as a normal young girl. In 1744 she married James Summs, and two years later gave birth to a daughter. Within a year her daughter had died and her husband had deserted her. She borrowed a man’s suit from her brother-in-law James Gray whose name she assumed. She began to travel, trying to find her husband who she later discovered had been executed for murder. She traveled to Portsmouth and joined the Royal Marines. She was sent in to battle twice, during which time she was wounded 11 times in the legs and once in the groin. It is not known how she concealed her sex when her groin wound was treated. In 1750 her unit returned to England and she revealed her true sex to her shipmates. She told her story to the papers and petitioned for a military pension which was, surprisingly, granted. Her military service was officially recognized and she eventually opened a pub called the “The Female Warrior”. She eventually remarried and had two children. Hannah died in 1792.
Surprisingly she wasn’t the only one. If you’re interested there’s great list of the top 10 here.
http://listverse.com/2008/09/04/top-10-men-who-were-really-women/
Historically there have been so few roles for women that it is hardly surprising that a few of them ran away to join the war. I would love to know how Hannah/James hid her groin wound, although I think it probably says more about the medical skills of the time than it does about her ability to decieve! 🙂
I will have to look up some more hidden women in war articles now, you have got me going.
I had no idea about any of this! So way back then there were women who actually fought alongside men?
Part of me is horrified but the other part is kind of cheering. Can’t help wondering how they snuck off to pee though 😦
I think it just means that if you showed willing they were happy to give you a weapon and send you off to die! Reportedly some pirates were secretly women too.
You have to wonder about not only the peeing side, obviously they never changed clothes or washed as these would likely been group activities and their secret would have been revealed.
You should read Monstrous Regiment, he goes through so much of this stuff in the funny way only Terry Pratchett can!
lol – I’ve put it on my to-read list!
Reblogged this on ww1ha and commented:
A clever post from our friend Buried Words and Bushwa, with an unexpected book recommendation.
If you have a lot of time on your hands and want to play Message In A Bottle — is that a cocktail? Sounds like one — I can recommend the time-waster http://www.oceangram.com. What do you mean, you have to work now?
Thanks for this — fun post!
Glad you liked it 🙂