The Mail Gaze

Mail delivery was suspended on November 15, when the Canadian Union of Postal Workers went on strike over wages, group benefits, and the structure of weekend services. So it was somewhat poetic that on the same day the New York Times reported that engineers working on a Scottish lighthouse had discovered a 132-year-old message in a bottle ensconced in its walls. While that’s cold comfort for the hundreds of thousands awaiting their passports or the millions who have yet to receive the parcels (or magazines) they’re expecting, it’s helpful to remember that it sometimes takes a while for correspondence to reach its intended audience.

Messages in bottles are so often the stuff of fantasy or romance. What kid exploring cottage country or walking along the beach hasn’t contemplated throwing a missive into the lake or ocean? In May 1995, for example, a boy from British Columbia dropped a wine bottle off the coast of Tofino while on a whale-watching tour with his parents. “Dear Finder,” he wrote, “Coquitlam is a city near Vancouver. Now if you don’t know where Vancouver is, you don’t know your geography.” Eleven years later, a family south of Astoria, Oregon, found the boy’s instructive note washed up on shore. And then there’s the Belgian sailor who wrote a love letter to his Canadian sweetheart in 1957, while aboard an aircraft carrier in the Atlantic. His tidings made it only as far as Iceland, where in 1998 a girl found the bottle he had tossed into the water. (The epistle was eventually returned to the Belgian, who by that point had lost touch with his former lady friend.)

Sometimes a message in a bottle is a ruse, as was the one found on Dawson Island, in Lake Huron, in November 1901. “I have decided to commit suicide by drowning, and am about to throw myself off the dock,” it read. “If this is found by anyone, you will oblige me by addressing my beloved mother. Her address is Brampton, Ontario.” The family of the supposed sender, who signed off “Yours in death,” dismissed the note as a prank. Fifty-four years later, two fishermen found some ledger paper drifting in a bottle in Lake Simcoe. “Rowboat capsized three miles from Beaverton,” the probable hoax explained. “I am on a small island southwest of Beaverton. My clothes are all wet. I have no food.” After searching the area, the Ontario Provincial Police found no trace of a castaway.

Not all see humour or mystique in the flotsam. Two decades ago, an “old romantic” sea captain on Long Island hurled five plastic bottles into the ocean, complete with his return address. Months later, he received a curt response from Dorset, in southwest England. “I recently found your bottle while taking a scenic walk on the beach by Poole Harbour,” the reluctant pen pal wrote. “While you may consider this some profound experiment on the path and speed of oceanic currents, I have another name for it, litter.” The same captain had previously been lectured by a woman closer to home, who had recovered one of the glass bottles he had dispatched a year before.

Whether glass or plastic, messages in bottles left in walls do seem less common than those thrown into the water, though they’re not unheard of. In September 1944, seven men at the Auschwitz concentration camp jotted their names, prisoner numbers, and hometowns on a scrap torn from a bag of cement mix and placed it in a bottle — before bricking that into an air‑raid shelter they were forced to build for the Nazis. “All age 18 to 20,” their final line read. Five of the young men survived the camp, and three were still alive when the testament was discovered by a construction crew in 2009.

Of course, none of the Scots working on Corsewall Lighthouse all those years ago lived to see the recent recovery of their cursive record, which explains, in part, “This lantern was erected by James Wells Engineer, John Westwood Millwright, James Brodie Engineer, David Scott Labourer, of the firm of James Milne & Son Engineers, Milton House Works, Edinburgh, during the months from May to September and relighted on Thursday night 15th Sept 1892.” But surely they would be pleased to know that the Fresnel lens they installed some thirty metres above the ground remains in reliable operation, which is more than we can say about Canada Post at this point.

Given the Crown corporation’s many woes — including three strikes since 2011, six consecutive years of losses over $150 million, and deliveries down by almost half from 2006 — it remains to be seen if postal service as we know it can survive. However endangered the mail is, and however passé sending physical letters has become in some quarters, the loss of Canada Post these past several weeks is painful confirmation that a lot of us still rely on it for both business and pleasure. Bottles can do only so much.