ABSTRACT
The Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, hereafter Royal Mail or the Company, differed from the other steamship companies established in the 1830s and 1840s in that its leading figure was neither a steamship owner nor experienced in the shipping trades. James MacQueen was a plantation manager in the West Indies. Having returned to Britain, in 1837 he developed and presented to the government a plan for, initially, an efficient, necessarily subsidized, steamship mail service between Britain and the West Indies. Royal Mail's first wooden paddle-steamers had accommodation for 100 passengers, with limited space set aside for the stowage of mail and specie. The Company histories make few references to the carriage of cargo not surprising, perhaps, when James MacQueen's words are borne in mind. The main sources used were the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company archives in the Caird Library of the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich and in the Special Collections Library of University College, London.
