Letter in Floating Bottle Comes Back to Eliot House via Scotland

Peter W. Rand '51 of Eliot House dropped a message-laden bottle overboard last summer while on a cruise in the Arctic Ocean, and it turned up April 22 on a Scottish beach. Rand received the message and a letter last week from the finder--John MacIntyre of South Uist, Lochboisdale, in the Outer Hebrides.

In the letter MacIntyre expressed the hope that the next bottle would contain more than a message. He wrote, "I am sending you this note which I found in a bottle on the shore at the mouth of the Harvard River on the west coast of South Uist. Hoping this will find you in the best of health. I hope you will send 100 pounds in your next bottle."

Rand replied, sending a letter and some photographs. "I don't think his hope will come true," Rand said.

The bottle is the only one that has turned up form about 20 which were thrown overboard by Rand and his shipmates on last August 1 while on a cruise with explorer Donald B. MacMillan. In the bottle he put a note requesting that it be returned to him. When the bottle was dropped, the schooner Bowdoin was sailing on a course west from Cape Chidley to Frobisher Bay in Baffin Land. Apparently the bottle drifted south down the coast of Labrador to the Grand Banks, where the Gulf Stream carried it to Scotland.

Commander MacMillan plans another trip to the Arctic this summer to collect specimens for the Peabody Museum and others. First mate Rand will make his third trip, along with Stanton A. Cook '51 and Ian M. White '51.