Turks and Caicos MuseumTurks and Caicos Museum
  • Contact Us
  • Locations & Directions
  • Get Involved
  • FAQ’s
  • Home
  • The Museum
    • About the Museum
      • Astrolabe
        • What is an Astrolabe?
    • Museum History
    • Guinep House
    • Genealogy
    • Board of Directors
    • Capital Campaign
    • Privacy Statement and Terms of Service
  • Community Events
    • Museum Day
    • Upcoming Events
    • Museum News
    • A Day at the National Museum
    • Children’s Club News
    • Where is Simon, Sandy?
  • Culture & History
    • Golden Age of the Turks Islands
      • A Golden Age: Anything Was Possible
      • Jeremiah Denis Murphy
      • The Grand Turk Lighthouse
    • Nature & Environment
      • Geography & Geology
      • Coral Reefs
      • National Parks
      • Botanical and Cultural Garden
        • Museum Garden History
      • Plants & Animals
      • Further Reading
    • Slavery
      • Background & the TCI
      • Brief History of Emancipation
      • Depopulation of the Islands
      • Bermudans & the Salt Industry
        • The Salt Industry Begins
      • The Loyalist Period
      • Plantations
        • Cheshire Hall Plantation
        • Wades Green Plantation
        • Haulover Plantation
      • Runaway Slaves
      • Emancipation & Beyond
      • Liberated Africans
      • Slave Ships
        • Trouvadore
      • Mary Prince
      • Sources of Slaves
      • Biased Recording
      • Slave Records 1822 – 1834
      • Religion & Records
      • Punishment
      • Conclusion
      • Bibliography & Related Material
    • Lucayans
      • Return of a Duho
      • Loans from the Smithsonian Institution
    • Space Race
      • Project Mercury
      • John Glenn
      • Friendship 7
      • Scott Carpenter
      • Stamps Celebrating Space
      • Tracking Stations
      • 40th Anniversary Celebrations
      • United States Airforce
    • Shipwrecks
    • Salt Industry
    • Sisal Industry
    • Royal Events
      • Queen Elizabeth II
      • Royal Visits
      • Stamps and the Royalty
    • Turks & Caicos History Timeline
    • Landmarks
    • Further Reading
  • Support
    • Support: New & Renewals
    • Provo Engraved Brick Purchase
    • Grand Turk Engraved Brick Purchase
    • Join Our Special Donor Circles
      • Friends Circle
      • Benefactor’s Circle
      • Director’s Circle
    • Supporter Gift
    • Donor Recognition
    • Corporate & Institutional Support
    • Museum Fund
    • Friends of the Turks & Caicos National Museum
  • Tours
    • Tours
    • Grand Turk Tours
      • Birding Tours for All Ages
    • Providenciales – Grace Bay Village Tours
  • Projects
    • Burrell Steam Traction Engine
    • Fort St. George
      • A Short History
      • Expedition Team
    • Governor’s Cannon
    • Maravedit Cove
    • Molasses Reef Shipwreck
      • Molasses Reef Shipwreck Part 1
      • Molasses Reef Shipwreck Part 2
      • Molasses Reef Shipwreck Part 3
      • Molasses Reef Shipwreck Part 4
    • Sapodilla Hill
    • Slave Ship Trouvadore
    • Southwest Harbor Bluff
    • Turks Islands Gates
    • Windmills
    • Occasional Papers Series
DONATE
  • Home
  • Collections
  • Message in a Bottle
 

Message in a Bottle

Support the Museum.

Help preserve the history of the islands.

Introduction
In 2000 the Museum’s founder, Mrs. Grethe Seim, passed away. Among her collections that were donated to the Museum was a series of messages found in bottles on the beaches of Grand Turk over a period of nearly 40 years. The Grethe Seim Collection is the inspiration for the Museum’s Message in a Bottle Project, launched in 2001. During a visit to the Museum Penny Smith (below), a well known TV presenter in Britain, filled in one of the Message in a Bottle forms.

Penny Smith|77

History of Messages in a Bottle
The pop group the Police sang about it, Kevin Costner starred in a film of the same title but what is the truth behind messages in a bottle. Who writes them? Why are they written? How far do the bottles travel before being washed upon a beach? How long does it take for the messages to be found? These are just some of the questions that are raised.

Are Messages in a bottle a new Phenomenon?

Ever since humans have had the “vessel” for a letter, the ability to write and the time to do it we can assume that messages have been dropped into the sea. The earliest recorded sender was the Greek philosopher Theophrastus who, in around 310 BC, threw sealed bottles into the Mediterranean to prove that the inland body of water was formed by the inflow of the Atlantic. There appears to be no record of any responses.

In 16th century England Queen Elizabeth I appointed an official “Uncorker of Ocean Bottles” making it a capital crime for anyone else to open the bottles. This severe punishment was seen as necessary as it assumed that some might contain secret messages from spies as well as from the British fleet who sent messages about enemy positions ashore in bottles. Whether this was an affective means to send information does not appear to have been recorded.

Of course sailors or passengers under dire situations have written messages at sea. One such incident occurred in the 1780s (some records give 1714 as the date) when Chunosuke Matsuyama went treasure hunting in the Pacific. He and the Japanese crew of 44 were shipwrecked off a small Island in the South Pacific. Knowing their fate was not good as there was no food or fresh water the captain scratched their story onto chips of wood and cast them adrift in a bottle. The bottle was found 150 years later on the shoreline of Japan – a bit too late to mount a rescue attempt. Coincidentally it was claimed that the bottle was found on the beach where Matsuyama grew up in Japan, but this may just be folklore.

Probably one of the most touching letters to have been found was from a passenger on board the torpedoed Lusitania, which sank in May 1915. Imagine, having the calmness to write a message and put it into a bottle, with all the mayhem going on around you as the ship sinks. According to one report the message read “still on deck with a few people. The last boats have left. We are sinking fast. Some men near me are praying with a priest. The end is near. Maybe this note will ” and the abrupt end to the letter suggested the writer hurriedly placed it into the bottle as the ship succumbed to its fate – a rather poignant message. Again however, there are different versions of this story: the letter’s content varies and was either picked up by a fisherman at sea, or found on a beach.

But not all messages found have such a grim outcome. In 1948 a Russian fisherman found a message written in Norwegian and English. Once translated it made little sense: “Five ponies and 150 dogs remain. Desire hay, fish and 30 sledges. Must return early in August. Baldwin”. It transpires that the polar explorer Evelyn Baldwin sent it in 1902, and he had returned alive and well.

Also, drift bottles were used in 1946 to map the places where Japanese mines were likely to be after being freed by storms. Similar drift bottles have been used in recent years to help understand currents and to allow the prediction of likely harvest areas of fish and marine life, especially endangered species. On top of this captains can use the drift information to make sure that when they “blow their tubes” the oil sludge will not end up on a beach, or impacting on the environment.

In fact messages in bottles are not a new phenomena to the Turks and Caicos Islands. In the consular papers dated January 4th 1861 the contents of two bottles are discussed. The first one read “Hamburg Bark “Orinoco” G.R. Krulle, Master from Liverpool for St Thomas- Lat. 18.20 North – Lon 57.50 West of Greenwich. Barometer 36.4 Thermometer 83 degrees” it was dated August 30 1860 and was discovered at Little Bluff, Grand Turk on 2nd December 1860. The other message read “ Bark “Home” 157 days from Manilla bound for New York: Lat 23.18 North – 64.13 West” dated November 6th 1860 and was found on December 31st 1860 on the eastern side of Grand Turk.

More bottles were found as in the dispatch for February 16th 1861 it recorded “The 5th instant a bottle was picked up on the east side of this Island. It contained a note for it to be forwarded to the British Admiralty. It read “H.M. Sloop “Ringdove” 25th November 1859 Lat 26.21 Long 18.7 by observation. This paper was thrown overboard at noon on the above day having just entered the North East trades. Force wind 3, along North westerly swell. Barometer 30.43, Thermometer 75, seawater 73. R. G Cragie Commander”. This local historical bottle suggests that using messages in a bottle to keep the British Navy informed of a ships progress appears to have been continued from Elizabethan times.

An interesting coincidence occurred in 1997. Two visitors to Grand Turk, Ted and Vivianne Cooper, met up with the then Director, Barry Dressel, and recounted a story about a message in a bottle sent by Ted’s Grandfather, Ralph Rogers in 1894. Ralph was traveling aboard the “Marion Lightbody” with a friend. The two lads had started to become homesick just North of Cape Verde and Ralph decided to drop a message into the sea for his sister Marion. The Diary of Ralph Rogers recorded the day the bottle entered the sea: “April 20th Friday, 1894…………sent off a bottle to Marion today, and intend to send one to each member of the family………”.

The message read:
Ship “Marion Lightbody”
Lat 25 degrees 2’ N 20th April 1894
Long 23 degrees 15’ W

All well on board, R C Roger

Finder please send this to
Miss M Rogers
3 Lancaster Terrace
Kelvinside
Glasgow
Scotland

The message was found and forwarded and this letter read:
Grand Turk
29th Dec 1895
Miss M Rogers
As requested by the writer that the person that finds this would please forward it to you. I have undertaken to do so and hope you will receive it quite safe. I found it on the 28th Dec.
Yours respectfully
Albert T Wynns
Grand Turk
Turks Island
West Indies

This letter was received in Glasgow on January 16th 1896 (the family in Australia now holds the original message) and was greeted by excitement by not only the family but also a local newspaper. The newspaper recorded that “the young voyageur was naturally elated with the success of his experiment especially as it brought him three good specimens of Turks Islands postage stamps..”. The writer of the article entitled “Neptune’s Post, A Tale of the Sea” went onto say “… I can see from the map that the bottle fell within the “sphere of influence” of the North Atlantic current, which after flowing southwards along the coast of Africa for hundreds of miles turns sharply to the west at Cape Verde, sweeps across the Atlantic and spends itself amongst the northern West India islands of which Grand Turk may be reckoned as the avant garde. With the chart of oceanic currents before my eyes, I might have predicted the destiny of this bottle, after a course of 3000 miles, with almost absolute exactness. It took 619 days to accomplish the passage, so it would appear that Neptunes post is somewhat slow…”

Now to the modern day. Whilst researching this article, the future for “message in a bottle” was discovered. A website was found that allows you to write a message and send it into cyberspace. It requests that you “enter a message here and it will be put into an imaginary bottle and cast adrift on the Internet Sea”. The message would eventually end up on the screen of someone else that had participated on the site, taking from a few weeks to 6 months.

It is also clear that further distances are being considered for “Messages in a Bottle”. When NASA launched Voyager 1 it included a gold plated disc containing greetings in many languages, sounds and images of earth. As one scientist comment, it wasn’t the message that was important; it was the fact that we had sent the message. Can you imagine having this message “wash up” on your planet and how long it will take to be found, if ever?

The information about historical messages were taken from:
The Peoples Almanac ™ Presents the Book of Lists , printed by Corgi in 1980. This recorded 7 remarkable Messages in a Bottle

Neptunes Sea-Mail Service , by Wilmond Menard, Article in Sea Frontiers, International Oceanographic Foundation, volume 26, Number 6 Nov-Dec 1980.

Make Contact

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Categories

  • 2009 Expedition Log
  • A Day at the National Museum
  • Children's Club News
  • Homepage Featured
  • Museum News
  • Uncategorized
  • Upcoming Events

The Colors of the Turks and Caicos Islands

RED was chosen to represent the nation’s capital, Grand Turk. The color is taken from the red/pink fruit found on the national plant, the Turks Head Cactus. They were once found in abundance on Grand Turk before they were removed to accommodate the salt ponds.

WHITE was chosen to represent Salt Cay. The color came from salt. The salt industry was largely responsible for populating the islands of Salt Cay, Grand Turk and South Caicos.

ORANGE was chosen to represent South and East Caicos. The color comes from the Spiny Lobster and fish and reflects the fishing industry in the “Big South.”

TAN was chosen to represent Middle Caicos. The color is taken from the raw material (thatch) that once covered the roofs of the houses. It is also used to make straw hats, baskets and brooms. Middle Caicos is known for the superior quality of native craftwork.

GREEN was chosen to represent North Caicos and Parrot Cay. The color is taken from the fruit trees and other types of trees that flourish in the most fertile of all the islands. North Caicos is also home of Wade’s Green Plantation, the most successful of Caicos Islands cotton plantations.

TURQUOISE was chosen to represent the islands of Providenciales, Pine Cay and West Caicos. The color is taken from the beautiful turquoise waters that surround these islands on which our famous Caicos fishing sloops sail. These turquoise waters also contribute to our newest industry, tourism.

PINK was chosen to represent the beautiful conch shell, flamingoes and the numerous uninhabited cays that make up our chain of islands.

YELLOW represents God’s glory as the sun shining down on all our beautiful islands and cays. The sun also contributes to our newest industry, tourism.

View a timeline of important events and dates in the history of the islands

View Timeline

A Few Artifacts You’ll See at the Museum

Our collections represent the rich historical, cultural and natural heritage of the Turks and Caicos Islands and its people.

Lucayan Duho

Photo courtesy of Joanna Ostapkowicz. The Duho is one of the rarest artifacts in the museum’s collections. It was used a ceremonial seat for the cacique or chief of the Lucayans, the first inhabitants of these islands.

Fresnel Lens

The Grand Turk Lighthouse was erected in 1852 and was originally designed to burn whale oil and had an Argand reflector lamp. In 1943 the lighthouse was converted to a Fresnel Lens one of these lenses is now on display at the Museum.

Swivel Gun

The Molasses reef wreck, an early Spanish Caravel was equipped with three types of breech-loading swivel guns, one type is shown above. The swivel guns are thought to be anti-personnel weapons placed wherever convenient along the ship’s rail.

Salt Industry Post Card

The museum has diverse collection of early postcards of the Turks and Caicos Islands. Most post cards depict scenes on Grand Turk, the capital and from the salt industry.

Take a Look
TCI Governor

Governor of the Turks & Caicos Islands

H.E. Nigel Dakin CMG

The Turks & Caicos Islands National Museum on Grand Turk surely stands in one of the most majestic settings of any museum, anywhere! Perched on the edge of the Columbus Landfall national park. The 200-year-old building, “Guinep Lodge”, which houses a multitude of artifacts covering everything from the pre–Columbian Indians to the modern age, is a museum in its own right. The west facing building has stood firm and witnessed 200+ years of incredible TCI sunsets and has withstood every major hurricane since before records began.

The National Museum plays a vital role in recovering, preserving, recording and displaying the history of these island for all to see, enjoy and learn from. The museum’s archive is a veritable treasure trove of information, with enough information to fill two museums. With thousands of pre-Columbian artifacts from multiple archeological digs from around the TCI over the last 50 years, un-displayed artifacts from ancient warships, parish records or births, deaths and marriages dating back over 200 years; a veritable gold mine of information, just waiting to be discovered.

The museum is not only an exhibition facility for local history and artifacts, but also undertakes important work in the community with multiple events throughout the year and supports all the TCI schools, has a regular summer camp and kids club for our budding historians and archeologists of tomorrow.  The Grand Turk location includes a “science building” which is a fully fledged restoration facility to stabilize artifacts before they are displayed or stored in the archive. All of this work has been quietly undertaken since the museum was founded 30 years ago. There is also a campus on Provo and there are exciting plans underway to construct a new, multimillion dollar purpose-built facility for the wider enjoyment of our fascinating history. The Governor’s Office is proud to have supported the TCNMF over the years with vital capital projects.

Whether you are a local, or a visitor to our beautiful shores; I encourage you to visit and support the Turks & Caicos National Museum and absorb our colorful and surprisingly diverse local history.


H E Nigel Dakin CMG

Governor of the Turks & Caicos Islands

Minister for Tourism, Heritage & Culture for inclusion on the museum website

Hon. Josephine Connnolly

"It is a pleasure as Minister with responsibility of Heritage to welcome you to the Turks and Caicos Islands National Museum website. This Gem of an operation is perhaps the most notable establishment in regards to sites of historical interest. Since its establishment in 1991 it has always been an intricate part of our tourism product.

As a supporter, I believe the National Museum’s success depends on all resident and visitors; and as Minister I am committed to strengthening our tourism product through the infusion of authenticity and the increase in awareness of the National Museum in the development of heritage assets for sustainable tourism development.

Visit and explore the Grand Turk and Providenciales locations and experience our heritage and culture through interactive displays and exhibits. Special thanks is extended to the National Museum, a tangible product, a repository for artefacts and documents, providing a true island experience.".

Hon. Josephine Connnolly
Minister for Tourism, Heritage & Culture for inclusion on the museum website

President of Turks and Caicos Islands Community College

Dr. Hubert A. Fulford

"My interest in history and research goes back to my years as a student at the then Grand Turk Secondary School, where my teacher and later mentor, the late Helena Jones Robinson instilled a curiosity in me to appreciate context.  At that time, not fully appreciating the impact that curiosity would have on me, I sought only to please my teacher.

Pursuing tertiary education at various institutions, in various countries and at various levels, my initial foundation of inquiry was further stimulated.  Libraries and museums would form a very important part of my education, specifically during my studies in Jamaica, Canada and the United Kingdom.

Returning home after my studies abroad, my first visit to the Museum so captivated me that I began to tell all persons, visitors and islanders alike, that a visit to the museum was a MUST! The quaintness, yet thorough organization and presentation of artifacts of various kinds avowed me.

I found tremendous joy in taking my TCI Studies students to the Museum, standing back and listening to their expressions of excitement and curiosity as the curators and assistants would walk them through the various displays and presentations.

The Jamaican expression “likkle but tallawah” (small but strong) aptly fits our Museum.  The significance of this institution to our history and culture cannot be over stressed.

Welcome to The Museum.  A combination of history, culture and enchantment awaits you."

Dr. Hubert A. Fulford

President of Turks and Caicos Islands Community College

Historic Photo Gallery of the Turks and Caicos Islands

All images and the design of this Web site are protected under federal copyright laws. Any downloading, duplication or reproduction of any part of this Web site by any method whatsoever without the expressed written permission of the Turks & Caicos National Museum Foundation is strictly prohibited. Photos and/or usage rights are available for purchase please contact us for details.

See More

Locations

Guinep House, Front Street

Grand Turk, Turks & Caicos Islands, British West Indies (BWI)
Tel (01 649) 247-2160
From the US (786) 220-1159
Hours Vary - See our schedule under Locations

The Village at Grace Bay

Development Office and Caicos Heritage House
Providenciales, Turks & Caicos Islands, British West Indies (BWI)
Tel (01 649) 247-2161
Grace Bay Hours: See Hours For This Location

Site design by NH Web Design Company Danconia | © 2021 All rights reserved.

TOP