Whisky found stashed on warship after 35 years

A small bottle of Canadian whisky that was hidden on an Australian warship for 35 years has finally been discovered.

An image posted on Reddit showing the bottle being cut from its 35-year-old hiding place

The miniature of six-year-old MacNaughton Canadian Whisky, wrapped in insulation tape, was apparently hidden inside the forward starboard leg of the main mast of HMAS Sydney by the team that built her at the Todd Pacific Shipyards in Seattle in 1982. The date, 10 April 1982 was also scribbled on the label.

The little bottle then went undiscovered for 35 years while Sydney sailed the seas, completing two round-the-world voyages in addition to other operations.

The Adelaide-class frigate was decommissioned in 2015 and towed to Henderson near Perth in May of this year to be scrapped.

Earlier this month however, a former employee of Todd who had built Sydney got in touch with Birdon – the company that has been charged with breaking up the vessel – to tell them the secret. Cutting away a section of the mast soon revealed the hidden spirit and it was brought out of its metal cocoon.

A former crewman on HMAS Sydney, Brenton Friend, was quoted in Australian media as saying: “the amount of times I’ve walked past that post and not knowing, if only”.

By 1983, when HMAS Sydney came into service with the Royal Australian Navy, traditions such as the ration of a tot of rum were long a thing of the past. The rum ration was stopped in the British and Canadian navies in the 1970s, although it continued with the Royal New Zealand Navy until 1990. The RAN however had halted the practice as early as 1921, making the little bottle even more of an illicit stowaway than it might have been otherwise.

Over the last three and a half decades, the frigate (and the bottle) has travelled 959,627 nautical miles – over 1.7 million kilometres or 1.1m miles.

During its service the ship has earned four fresh battle honours for service in East Timor and the Persian Gulf (in addition to 10 honours given to previous incarnations of HMAS Sydney), took part in anti-narcotic operations in the Caribbean, anti-piracy missions in the Indian Ocean, evacuated Australian citizens from Fiji and Bougainville during periods of civil unrest, was the first Australian warship to visit Sweden and the Russian port of Vladivostok and led the Australian fleet into Sydney harbour for the fleet review in 2009.

The fate of the little bottle may be sealed however, as reports seem to suggest its discoverers will drink it. Hopefully this will not happen. To begin with it would almost be a wasteful end for the spirit which has been on such an extraordinary voyage. Perhaps a place in the Australian National Maritime Museum or Royal Australian Navy Heritage Centre (both in Sydney, fittingly) would be a better place for it?

Furthermore, as ‘part’ of the ship – not having been carried for consumption or other use – the drinks business would like to know if this is the first bottle of whisky (or anything else for that matter) that can be considered to have won battle honours?

*Which include two of just three single-ship actions awarded since the start of the 20^th century; the first by the Town class HMAS Sydney for its destruction of the German cruiser SMS Emden in 1914 and the second for the Leander class Sydney’s sinking of the German cruiser Kormoran in 1941.