Ms. Cassidy Beach was recently the latest in a long chain of people to be walking along a beach or a harbor and see a dark green bottle with a letter in it.
This one she found on a beach in the archipelago of the Turks and South Caicos Islands, in the Caribbean north of Haiti. Dated September 20th, 2004, it was cast adrift by Mr. Pennel Ames, a commercial fisherman from Nantucket.
Between 2000 and 2006, Ames threw hundreds of these bottles off his boat into the Great South Channel. They have washed up and been found in Portugal, Spain, France, Ireland, Great Britain, Florida, all over the Caribbean, and the Canary Islands.
80 people have taken the time to remove the artificial corks, read the letter inside, and write back.
Together with his wife Sharon and their two daughters, Pennel Ames perfected the techniques for preserving penned paper inside glass, and have every once in awhile enjoyed pulling a strange letter out of the mail and reading where their bottles have arrived.
“You get your mail and you kind of know your bills and the familiar people who send stuff to you,” Mrs. Ames told The World. “But then, all of a sudden, you get an envelope and you go, ‘Oh, wow, I don’t know that person. That’s a bottle letter.’”
Sometimes they’re in English, but often they’re in Spanish, owing to the Canary Current bringing their bottles down to countries like Cuba and the Dominican Republic.
The currents of the Atlantic Ocean keep all the bottles north of the Equator, moving in a big ocean “gyre” in a clockwise motion around the North Atlantic.
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Still living in Nantucket, they have scrapbooks of all the letters and envelopes, photographs, postcards, news articles, and printed emails from everyone who has found a bottle and written back. They have a whole book for France alone, a nation special to the Ameses because of an incident where a Frenchmen found one, and then his son also found one years later.
Ms. Beach was working for the NOAA on acoustic data from harbor porpoises and dolphins and wrote to the Ameses that this would bring her to Massachusetts, not far from their house.
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The World reported that she stopped in to deliver their letter, and her reply, personally.
“As soon as I walked in the cottage, they had a whole dining room table full of letters and books,” Beach said. “They had one book dedicated to France alone. And it was just really cool.”
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