“Darling Martha, miracle if you ever read this,” wrote a sailor named Tom Waugh in 1978, before tucking the letter into a scotch bottle, and throwing it overboard a container ship, 30 nautical miles north of Sydney.
“But it won’t be your first bottle letter, you have many more away out in the mid-Pacific.”
Forty-five years later, Martha Cave got a phone call from a stranger out of the blue to say the letter, which was addressed to her when she was eight years old, was found washed up on the shore of an Australian beach. It was on the far south coast of New South Wales.
It was the fifth letter Waugh threw overboard in his years as a sailor that had eventually found its way to Cave, now 57. The others had washed up on the shores of Solomon Islands, the Philippines, South America, and Wilson’s Prom near Melbourne. But it was the first letter she had received in 43 years.
“I was astonished,” says Cave. “To have found one after so long and in such perfect condition and to see Tom’s writing, it just brought it all back to me.”
Waugh’s letters to Cave, then Martha Brister, continued when she moved to Australia from Essex, England, in 1976. Waugh, who was born in New Zealand, lived a few doors from Cave’s family home in England.
When he’d return from his six-month stints at sea, Cave says Waugh would tell her tales of his travels, and teach her how to tie ship knots.
“He was like a grandfather to me,” says Cave, who now works as a horse trainer in Sydney. “He’d always call me darling Martha.”
Wrapped around the letter to Cave was always a second note, addressed to the finder of the bottle, asking if they could send the letter to her. The finder of this bottle was Luke Hamilton, who works on Landcare’s coastal weeds project on the far south coast of NSW.
He was working at Wallaga Lake, near Bermagui, when he spotted the bottle on the shore. It was the second bottle he’d found in a month – the first held a ship’s log, and had been tossed overboard the Soren Larson, in the Bass Strait, a few months earlier. Hamilton initially didn’t think his latest find was much older, until he unravelled the letter, which was in perfect condition, and saw the date – 1978, the same year he was born.
“My wife and I ended up spending a few hours deciphering it, there’s still a few words we are unsure of … that seaman Tom was a messy writer,” he says.
Hamilton tasked his father-in-law, a retired sailor, to track down Martha Brister. Half an hour later, he was on the phone to Cave telling her what they’d discovered.
Cave says, often the letters sent to her would say: “When you find this letter, you’ll know you have found a piece of treasure.”
In this letter, Waugh apologised for not visiting her while he was docked in Sydney, on his journey up the east coast of Australia.
“It was a different era; when people actually wrote letters for a start, but also when someone had the imagination to do that,” she says.
Not long after Waugh sent the 1978 letter to Cave they lost contact. She says Waugh retired in the UK in 1989, and has likely since passed away.
“A lot of times over the years I’ve been sad that I haven’t been able to tell him how much I appreciated it,” Cave says.
But she’s hopeful that there might be more messages for her waiting to be found.
“I thought I’d never see another but here it is,” she says. “So hopefully we get another miracle.”
