ABSTRACT
Edmond Dummer1 Merchants have always been concerned about keeping abreast of market fluctuations. The mails convey such intelligence and it comes as no surprise that businessmen have had a consistent interest in maintaining and improving postal service. For seventeenth-and eighteenth-century English merchants who had dealings with the colonies, a tenuous but normally effective line of communication involved letter drops at taverns frequented by ship captains who traded to particular areas. A ships captain would collect letters there and deliver them when he arrived, receiving a small sum for the carriage of each letter. This worked well until war disrupted the system. Letters were delayed if convoys had to be formed and letters were lost if ships were captured.2 The War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1713) saw a partial solution to this problem when the British government, at the behest of the merchants and to serve its own needs, established packet ship mail services to speed communications. Improved were the already existing runs to the European Continent; inaugurated were totally new packets to the Western Hemisphere, first to the West Indies, later to North America, between Bristol and New York.3 The discovery of one piece of mail carried by the Bristol packet sheds a bit more light on the service, its origins, its demise, and its more lasting implications. The letter itself becomes an important document in the postal history of the early eighteenth century. Unfortunately the covering sheet of the letter in question lacks an explicit date (see figure 8.1). This difficulty, while tending to pervade the postal history of this period, is not insurmountable. The dates of the packet service, 1710 to 1713, suggest initial limits to any dating of the letter. Its postal markings provide added support to such a hypothetical dating. The identification of the writer of the letter and its recipient, the establishment of their relationship, and the uncovering of their dates of death, all meshing neatly with the other particulars, confirm the argument. As a result, this postal cover, of untraced provenance,4 presumably unnoticed previously because of its lack of a date, can now be appreciated as both the earliest
1 Edmond Dummer, organizer of the first transatlantic packet service, in a letter to Sidney, First Earl of Godolphin, Lord High Treasurer, 15 Feb. 1706/07, T 64/89, p. 356, PRO. The original version of this chapter was published in Postal History Journal, XIII (July 1968), 15-24. Copyright © 1968 Postal History Society of the Americas. Copyright © renewed 1996 by John J.McCusker. This revision is presented here with the permission of the Postal History Society which awarded the original essay its gold medal as the best article to appear in the journal in 1968. I continue to be grateful for the help and support given me in the preparation of this chapter by Carl H.Scheele, then Associate Curator-inCharge, of what was then the Division of Philately and Postal History and is now the National Postal Museum, Smithsonian Institution. Photographs are courtesy of the Division of Philately and Postal History, Smithsonian Institution. I am additionally thankful to Joseph Geraci of the National Postal Museum for his advice and assistance. 2 An example of the other kinds of problems that could occur under this system is found in the complaint by one London businessman who reported to his correspondent that his most recent “letters…being brought upon the [Royal] Exchange to deliver, it was not my fortune to be there, so that my letters were catched up” by someone else. John Paige, at London, to William Clerke, at Tenerife, Canary Islands, 20 Sept. 1650, in The Letters of John Paige, London Merchant, 1648-1658, ed. George F.Steckley, London Record Society Publications, XXI (London, 1984), 25. People learned to send second and third copies of letters to offset such problems but the consequent delays in the receipt of important information could be significant. 3 See, in general, Frank Staff, The Transatlantic Mail (London and New York, [1956]); and Howard Robinson, Carrying British Mail Overseas (London, [1964]). For the broader context of all of these developments, see especially Ian K.Steele, The English Atlantic, 16751740: An Exploration of Communication and Continuity (New York, 1986), particularly pp. 168-188.
