oldest-message-in-bottle最古老的瓶中信.docx

Oldest Message in Bottle: Behind History's Famous Floating Notes最古老的瓶中信：历史上著名的漂流瓶背后的故事

New find recalls "amazing paths" of drifting documents since ancient times.
新发现使人回忆起从古至今那些漂流文件的“神奇之旅”。

Found in a bottle set adrift 98 years ago, this document was part of an ocean-current study.
这份文件发现于98年前投放的漂流瓶之中，是洋流研究的一个组成部分。

Jeremy Berlin
National Geographic News
Published September 18, 2012

作者：Jeremy Berlin
国家地理新闻
发布时间：2012年9月18日

Photograph courtesy Marine Scotland
感谢苏格兰海洋组织友情提供照片

Ensconced in a plain glass bottle, the scrap of paper drifted in the North Sea for 98 years. But when a Scottish skipper pulled it from his nets near the Shetland Islands last April, he didn't find a lovelorn note or marooned sailor's SOS.
这一张装在玻璃片中的纸片，在北海中已经飘荡了98年。但当去年四月一名苏格兰船长在设德兰群岛附近从渔网中取下它的时候，他并没有看到一名失恋者的留言，抑或是困境中水手的求援。

"Please state where and when this card was found, and then put it in the nearest Post Office," read the message. "You will be informed in reply where and when it was set adrift. Our object is to find out the direction of the deep currents of the North Sea."Sorry, romantics.The message in a bottle found by Andrew Leaper—certified by Guinness World Records on August 30 as the oldest ever recovered—belonged to a century-old science experiment.
这张纸条上这样写道：“请写上你发现这张卡片的时间和地点，然后将它投递到离你最近的邮局。你会被回复告知漂流瓶是何时何地被投放的。我们的目的是为了研究北海深海洋流的运动方向。”不好意思，这真的一点儿也不浪漫。Andrew Leaper发现的这个漂流瓶，在8月30日由吉尼斯世界纪录确定为世界上最古老的漂流瓶，而它属于一项百年之前的科学实验。

To study local ocean currents, Capt. C. Hunter Brown of the Glasgow School of Navigation set bottle number 646B adrift, along with 1,889 others, on June 10, 1914."Drift bottles gave oceanographers at the start of the last century important information that allowed them to create pictures of the patterns of water circulation in the seas around Scotland," Marine Scotland Science's Bill Turrell explained in a statement. Turrell's Aberdeen-based government agency still keeps and updates Captain Brown's log. According to Turrell, Leaper's discovery—plucked just 9 miles (15 kilometers) from where Brown released it—is the 315th bottle recovered from that experiment.
为了研究当地的洋流，格拉斯哥航海学校的C. Hunter Brown船长在1914年6月10日投放了这个编号为646B的漂流瓶，同时投放的还有另外1889个。苏格兰海洋科学组织的Bill Turrell在一份声明中这样解释：“在上世纪初，漂流瓶带给了当时的海洋学家们重要的信息，这些信息让他们能够勾画出苏格兰附近海域的洋流运动模式。” Turrell在阿伯丁的政府机构仍然保存并更新着Brown船长的日志。据Turrell所说，Leaper发现漂流瓶的位置，距离Brown投放它的地方只有9英里（15公里）。那支瓶子是迄今为止第315个被发现的。
Each one, Turrell explained, was "specially weighted to bob along the seabed," hopefully to be scooped up by a trawler or to eventually wash up on shore. Oddly enough, the previous record—a message in a bottle dating to 1917—was set in 2006 by Mark Anderson, a friend of Leaper's who was sailing the same ship, the Copious. "It was an amazing coincidence," Leaper said in a statement. "It's like winning the lottery twice."
Turrell解释说，每个瓶子，都“被专门称重，能够漂浮在海床之上”，以便能够被拖网渔船打捞上来，或者被冲到海边上。最古怪的事情是，前世界纪录的保持者马克·安德森在2006年发现了一个1917年的漂流瓶；而他正是利普尔的朋友，且驾驶着同样一艘船——丰产号。利普尔说：“这是一个惊人的巧合，简直就像中了两次大乐透。”

Current History
洋流的历史
Of course, people have been putting messages in bottles for a lot longer than 98 years. Around 310 B.C., the Greek philosopher Theophrastus plopped sealed bottles in the sea to prove that the Mediterranean was formed by the inflowing Atlantic. (There's no record showing that he ever received a response.)
当然，人们使用把信息放进漂流瓶中这一方式的历史远远不止98年。在公元前310年，古希腊哲学家泰奥弗拉斯托斯投放了许多漂流瓶，来证明地中海是由大西洋流入内陆形成的。（历史上并没有他收到回应的记录。）

In the 16th century, Queen Elizabeth I of England—thinking some bottles might contain secret messages sent home by British spies or fleets—appointed an "Uncorker of Ocean Bottles," making it a capital crime for anyone else to open one.And in the 18th century, a treasure-hunting seaman from Japan named Chunosuke Matsuyama, shipwrecked on a South Pacific island with 43 shipmates, carved a message into coconut wood, put it in a bottle, and set it adrift. It was found in 1935—supposedly in the same village where Matsuyama was born.
16世纪，英格兰女王伊丽莎白一世认为某些瓶子里可能装着英国间谍或船队的秘密消息，于是专门指派了一名“漂流瓶开启者”，并将私自开启漂流瓶者判为死罪。18世纪，一名寻宝的日本船员Chunosuke Matsuyama和他的43名同伴，在南太平洋的一座小岛附近遭遇海难，在椰子壳上刻下消息，装进瓶子，投入了海洋。1935年那个漂流瓶被发现，而发现的地点据推测正是Matsuyama的诞生地。

In the 20th century, doomed World War I soldiers used bottles to send last messages to loved ones. And in 1915, a passenger on the torpedoed Lusitania tossed a poignant note that read, according to one report, "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—"
20世纪时，一战中绝望的士兵们用漂流瓶来向他们的爱人们传递最后的信息。1915年，
卢西塔尼亚号被鱼雷击中（英国远洋客轮，一战中被德国鱼雷击中，译者注），船上的一名乘客在漂流瓶中写下了一段令人唏嘘的文字。根据一份报告，其内容如下：“（我）和一些人还呆在甲板上。最后一批船只已经离开了。我们下沉得很快。我旁边的一些人正在和神父一起祈祷。死神即将降临。也许这个纸条能够……”

Set Adrift for Science
为科研而投放
Today drift bottles are still used by oceanographers studying global currents. In 2000 Eddy Carmack, a climate researcher at Canada's Institute of Ocean Science, started the Drift Bottle Project, initially to study currents around northern North America.
时至今日，漂流瓶仍然被海洋学家们用来研究全球的洋流。2000年，加拿大海洋科学研究所的一名气候研究者Eddy Carmack开启了一项“漂流瓶计划”，意在研究北美北部地区的洋流。

In the past 12 years, he and his colleagues have launched some 6,400 bottled messages from ships around the world. Of those, 264—about 4 percent—have been found and reported. "There have been some amazing paths followed by these bottles," Carmack said. Three that were dropped into the Beaufort Sea，above northern Alaska and northwestern Canada, became frozen in sea ice, he said.
在过去的12年间，他和同事们已经从世界各地的船只上投放了约6400只漂流瓶。这其中的264只，约4%已经被发现并记录在案。“这些瓶子所走过的路径十分令人惊奇。” Carmack如是说道。据他所说，在阿拉斯加北部和加拿大西北部的波弗特海投放的三只瓶子，被冻在了海冰上。
Five years later, melting Arctic ice had flushed the bottles all the way to northern Europe. Another bottle circled Antarctica one and a half times before it wound up on the Australian island of Tasmania. Some have made it from Mexico to the Philippines. And others have demonstrated that oil spills and debris from development in Canada's Labrador Sea and Baffin Bay could end up on Irish, French, Scottish, and Norwegian beaches. But there's more to the project than science, Carmack said.
五年之后，融化的大西洋海冰将它们一直冲到了欧洲北部。另一只瓶子绕着南极洲漂了一圈半，最后到了澳大利亚的塔斯马尼亚岛。一些瓶子从墨西哥漂到了菲律宾。另外一些瓶子则证明了加拿大拉布拉多海和巴芬海湾开发所产生的石油泄漏和碎屑能够一直漂到爱尔兰、法国、苏格兰和挪威的海岸。Carmack说，这个项目的意义远远超出了科学研究的范畴。
"The main thing about this study is that it connects people with the currents of the ocean," he said. "We find that we are only a bottle drop away from our neighbors around the world."
“这项研究最主要的意义是它通过洋流将人们连结在了一起。”他说道，“我们领悟到，我们只不过是世界各地的邻居们丢出的一个瓶子而已。”

One Man's Message-in-a-Bottle Obsession
一个人对瓶中信的痴迷
Sean Bercaw agrees. A captain and teacher in Connecticut, Bercaw has been obsessed with drift bottles since the early 1970s, when he and his parents sailed around the world on a 38-foot (12-meter) ketch called Natasha.
Sean Bercaw同意Carmack的说法。Bercaw是美国康乃狄克州的一名船长，也是一名教师。自从上世纪70年代跟随父母乘坐着一艘名叫娜塔莎的12米双桅帆船环游了世界，他便对漂流瓶痴迷不已。
As a 10- year-old, Bercaw dropped 40 bottles over the side—"my parents didn't drink, so I had to scrounge bottles from behind bars in ports of call"—and received two responses.Twenty-five years later, he began the project anew. Today he's cast more than 250 bottles into the sea and received responses from about 50."I've had 7-year-old kids and people in their 70s find my bottles and write back," he said.
当年年仅十岁的Bercaw从船上扔下了40个瓶子。“我父母不喝酒，所以我只好在停靠的港口去讨要瓶子。”随后他收到了两个回复。25年后，他重新开始了这项计划。如今他向海中投掷了250多个瓶子，并收到了约50个回复。他说：“我收到过7岁儿童和70多岁的老人写给我的回信。”
"Once I dropped two off the East Coast, a day apart. Both made it to France. But I heard about one just a year and a half later. The other took ten years."Bercaw favors tightly corked wine bottles ("they float best") and seals his handwritten messages in plastic bags, to waterproof them further. He explained that water pressure helps keep a bottle sealed, so one that drifts well below the surface—like the 98-year-old bottle found in Scotland, which Bercaw suspects was long lodged on the seafloor—has a stronger seal than one floating higher on the waves.
“我曾经一天内在东海岸分别丢了两只瓶子。两只都到达了法国”，只不过有一个隔了一年半就收到了回复，另一个则隔了十年。Bercaw最喜欢用被软木塞塞紧的酒瓶子（“它们漂的最好”），他把信件装进塑料袋中，防止进水以让它们漂得更远。他解释说，水压能使瓶子密封得更好，所以水面之下能漂流得更好的瓶子比漂在水面上的瓶子密封得更好。Bercaw猜想那只时隔98年在苏格兰被发现的瓶子，就可能长时间停留在海底，
"One of the things I find fascinating about messages in bottles is how they bring things together," Bercaw said. "A lot of times in our society, it's either/or—there's science, and there's humanities. But with drift bottles it's both: You learn about ocean currents, but the messages themselves are so human."They also bridge oceans of time—and technology."Once this guy in the Bahamas called me," Bercaw remembered, "and he said to me, over a new satellite cell phone, 'Hey, I found your message in an old bottle!'"
Bercaw说：“我发现瓶中信最有趣的地方是它们如何将事物联系在一起的。在我们的社会中，连系我们的很多时候不是科学，就是人性。但是对于漂流瓶来说，二者皆有：你了解了洋流，但是瓶中信本身却闪耀着人性的光辉。”它们架起了时间和技术海洋中的桥梁。“曾有一次，有个巴哈马群岛的哥们打电话给我，”Bercaw回忆道，“他用新型的卫星手机跟我说‘嗨，我在一个古老的瓶中发现了你的信件！’”