Bottle containing messages from two Australian World War I soldiers found on beach

A bottle containing messages from Australian soldiers on their way to Europe during World War I was recently found at a beach in Western Australia.

The two letters, dated Aug. 15, 1916, were written just days after a ship carrying Privates William Kirk Harley, 37, and Malcolm Neville, 27, set sail from the southeastern Australian city of Adelaide for Europe, according to The Associated Press.

Neville was writing to his mother. Harley, whose mother died prior to his voyage, addressed his message to the eventual recipients of the bottle, writing “may the finder be as well as we are at present,” according to the AP.

The bottle containing the messages was found more than a century later, about 1,350 miles away in the southwestern Australian city of Esperance, earlier this month.

Debra Brown, who discovered the water-logged bottle with her family, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that her hunch was that the bottle washed up years ago but was only recently uncovered after storms eroded away sand dunes. The Browns dried out the letters and went about finding relatives of the two soldiers.

“We thought, ’Oh wow, this is wonderful,’ so we jumped on the computer and onto the Australian War Memorial and found all of his history,” Ms. Brown said.

Neville died while fighting in France, while Harley survived the war and died of cancer, which his family says came about because he was gassed by German soldiers while fighting in the trenches, according to the AP.

Ann Turner, one of Harley’s grandchildren, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, “We are all absolutely stunned. There are five grandchildren who are still alive. We’re all in constant contact since it happened and we just can’t believe it.”