Martha got a phone call from a stranger to say the letter – addressed to her when she was eight years old – was found washed up on the shore of an Australian beach
arling 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.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 a different era; when people actually wrote letters for a start, but also when someone had the imagination to do thatIt 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.
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.
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