By James Heinz
As noted in a previous story by Carl Eisenberg, the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society launched Little Toot 1 and Little Toot 2, the Society’s own versions of the proverbial message in a bottle, into two of the Great Lakes on June 9 and June 30, 2021. The Little Toot project was inspired when WMHS executive director Suzette Lopez read a story about an inscribed model boat that was recovered in 2020 at Ashland, Wis. after being launched 27 years earlier at Duluth, Minn. But between those two launch dates a discovery revealed that someone had beaten WMHS to it by about one hundred years.
As first reported on the Fox News web site on June 25, 2021, Jennifer Dowker runs glass bottom boat shipwreck tours in Cheboygan, Mich. Sometime during the week of June 13-19, 2021 she was cleaning the bottom of her boat when she noticed a green bottle on the bottom of the Cheboygan River.
She picked the bottle up and saw inside there was a note dated November 1926. The note read: “Will the person who finds this bottle, return this note, to George Morrow, Cheboygan, Mich., and tell where it was found?”
The story was later expanded and reported on the CNN website. Dowker posted her story on Facebook and when she got up the next day she had 100,000 shares and 6,000 comments. Dowker, who describes herself as “a single mom running a small business with three teenage boys”, did not think she would find the time to track down any possible descendants of George Morrow.
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She needn’t have worried. On June 20, 2021 she received a phone call from George Morrow’s daughter, Michele Primeau. A total stranger who read the Facebook post took it upon himself to track Primeau down and tell her about the story.
Primeau said that her father would have been 17 or 18 years old when he threw the bottle in the river, probably on his birthday, which was in November. Primeau said that the note brought back fond memories of her father, who died in 1995. Primeau said she intends to meet with Dowker this coming September.
Since the bottle was found at the bottom of the Cheboygan River, where it was thrown, it did not travel very far even though it took 95 years for it to be found. Wikipedia records several other instances of Great Lakes messages in a bottle. In 1915 two women threw a message in a bottle into the Detroit River at Hansen’s Island. It was found in 2012…at Hansen’s Island. And in 1974, an 11 year old girl threw a message in a bottle into Lake Michigan at Old Mission Peninsula, Mich. It was found 41 years later…at Old Mission Peninsula. Apparently many Great Lakes bottles believe, like George Morrow’s bottle and Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, that there’s no place like home.
The British Broadcasting Corporation website says that the longest confirmed time a message in a bottle took to be found was 132 years. In 2018 a woman found on an Australian beach a message in a bottle that had been launched in 1886 in the Indian Ocean as part of an oceanographic study. The handwriting on the note matched that in the log of the ship that launched it. The longest unconfirmed report of a message in a bottle was one sent by a shipwrecked Japanese sailor in 1784. It was recovered in 1935 on the beach of the village where the shipwrecked sailor was born.
Messages in a bottle are often associated with shipwrecks. After the car ferry Milwaukee disappeared in 1929 a message from the purser was found that described the crew list and the storm damage that was sinking the ship, damage that was confirmed when the wreck was found in 1972.
The Canadian steamer Kamloops went missing in Lake Superior in December 1927. In May 1928, the bodies of nine crew members were found on Isle Royale, they having survived the sinking and made it ashore but died over the winter. In December 1928 a trapper found at the mouth of the Agawa River, Ont., a note in a bottle written by Kamloops stewardess Alice Bettridge, who wrote, “I am the last one left alive, freezing and starving to death on Isle Royale in Lake Superior. I just want Mom and Dad to know my fate.”
Fortunately, Little Toots’ message in a bottle story has a much happier ending.
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Photo at the top: Green bottle with its message found by Jennifer Dowker in mid-June 2021 in the Cheboygan River. Photo credit: Courtesy of Jennifer Dowker, Nautical North Family Adventures
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James Heinz is the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society’s acquisitions director. He became interested in maritime history as a kid watching Jacques Cousteau’s adventures on TV. He was a Great Lakes wreck diver until three episodes of the bends forced him to retire from diving. He was a University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee police officer for thirty years. He regularly flies either a Cessna 152 or 172.
