It is first and foremost a story of migrants, of French emigrants crossing an ocean… In the winter of 1910, Franck Lefebvre, a miner in Liévin, in the Pas-de-Calais, left to try his luck in the United States. With one of his sons, Anselme, 10, he traveled by ocean liner to New York and settled in Mystic, Iowa, where both pointed to the Lodwick mines. Same sweat, same soot, for more money. Two other sons join them who also go to charcoal. In 1912, the father acquired enough money to bring in the rest of his large family. On April 10, in Southampton, in the south of England, his wife Marie and four of their children therefore boarded a brand new ship: the Titanic. The rest of the story is known… None of the Lefebvres survived the shipwreck. Fatal fate of third-class passengers, forgotten by the canoes.
In 2017, while strolling along the Bay of Fundy in southeastern Canada, a couple and their two children discovered a bottle on the beach.
Inside, this message: “I throw this bottle into the sea in the middle of the Atlantic.
We are due to arrive in New York in a few days.
If anyone finds her, tell the Lefebvre family in Liévin.
The letter is dated April 13, 1912, the eve of the most famous maritime disaster.
It is signed Mathilde Lefebvre.
One of Franck and Marie's daughters was called that.
She was about to celebrate her 13th birthday when she sank in the cold waters of the North Atlantic.
LP / Computer Graphics LP / Computer Graphics
Since then, scientists from the University of Quebec at Rimouski (Uqar), to whom the object was entrusted, have struggled to try to answer this question: was an artifact from the Titanic found thousands of kilometers away the shipwreck site or is it a hoax? “When the family contacted us, we thought maybe we should go and have a look. We were astonished that the hypothesis that this object was authentic could not be easily dismissed. We have formed a multidisciplinary team with the objective also of using this bottle for teaching, to pique the curiosity of our students, ”says historian Maxime Gohier. Although the results of their research are preliminary and lacking in evidence,researchers have started in recent days to communicate the first elements of what looks like a real investigation.
Suspicious writing?
First observation: the date may correspond.
“We examined the bottle.
The molding and processing marks, the quality of the glass and its chemical analysis are compatible with the beginning of the 20th century, ”explains Nicolas Beaudry, from the Archeology and Heritage Laboratory at Uqar.
The carbon 14 dating of the cork and a piece of paper inserted with it into the neck does not disqualify them either.
A chemist was interested in the composition of the ink, thanks to Raman spectroscopy, a method which makes it possible to analyze a sample without touching it and therefore without altering it.
However, it has not yet been possible to compare it with others.
“So far, materially, we have a blend that is not incompatible with a date of 1912, continues Nicolas Beaudry.
This does not mean that the complete assembly dates from that year.
Because old bottles with stoppers are not difficult to find, neither is old paper, you just have to tear a blank page from an old book… But so far, we have not succeeded in taking default a forger!
"
Nicolas Beaudry examines a detail of the letter at the Archeology and Heritage Laboratory of Uqar.
Maxime Gohier / Uqar Maxime Gohier / Uqar
More disturbing is the writing of the so-called Mathilde.
“At the start of the 20th century, we learned in France to produce beautiful, regular, cursive writing with a continuous movement.
While Mathilde's letter shows choppy writing clearly influenced by typography.
Some gestures are broken, a few letters in particular which show a very personal character.
It is only with a certain experience of writing that we end up deviating from the model, that we learn and develop our own automatisms, which makes us doubt that this letter could have been produced by a child of 13 years old, ”explains Nicolas Beaudry.
Excavations in attics
The paleographer Maxime Gohier, who consulted the notebooks of old schoolchildren, examined the signatures of Mathilde's parents on their marriage certificate. They, for once, agree with the canons of the time. In the event that the bottle would have been thrown from the deck of the Titanic, the professor has two leads. “Mathilde could be a very gifted child in writing for her time, her social background and for her age. Mozart wrote well at 6 years old! This possibility cannot be dismissed out of hand. Or, an adult has written from the girl's dictation. Certainly not his mother, whose handwriting is too wavering to have written such perfect lines on white paper. A foreign cabin neighbor, with more exotic writing?
There remains the thesis of the joker, today or yesterday. "The list of victims was known in New York even before the survivors disembark", notes Nicolas Beaudry. If we still do not know if it inspired a usurper, we know that it sealed the fate of Franck Lefebvre. “He learned that two French children had survived the sinking. He went to New York to claim his own. But having entered the United States under a false name, he was expelled by the authorities. In France, he returned to the mine. He had a new partner and a daughter. He tried to rebuild a life, it didn't seem obvious. He died in 1948 at the age of 77, ”explains Hélène Lefebvre, whose husband, Jacques Lefebvre is Franck's grand-nephew.
There is no photo of Mathilde Lefebvre. Here is a portrait of his mother, Marie, also a victim of the Titanic. DR DR
It was their own genealogical, more personal investigation that introduced Mathilde, a dozen years ago, to these inhabitants of Aix-en-Provence. They sometimes receive testimonials from people who knew Franck or heard about the tragedy that struck the family, especially since the sudden media coverage of the history of the bottle. In Canada, researchers want to take advantage of this visibility to appeal to the public: anyone who has information, a school notebook of Mathilde in her attic or recognizes a hoax, can make themselves known, via a dedicated Facebook group, among others. “It's our bottle by the sea”, jokes Maxime Gohier. This participatory approach has already borne fruit.Forensic scientists have also been approached to track down any suspicious hairlines in the message.
The astonishing drift
The sea, at the bottom, could hold the key to the enigma.
Since 1979, ocean currents have been measured using drifting buoys.
The oceanographer Daniel Bourgault looked at the trajectory of those who one day crossed the route taken by the Titanic on April 13, 1912. The map he drew speaks for itself: most of these buoys then spun. towards Europe and none reached the Canadian coasts.
"There may very well be a bottle which takes another path and makes a different path than what the average circulation of the Gulf Stream suggests", nuance Daniel Bourgault.
These data have limits, the batteries of the buoys having a very short lifespan compared to the 105 years of marine life that we attribute to Mathilde's message.
After the first simulations with weather data from 1912, the Norwegian Meteorological Institute intends to carry out more extensive ones which should make it possible to represent much longer drifts!
We can then accurately estimate the probability of such an incredible odyssey.
Posted by Laurent Bertino on Tuesday, May 11, 2021
“If the bottle were authentic, it would be the third known object to have spent the most time at sea,” emphasizes Maxime Gohier. How, then, can we imagine such a good state of conservation? “In the Bay of Fundy, the sediments are extremely fine. They have little abrasive effect and may even have a protective effect. For Uqar, there is no question of leaving this aspect aside: with his students, a geographer from the Quebec university plans to study the local climatic events that could have led to the burying of the bottle and its recent resurgence. Preliminary results, on the most advanced research in other disciplines, could be published during the year.
