Internet sleuths have linked the note, a purported SOS message written in a mixture of Chinese, Indonesian and English, to the Yong Yu Sing No 18, a Taiwanese fishing vessel that was found adrift with its crew missing in 2021.

Matthew Laming said he and a friend were walking on a beach on Inisheer, a small island located about 8km (5 miles) off County Clare, last week when they came across a wax-sealed bottle containing the handwritten note. “We used Google Translate and the first half of the message translated to an SOS message in Indonesian,” Laming told Al Jazeera.

Laming said he handed the note over to the local police before posting about his discovery on the social media site Reddit, where internet sleuths quickly got to work trying to track down its origin. “We posted it in a few places online, but when we posted it in r/beachcombing, it blew up and clever Redditors were able to trace it back to a real missing ship crew,” Laming said.

According to the Reddit posting, the text reads: “Please send help! We are lost since 12/20. There are 3 of us here. We don’t know the name of this island. We are injured. HELP. HELLO. SOS.” The note ends with the Chinese character for “Li” and the name “Yong Yu Sing No 18”. An Garda Siochana, the Irish police service, said it does not comment on third-party content online but confirmed it had received a “report of an item found” on Inisheer last Saturday. It declined to provide further information. The Yong Yu Sing No 18 was reported missing on January 1, 2021, after its owner lost contact with the ship’s captain, a man surnamed Li, two days earlier, according to Taiwan’s Central News Agency. The fishing vessel was later found approximately 600km (373 miles) from Midway Atoll, an unincorporated United States territory in the North Pacific Ocean, with its crew and lifeboat missing. (Al Jazeera/ Matthew Long)