[imagesource: L’Université du Québec à Rimouski]

12-year-old Mathilde Lefebvre was one of the more than 1 500 people who lost their lives when the Titanic sank 109 years ago.

She boarded the ship with her mother and siblings in 1912, hoping to reunite with her father in the United States.

But she never made it across the Atlantic.

However, it seems a letter that she might have written and reportedly chucked into the sea just before the ship sank survived, and washed ashore a century later.

Via CBC News, the letter in a bottle was found by a New Brunswick family on the shore near the Bay of Fundy in Canada back in 2017.

Now a team of researchers at the Université du Québec à Rimouski are analysing it to see if it is indeed the work of Lefebvre.

The letter is in French, and translated, says the following:

“I am throwing this bottle into the sea, in the middle of the Atlantic. We are due to arrive in New York in a few days. If someone finds it, contact the Lefebvre family in Liévin.”

It was signed “Mathilde Lefebvre”.

Nicolas Beaudry, history and archaeology professor at the Université du Québec à Rimouski, who is studying the letter, can confirm that a person with her name was on the Titanic at the time it sank.

He is hopeful about the authenticity of the letter:

“So far, we have not caught a smoking gun of a forgery,” he said.

Besides getting to know Lefebvre’s story, the researchers also need to analyse the letter and bottle, which they do by means of carbon dating and verifying the materials it was written on and with, as well as the bottle it was found in and the cork that kept it sealed.

“So far, the materials seem consistent with the date,” Beaudry said. “[That] does not exclude that it could be a forgery or a hoax.”

The letter could still have been forged, with someone using old materials to trick researchers, or it could have been forged back when the ship sank already, for attention-seeking reasons:

“So we haven’t caught a prankster red-handed yet, but this still doesn’t exclude a recent hoax. Old paper is easy to find – by ripping a blank page from an old book, for instance – while old bottles and even corks are not rare,” he added.

There are a few parts that seem off.

The handwriting is one part:

“At first glance, it may look like cursive, early-20th-century handwriting, but there are inconsistencies with what children learned in school in France,” Beaudry said.

Via The Independent, Mr Beaudry added:

“The message could have been written by Mathilde on board the Titanic or it could have been written by someone else on her behalf.”

The other issue is where the bottle was found.

It’s unlikely that a bottle thrown off a ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean could make its way to New Brunswick:

It’s quite unlikely — but it’s not impossible,” said Daniel Bourgault, physical oceanography professor at the Université du Québec à Rimouski.

“Where the Titanic was on the 13th of April, it’s the continuation of this big current we call the Gulf Stream,” Bourgault said.

“The Gulf Stream flows from eastern North America and goes toward Europe, and so most likely if you throw something in the water there, it would wash up on the European shore.”

There is still less than a one percent chance, though, that it could have ended up in the Bay of Fundy.

If it can be proven real, the bottle could be the first Titanic artefact found on the North American coast.

[sources:cbcnews&independent]