I first contacted Buffington in 2016. I’d been intrigued by his blog: “A message in a bottle can make friends out of strangers, lovers out of the lonely, or give the dead a final chance to speak.” I hoped to join him on one of his expeditions, but he was on an involuntary hiatus, owing first to the Zika outbreak, then to the COVID pandemic.
Eight years later, an e-mail from Buffington popped up in my inbox. “Hi Lauren, It’s been a minute!” he wrote, explaining that he was ready to begin far-flung bottle-searching missions again. Months passed as he pored over tide charts, satellite maps, and airline schedules, trying to determine the perfect location for our hunt. Finally, he settled on one: “I really think Mayaguana is where the magic is going to happen :)”
Mayaguana, the easternmost island of the Bahamas, is a hatchet-shaped spit of land about a hundred nautical miles north of the Windward Passage, the channel separating Cuba from Haiti. The island’s name comes from the Lucayans, its original inhabitants. In the early sixteenth century, Spanish colonization wiped out the local population; the land was sparsely populated until the early eighteen-hundreds, when settlers arrived from Turks and Caicos. In 1890, the future British statesman Neville Chamberlain visited the island with his brother to see if it would make a good sisal plantation. The latter was “in ecstasies over the flamingoes,” but the Chamberlains ultimately abandoned the project.
Mayaguana remains one of the least developed and most difficult to access Bahamian islands. Around two hundred people live there. The island is home to frigate birds, gnatcatchers, bananaquits, boobies, and a rare rodent called the hutia, which looks like a rat and comes out at night to feed. It has no hospital, grocery store, or A.T.M. Every ten days, a boat comes to deliver mail and to stock the island’s mini-marts. From Nassau, the capital, you can fly to Mayaguana on Monday or Friday. If you want to leave, you have to be at the airport when the plane comes in. Otherwise, you wait.
Buffington warned that Mayaguana would be no Margaritaville. “We are not talking about a ‘stroll’ here,” he wrote. “A typical day of hunting involves hiking maybe 8-15 miles on a beach: soft sand sucking energy from every footstep; relentless sun hammering you on exposed, shadeless shores.” He recommended that I come equipped with trekking poles, fingerless sun gloves, a multipurpose tool that included “pliers and a knife at minimum,” and “one 3-liter water reservoir with hose.” He also suggested packing provisions, including canned chicken, for “suitcase burritos,” and powdered Pedialyte.
There was one last thing Buffington wanted me to know: I shouldn’t mention what we were doing there. “It’s a paranoia born of finding footprints on desolate beaches that I have busted ass to reach (always a vibe-killer!), and so I take every wacko precaution to avoid tipping off anyone,” he explained. “Lest it inspire someone to get there before me.”
Unlike many trends, the fad for putting messages in bottles can be traced to a specific source. Sure, the Vikings, invading Iceland, hurled objects overboard and followed the currents toward resources like whales and driftwood. Yes, a twelfth-century Japanese epic tells of a banished poet who wrote a thousand verses on slabs of wood, called stupas, and threw them into the sea, hoping that they would reach his parents. But the modern era of M.I.B.s began in 1833, when the Baltimore Saturday Visiter published “MS. Found in a Bottle,” a short story by a fledgling writer named Edgar Allan Poe. The work’s narrator is travelling from the port of Batavia to the Sunda Islands on a ship filled with ghee, opium, and jaggery. As a “whirlpool of mountainous and foaming ocean” threatens to swallow the ship whole, the narrator attempts to tell the tale of his fateful voyage by sending a manuscript into the ocean. “At the last moment I will enclose the MS. in a bottle and cast it within the sea,” he vows.
