The story begins with a simple whiskey bottle, its belly full of air and a cork shoved down its throat. This airtight vessel was set adrift, bobbing on the currents of the Thames River in old London Town.
Where would such a bottle go ashore? More likely, however, it would be carried out by the current into the Strait of Dover and from there into the chill expanse of the North Sea. We are going to retrace the course of this sturdy glass vessel—a long and lonely voyage that truly took place.
It drifted away from the east coast of England, northbound past the Netherlands. Somewhere midway between Scotland and Denmark, still in the North Sea, June of 1937 passed into July. The sealed bottle, urged ever north northward, was carried by the ocean current between the Shetland Islands and the coast of Norway. The vast expanse of the North Atlantic lay ahead, the Arctic Circle less than four hundred miles away.
The year 1937 bowed gracefully into the next as the lonesome voyage continued. Hundreds of miles of Norwegian coastline were left behind as the int intrepid bottle ventured into the icy Barents Sea, the northern coast of the Soviet Union far below. Years passed in those desolate waters—thaw and freeze and thaw again. The currents lured it gently eastward over Siberia: from the Kara Sea, past the Novaya Zemlya islands, then through the East Siberian Sea. And there, east met west.
The bottle had remained intact and airtight for most of a decade as it finally floated into the Bering Strait between Siberia and Alaska. It began a southbound journey into the Bering Sea, past the Aleutian Islands, and into the vast North Pacific. Then it traveled along the west coast of the United States.
At long last, this restless voyage of almost twelve years came to an end as the bottle came to rest on a beach in San Francisco. We have now retraced the incredible journey of a buoyant vessel from the mouth of the Thames River in England all the way—twelve thousand miles over a period of twelve years—to San Francisco. This model of its course has been reconstructed by oceanographers, tracing the path it had to have taken after being released.
It was a chilly day, March 16, 1949, when a fellow named Jack Wurm was wandering a deserted San Francisco strand and happened upon the bottle, half-buried in the sand. Jack Wurm was fifty-five, jobless, near penniless, and despondent. His restaurant business was bankrupt, and his life savings were gone.
But Jack discovered this bottle and saw something inside. He broke it on a rock and recovered its contents: a piece of paper upon which was handwritten a message.
“To avoid all confusion, I leave my entire estate to the lucky person who finds this bottle. Signed, Daisy Alexander. June 20, 1937.”
And yes, it did stand up in court. This was the last will and testament of Daisy Alexander, who had died in London in 1939. Daisy Alexander was the eccentric heiress to a large portion of the Singer sewing machine fortune. She had secretly decreed that luck would determine her heir.
And so, Jack Wurm of San Francisco—broke, disheartened, and down on his luck—was to harvest a legacy from a deserted beach, from a whiskey bottle that had begun its relentless journey half a world away.
Six million dollars.
And now you know the rest of the story.
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