Hopes for finding answers to the disappearance of a Taiwanese fishing crew disappeared four years ago have rekindled after a message found in a bottle off the west coast of Ireland.
The Yong Yu Sing No 18, a Taiwanese fishing vessel that was found adrift with its crew missing in 2021, is alleged to be a SOS message written in a combination of Chinese, Indonesian, and English.
The handwritten note was discovered last week by Matthew Long and a friend while they were walking on a beach on Inisheer, a small island about 8 kilometers (5 miles) off County Clare.
Long told Al Jazeera, “We used Google Translate, and the first portion of the message was translated into Indonesian as an SOS message.”
Long claimed to have handed the note to the local police before disclosing it on the social media platform Reddit, where scheming was quickly carried out to find out where it came from.
It blew up when we posted it in r/beachcombing, where it was discovered by savvy Redditors, according to Long, who posted it online in a few places.
The Reddit posting reads, “Please send help! We are lost since 12/20. We are three people in this place. The island’s name is unknown to us. We are harmed. HELP . . . . . SOS”.
The title “Yong Yu Sing No 18” and the Chinese character “Li” are at the end of the note.
The Irish police service, An Garda Sochána, confirmed it had received a “report of an item found” on Inisheer last Saturday, but stated it does not comment on third-party content online.
It declined to provide more details.
According to Taiwan’s Central News Agency, the ship’s owner lost communication with its captain, a man by the name of Li, two days prior. The Yong Yu Sing No 18 went missing on January 1, 2021.
The fishing boat’s crew and lifeboat were missing, and they later were found about 600 kilometers (373 miles) away from Midway Atoll, an unincorporated United States territory in the North Pacific Ocean.
Taiwanese prosecutors later determined the incident to be an accident, but Li and his nine Indonesian crew’s fate is still unknown.
The Taiwan Yilan District Prosecutors Office, which conducted the case in 2021, did not respond to a request for comment right away.
Nearly 10,000 users have commented on Long’s Reddit post, many of whom have theories about the crew’s fate and debating whether the note is genuine or fake.
The Su’Ao Fisherman’s Association and other organizations have taken the note seriously in Taiwan by those who support the families of the missing crew.
The association expressed hope that the government would follow through with the necessary channels and that, if the situation was confirmed to be true, it would work with international organizations to coordinate rescue efforts, according to a statement from the association to the local media.
The Su’Ao Fisherman’s Association did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment right away.
The authenticity of the note has also been debatted by internet users on Taiwan’s PTT message board.
Some have compared it to a 1992 accident where a shipment of 28, 000 plastic ducks and bath toys slammed into a cargo ship during a storm.
The ducks have been washed up all over the world, including Scotland, in the decades since the incident.
Long claimed he doesn’t know whether the note is real but that it is.
He said, “I don’t know whether the note was actually sent by the crew of that ship” or whether it was genuine.
Source: Aljazeera
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