DRIFTING BOTTLE.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20485, 11 December 1934, Page 1

DRIFTING BOTTLE.

Interesting Light on Atlantic

Currents.

On July 20 Professor James Ritchie, of Aberdeen University, picked up on the western shore of the Moray Firth, at Loth, in Sutherland, a bottle containing a message from a lieutenant in the Air Service of Lithuania (states the London “Times”). The message, which was written in Lithuanian, and has been translated by the Lithuanian Minister in London, is as follows: “ Returning from the World Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago to Kaunas in Lithuania, I am dropping this bottle with the letter in mid-ocean at the 31st meridian and 46th parallel. Let the sea-goddess Jurate know that the fearless Lithuanian aviators have conquered this ocean, and that it no longer can inspire any fear.—FlightLieutenant P. Nakrosis on the Hol-land-America Line steamer Statendam. August 25, 1933.” » The reference to the conquest of the Atlantic Ocean by Lithuanian aviators is to the attempt at a non-stop flight from New* York to Kaunas, made on July 15, 1933, by Lieutenants Girenas and Darius, who, after successfully crossing the Atlantic, crashed to death at Kuhldamm, in Pomerania, Germany, only 400 miles short of their destination. Some scientific interest attaches to the drift of the bottle dropped in midAtlantic on August 25, 1933, and recovered eleven months later in Scotland, on the shore of the Moray Firth. Caught up in the Atlantic drift, it must have been carried north-eastw’ards towards the coast of Northern Europe, and. finding its way into the branch of the drift which sweeps round the north of Shetland into the North Sea, it must have entered the eddy which circulates in the Moray Firth. This movement corresponds to the route taken by the larval eels which are bom in the Western Atlantic south of the Bermudas, and migrate across the ocean on a three-year journey, ultimately to stock the rivers of the British Isles and the Continent with their fresh-water eels. The drift of the bottle gives an indication of the time which the migration from midAtlantic w’ould take unaided by the active swimming of the eel larvae themselves.