The note in the bottle that the girl dropped from the Titanic, put scientists at a dead end
On the coast of Canada, a mysterious document was found that was thrown off the deck of the doomed Titanic on April 14, 1912. So, there is a possibility that the note in a glass bottle sank to the bottom of the ocean a few hours before the collision of the ship with the iceberg. However, the valuable find still raises many questions for experts.
In Canada, researchers at the University of Quebec have been working for the second year to establish the authenticity of a letter found in a bottle on the shores of the Bay of Fundy. It is assumed that the message was written by a girl who traveled on the Titanic in 1912, and dropped it into the ocean the day before the shipwreck.
The text of the letter says that its author — a 13-year-old Frenchwoman Mathilde Lefebvre, along with her mother, brothers and sisters, intended to cross the Atlantic on the Titanic to reunite with the father of the family in the United States.
Unfortunately, the Lefevres were unable to reach their destination. And all that's left are the lines from the letter:
According to the documents, there was indeed a passenger on the Titanic named Mathilde Lefevre, and in the United States lived Frank Lefevre, who, along with his four sons, worked in a mine in Iowa. In favor of the authenticity of the letter, radiocarbon analysis also speaks — the paper and wax date back to 1912, when the bottle was thrown into the water.
However, scientists still have reason to doubt. First, it is the handwriting, according to experts, it is different from the writing style that children were taught in French schools at the beginning of the XX century. Also suspicious is the route the bottle would have taken to reach the Bay of Fundy. The trajectory of its possible course, constructed by scientists, does not converge with the direction of water currents.
Researchers believe that the letter was actually written in the year of the Titanic crash, but it could probably have been a fake 110-year-old. At that time, hoaxes were a common phenomenon, which was often resorted to by members of the press — they themselves threw such bottles into the sea and published tragic reports that attracted the attention of readers.
Nicolas Baudry, a professor of history and archaeology at the University of Quebec, believes that more research on handwriting and writing style is needed to establish the authenticity of the letter. But even they may not give a definitive answer to what exactly the waters of the bay brought-a genuine message from a young passenger or someone's prank from the distant past.
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