Did the world’s oldest message in a bottle just wash up on a beach in Ocean City?
A South Jersey woman is trying to solve the mystery of an old bottle and its message she found down the Shore earlier this month. Could it really be from 1876?
Amy Smyth Murphy was taking an early morning stroll on the beach in Ocean City the other week when she spied a distinctive looking bottle by the water’s edge. Intrigued, she picked up the corked green vessel and saw paper inside.
“I just thought, ‘This is so peculiar. What is this?’” Smyth Murphy said.
She decided to take her find back to her mom’s beach house so she and her relatives could explore it together.
“I wanted the whole family to be there,” she said.
With the aid of a corkscrew, her niece Avery Smyth’s nimble fingers, and nephew Jack Smyth’s assistance, they were able to coax the message out of the bottle. They captured it all for TikTok.
Since then, the Haddon Heights woman has been on a quest to solve the mystery of the bottle. The papers inside it have provided clues and raised more questions. She’s a greeting card designer, not a historian, so she’s hoping there are folks out there who can help her find more answers.
But so far, said Smyth Murphy, 49, here is where the trail seems to be leading:
“I believe I found the oldest message in a bottle on July 3 in Ocean City at Corson’s State Inlet.”
It’s taken her a lot of connecting dots to get to that, and she’s not done. She has researched old newspapers, enlisted the help of a bottle expert, contacted an auction group, and went on Reddit. Here’s what has turned up so far.
The facts of the find
There’s the bottle itself. The name on it is Barr & Brother Philadelphia. When she looked it up on Worthpoint, an online valuation site, she said she saw an identical bottle dated pre-1900 and others from the 1870s.
Then there is the paper that was in the bottle.
One piece looked like a business card for W. G. & J. Klemm Manufacturers and Wholesale Dealers in Gents Furnishing Goods, 33 North Third St., Philadelphia. Klemm & Brother was a well-known instrument company in Philadelphia in the 1800s, but Smyth Murphy found a death notice from 1917 for a William G. Klemm of Camden. The Camden Courier-Post notice said he was “engaged in the wholesale gentlemen’s furnishing business in Philadelphia.”
There was also a handwritten note.
“It took us I would say maybe 48 hours to really understand what it said, but if you stare at it long enough, you can kind of start to see it,” Smyth Murphy said. “It says Yacht Neptune off Atlantic City, and, in the lower right, New Jersey. Aug. 6 - 76.”
A record?
Given the other clues so far — the likely age of the bottle, the Klemms — Smyth Murphy said she feels pretty sure the 76 refers to 1876.
According to Guinness World Records, the oldest message in a bottle was set to sea on June 12, 1886, by German captains aboard the Barque Paula and found at Wedge Island, Australia in 2018.
If the Ocean City bottle was released on Aug. 6, 1876, “this is potentially the oldest one ever found,” said Smyth Murphy.
She said she had applied to the Guinness records folks to have her message in a bottle judged as the new oldest; she figures they may do their own verification.
She’s still doing her own digging, though, and she’d welcome help learning the story behind her bottle, its message, and whoever sent it adrift.
“I would love to find who was sailing on the ship, who was the captain, where was it going? Was it for pleasure? Was it business? All those types of questions,” she said.
Just the other day, she found a Philadelphia Inquirer news item from 1874 about a Captain Samuel Gale of Atlantic City who had “just built a splendid yacht, which he christened ‘Neptune,’ after the Neptune Club of this city.” Gale’s 1923 obituary in the Press of Atlantic City reported that ‘Capt. Sam’ had such a winning personality, people would pay a whopping 50 cents — double his competitors’ fare — to take pleasure cruises off Atlantic City with the popular seaman.
Could he have been her captain and his ship, the yacht mentioned in her message?
“From the reactions so far that I’ve had, everyone really likes the mystery of it,” Smyth Murphy said.
“Let’s see how much info we can get out of this one bottle and the history of it and how it connects to Philadelphia and South Jersey.”