Woman Finds 96-Year-Old Message in Bottle While Diving
Jennifer Dowker was on a routine dive to clean the windows on her vessel when she spotted something unusual on the riverbed: a small glass bottle with a rolled-up piece of paper inside.
Courtesy Jennifer DowkerJennifer Dowker shows off the bottle she found in Michigan's Cheboygan River.
“I thought, ‘A message in a bottle? Cool!’” Dowker, the owner of glass-bottom boat tour company Nautical North Family Adventures, tells the Washington Post.
When she surfaced, she checked out the contents with Rob Hemmer, an employee who was on the boat at the time.
“Rob picked the broken cork out of the bottle with his jackknife and dumped out the water, then we carefully got the note out,” Dowker says. “It was wet, and we were surprised to find that we could still read it.”
The message, from 1926, that read: “Will the person who finds this bottle return this paper to George Morrow Cheboygan, Michigan and tell where it was found?”
Dowker posted pictures of the message on her company’s Facebook page with a call to find someone who knew George Morrow.
The post went up on June 19, and three days later, Dowker connected with Michele Primeau, Morrow’s daughter who learned about the note from another woman who had seen the original Facebook post. The two met via Zoom and made plans for Primeau to come aboard the boat in September.
Primeau said her father, a World War II Army veteran who fought in the Battle of Normandy, died in 1995, about 25 years before his sunken treasure would be found.
“[My dad] didn’t like a lot of attention, so he’d probably want to go into hiding if he were here and knew the story about his note in the bottle had gone all over the world,” Primeau tells the Post.
Courtesy Jennifer DowkerDespite nearly a century underwater, the note is still readable.
As for Primeau, it made her happy to see that the note had been written in November of 1926.
“My dad was born in November, and I can just picture him going down to the river on his 18th birthday and tossing the bottle in,” she says.
So, what will happen with the letter? In exchange for a lifetime of glass-bottom boat tours, Primeau will allow the bottle and note to stay with Nautical North Family Adventures and be displayed for all passengers to see.
