Flotsam & Jetsam Script.

00.10 – 00.30
A propeller from an aeroplane, a charts table from a ship, a cage with a parrot. You know everything we’ve got in the sheds has its own story. You never know what you are gonna find and it’s different every day, that’s the beauty of it.

01.20 – 02.01
Well my name is Gilles Van Milles, born 1948, not here in Texel, but 200km away on the mainland, but part of my family is from here. So I always went to visit my Grandfather and that’s the way I started beachcombing . The beachcombers here in Texel, there were, at that time is was 1980 I’m talking about, there were 8 of them and they had a lot of stuff, stacked away in different places and one of them actually said why don’t we bring everything together, the funny stuff we’ve got, the strange stuff that we don’t use, because that’s what its normally about and that’s the way the museum started in 1980.

02.03 – 02.29
My name is Jan Altrest, I was born on the 19th of February 1938 and I have been beachcombing for 62 years. I never started beachcombing to start a museum, it just happened. If you have a museum like this, everything you find on the beach gets a place. You find the strangest things in our museum. We hang it up and give it a place, but it’s the large amount that makes it interesting.

02.30 – 2.47
My name is Piet Van Leersun, I was born in 1946 right after the war. I’m from the island and I’ve been interested in the sea from an early age. I can go back 5 generations in my family and find people connected with the sea or beachcombing.

02.54 – 03.33
Here we have a shoe that we found on the beach. Any shoe that arrives here is always a left shoe.
That’s because when the show is in the water, it floats with the toe up and then circles in the current.
All the left shoes arrive here in the Netherlands and the right shoes travel to England, Ireland and Scotland. Because of the different shapes of right and left shoes, they go in different directions. I can prove it because you guys drive on the left.

03.34 – 03.47
If a ship gets beached, there are 1000 people on the beach and then everybody is a beachcomber, but they are not real beachcombers. There are only 8 of us left on Texel.

03.48 – 04.26
It’s all disappearing as there isn’t anything to find anymore, so we are dependant on a good storm. Interestingly, last year some stacks of wood fell from a ship and washed up on a local island. Also at that island, a container fell from a ship that was full of nuts and crisps. There was also a container full of mountain bike wheels and a few thousand luxury coats. The people of the island all started wearing jackets with fur collars from the beach.

04.27 – 5.18
I am Cor Ellen. I was born on Texel on the 16th November 1926. So today I am 83 years old. So let me say I am an old man. Another story is about a container, a container full of milk powder, milk powder made in Holland, on its way to Africa for the poor people over there. I got a lot of things from this container, so much, that for one year, I didn’t have to go to the milkman.

5.19 – 5.50
One time I found a small bottle on the beach full of money, the bottle was about this big and worth in today’s value – 500 Euros. At the time I was 8 years old, my brother opened the bottle and gave me some money to buy sweets whilst he bought a motorbike.





5.54 – 6.41
I have got more than 500 bottles, found with letters inside. This is a letter from Brentwood, Essex.
‘Please write and tell me about yourself. My full name is Suzanne Wendy Eley. I am 13 and three quarters. My hobbies are breeding budgies and reading not forgetting fishing. I also smoke. I hope you will write back.’

6.42 – 07.11
My name is Suzanne, I come from Brentwood in Essex. When I was 13 years old, I threw a bottle into the sea with my Dad. I think the idea was more my dads, I think it was something he read in the paper about bottles drifting. So he decided he was going to go down to the beach, so he said ‘write out a note’ and I remember one particular thing he said was to put stones in the bottom of the bottle so it would go with the sea and not the wind. So we went down to the beach and launched it out but I didn’t think id hear anything of it.

07.12 – 07.40
Sending a message to someone you don’t know, you hope that you’ll get an answer. But especially young people, children, they are very curious, they want to know ‘what’s in another country, what is somewhere else?’ – You try to make contact with other people, with maybe another continent even because we have found bottles from Iceland – we get them from anywhere.

07.41 – 08.31
These are 2 bottles that we found on the beach containing letters. These 2 children from Norfolk have a lot of knowledge of the sea. They weighed down the bottles with little pebbles so they would travel upright in the water. This way the bottles are carried by the current. If you don’t weigh them down, they float horizontally and get blown with the wind back to where they came from. With the wind behind them, they could return within 30 minutes.  These were put into the sea together on November the 25th and on December the 8th we found them. We opened one and it was from Fred Shepperd and the other was from his sister. The bottles from the brother and sister were found just 150 meters apart.

08.32 – 09.35
So Jonathan and Rebecca from England were going out together and the girl broke it off. Jonathan got a bit angry and put all the nice things he had of her in a box and threw it into the sea at Lowestoft. My brother found the box on the beach 10 days later. He opened the case, dried it all and discovered there were 330 photos. Clean photos I have to add as we were wondering what kind they were. There were also some love letters, cuddly toys and some saucy objects – dildos etc. I guess they didn’t need them anymore. Rebecca said she wanted them back, but we don’t do that – What the sea gives, we keep.

09.43 – 11.20
Around here, sad things occur as well.  I used to have a girlfriend who moved away from the island to Germany. She would often come back to the island on holiday and every year she would visit. One day when I was 16, I came home from work and there was a silence at home. My girlfriend had not arrived back at home after going to swim in the North Sea. We went searching with everybody, family, Police and other islanders. They went up to the north island because there was a certain wind and they thought she would be there, but I woke up in the middle of the night – 03:15, I can still remember the exact time. I took my bike down to this beach and found my girlfriend there, where that wooden post is – that’s where she was over there. If the tide had come up, then she would have been lost forever as the currents are so strong, you would never find her again. This is my most special find.

11.28 – 11.53
Look, if you like to do anything in the world and you like to get to know other people, look at the water, maybe there is a bottle. So still today I look at the bottles drifting in the water around Texel island.