Passage 1
In 1866, sailors on a German ship called Paula threw a bottle with a message into waters hundreds of miles off the western coast of Australia. One hundred and thirty-one years later,(76) the bottle was found on an Australia island.
It's believed to be the oldest-known message in a bottle, in terms of the amount of time that has passed between when it was written and when it was found. Before this discovery, Guinness(吉尼斯) World Records said that the oldest was 108 years old, found in Germany in 2015.Aus-tralian and German researchers worked together to check whether the note is real or not.
Tonya IIlman was walking on the beach in January when she spotted the old bottle. “I picked it up thinking it might look nice on display in my home, " Illman says, according to an account on her husband's website.(77)The bottle was partially filled with wet sand. Shortly after, Illman's son's girlfriend poured out the contents and found a tightly rolled note covered in a piece of string.
Too damp to open initially, according to the account, the group waited for it to dry and were amazed to see that it was carefully handwritten in German. "The first thing that caught my eye was the year 1866,” said Illman's husband Kym. "It seemed totally unlikely to us that the note and bottle could have lasted that long."
The pair reached out to the Western Australia Museum, which set out to study the document, "Extraordinary finds need extraordinary evidence to support them, so we contacted colleagues in Germany for help to find more information,”Ross Anderson, who is in charge of words of art in the museum, said in a statement.
But this message is no SOS or love letter.
