In Canada, a letter is being investigated that was probably thrown into the sea shortly before the luxury liner sank
Can it really be? That a message in a bottle that was thrown from aboard the luxury liner Titanic into the North Atlantic in April 1912 was driven to Canada’s east coast and was found there more than 100 years later? At a Canadian university, a letter is now being investigated that could have come from a twelve-year-old who was killed in the sinking of the Titanic on April 15, 1912.
The researchers not only have questions but also doubts. The possibility that the letter allegedly written by the young Frenchwoman Mathilde Lefebvre is a forgery cannot be completely ruled out. But Nicolas Beaudry, history and archeology professor at the Université du Québec (UQAR) in the city of Rimouski on the St. Lawrence River, also states: “So far we have not found any clear evidence that it could be a fake. “Everything that has been scientifically proven indicates that the message in a bottle could be real.
In the summer of 2017, a Canadian family found a bottle with a letter in the Bay of Fundy near the famous Hopewell Rocks on the coast of New Brunswick. It was closed with cork and sealed with wax. The handwritten letter was signed by a Mathilde Lefebvre and marked “13. April 1912 ”. “I’m throwing this bottle into the sea, in the middle of the Atlantic. We are supposed to arrive in New York in a few days. If someone finds the bottle, get in touch with the Lefebvre family in Liévin, ”the girl wrote.
But she never arrived in New York. The Titanic had left the British port of Southampton on April 10, 1912 for her maiden voyage with destination New York. On board the steamer: around 2220 people, including hundreds who wanted to emigrate and could only afford the passage in third class on the lower decks. On April 14th at 11:40 p.m. (ship time) the Titanic collided with an iceberg, almost three hours later, at 2:20 a.m. on April 15, the Titanic sank in the icy floods. Only 713 of the people on board survived, although this number has not been established.
Among the victims who were not recovered were Mathilde, her mother Marie and her siblings Jeanne, Henri and Ida. You can read a lot about the family in the Encyclopedia Titanica. Mathilde’s father, Franck Lefebvre, presumably emigrated to the USA with his four oldest children from Liévin in northern France in 1910. He wanted to find happiness in Iowa as a miner. Now his wife was to follow with the other children. On April 13th Mathilde wrote the letter in question. A day later, she tragically died.
The find was handed over to UQAR in 2018. The paper was in very good condition. “Because the bottle was sealed with wax, no moisture formed in it,” explains archaeologist Manon Savard. “But old paper and an old bottle do not necessarily result in an old message,” adds her colleague Maxime Gohier.
To get to the letter, the finders broke the bottle. The letter is torn in the middle, which can be attributed to being rolled and folded to fit in the bottle and then tearing the paper over the years. Both the chemical composition of the glass and the examination of the cork using the radiocarbon method indicate that both could date from around 1912. There was also paper wrapped around the cork that appears to be identical to the letterhead. These scraps of paper have also been dated radiocarbon. The results of the analyzes matched the date on the letter. The letter itself was not subjected to a radiocarbon analysis because a material sample would have to be taken for it. “For the time being, we limited ourselves to investigations that did not destroy the document,” explains Beaudry.
The fact that there are doubts as to its authenticity is due to the location. The Gulf Stream should have driven the bottle from the Titanic location towards Europe. Instead, it was washed ashore more than 1,500 kilometers west of the place where the Titanic was located in the Bay of Funday between the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. A scenario that is considered rather improbable by experts in oceanography, but cannot be completely ruled out either.
Beaudry and his team have studied Mathilde’s handwriting in detail. At first glance it looks like handwriting from the early 20th century, but there are some inconsistencies compared to how children in France learned to write at the time, Gohier explains. “They learned that all letters should be connected. But some letters are not connected to the word. ”So far, no document has appeared that is clearly from Mathilde, nothing from her school days and no other letters.
With the names of the victims known soon after the Titanic sank, it is possible that someone was kidding themselves. It’s possible it could be a fake from shortly after the sinking of the Titanic or more recently. “We don’t know if we can ever solve the puzzle,” says Manon Savard.
In the south of France, Hélène and Jacques Lefebvre are now hoping that further investigations will bring clarity. Mathilde’s mother was Jacques’ great-aunt. He found out about the letter from the local newspaper shortly after it was found. As Jacques tells the Canadian broadcaster CBC, if this letter is genuine, it would be the only one he would have from this branch of the family.
