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Updated: May 17, 2025
Mail-packets are supposed, under the Conference rules, to have the five-thousand-foot lanes to themselves, but the foreigner in a hurry is apt to take liberties with English air. There is no cloud on the Atlantic, and faint streaks of cream round Dingle Bay show where the driven seas hammer the coast. Lower still lies a disabled Dane she is telling the liner all about it in International.
Nominally a mail-packet sailed from Jamaica once a month, but the seas were swarming with swift-sailing French and Spanish privateers, hanging about the trade-routes on the chance of capturing West Indiamen with their rich cargoes, so the mail-packets had to wait till a convoy assembled, and were then escorted home by men-of-war.
Our grievance was, that our mail-packet was stopped on the seas while doing its ordinary beneficent work. And our resolve is, that our mail-packets shall not be so stopped wit impunity. As we were high handed in old days in insisting on this right of search, it certainly behoves us to see that we be just in our modes of proceeding.
Among other things, we find reference to `fifteen couple of hounds going to the King of the Romans with a free pass. A certain `Dr Crichton, carrying with him a cow and divers other necessaries, is mentioned as having been posted! also `two servant-maids going as laundresses to my Lord Ambassador Methuen, and `a deal case with four flitches of bacon for Mr Pennington of Rotterdam. The captains of the mail-packets ought to have worn coats of mail, for they had orders to run while they could, to fight when they could not run, and to throw the mails overboard when fighting failed!
The second part was to follow. But it was now growing late, and time and mail-packets wait for no man. As I come forth from the Elocution Contest, I find that night has closed in. Not a ripple is on the far-stretching blue waste.
"But our mail-packets were not always thus easily or summarily mastered. Sometimes they fought and conquered, but, whatever happened, the result was invariably productive of expense, because wounded men had to be cared for and cured or pensioned.
But in size she will not necessarily be any larger than the nineteenth century type of mail steamer. Indeed the probability is that, on the average, the twentieth century mail-packets will be smaller, being built for speed rather than for magnificence or carrying capacity. The turbine-engine will be the main factor in working the approaching revolution in mail steamer construction.
Abetting myself in my idle humour, I closed my eyes, and recalled life on board of one of those mail-packets, as I lay, part of that day, in the Bay of New York, O! The regular life began mine always did, for I never got to sleep afterwards with the rigging of the pump while it was yet dark, and washing down of decks.
He was rushing all over the Archipelago, jumping in and out of local mail-packets as if they had been tram-cars, here, there, and everywhere organizing with all his might. This was no mooning about. This was business. And this sudden display of purposeful energy shook the incredulity of the most sceptical more than any scientific demonstration of the value of these coal-outcrops could have done.
We are to secure all "loose objects"; hood up our Fleury Rays; and "on no account to attempt to clear snow from our conning-towers till the weather abates." Under-powered craft, we are told, can ascend to the limit of their lift, mail-packets to look out for them accordingly; the lower lanes westward are pitting very badly, "with frequent blow-outs, vortices, laterals, etc."
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