Demerara
Pernambuco Bahia Rio de Janeiro
Buenos Aires Montevideo
Madeira Bermuda
New York
Tampico Vera Cruz
Havanna
Jamaica
Barbados Cartagena
St. Thomas
Lisbon Halifax
Falmouth
N
Channel ports, mainly Falmouth or Plymouth, to Barbados during 1702-1711 in 32.7 days on average, being only two days slower than the Falmouth packets of 1840.600 At the same time, however, it looks like the merchant ships would have sailed from British ports to Guiana clearly faster in 1840 than to Barbados in 1698-1700.
According to Ian K. Steele, an average merchantman of the earlier period sailed from the Channel ports to Barbados in 62.9 days (20 cases) and from the west coast of England in 80.2 days (26 cases).601
We should probably not assume that merchant shipping developed so much faster than mail sailings. It seems that the customs-to-customs calculation method used by Steele may have added a number of extra days to the duration of voyages.
The ships did not always leave on the same day as they were cleared from the customs, due to bad weather conditions or other reasons.
Despite generally faster sailings, the West Indian mail transmission – even if conducted bi-monthly – was organized in a way that gave no advantage to the government mail service compared with the merchant ships in terms of business information circulation. Table 36 gives an example of the best options, starting from Liverpool at the beginning of the year 1840.
Table 36. Consecutive information circles enabled by Falmouth packets for correspondence between Liverpool and Demerara in 1840, an example
Letter sent
As can be seen in table 36, the information circulation enabled by the Falmouth packets on the West Indian mail route was not at all faster than what could be achieved by merchant ships (see table 35). The only good thing in the service was the regularity in sailing times from England. The arrivals at Barbados varied considerably, and there seems to have been no fixed departure dates from Haiti. From a Liverpool merchant's perspective, at least four extra days had to be added for the inland connections to and from Falmouth. The mails were made in London two days before the departure of the packet, and they arrived via the London Post Office.
When looking at the West Indian route only, it seems strange that the Falmouth packets did not adopt the practice that had already been used by the American sailing packets in the North Atlantic for 20 years. The American packets made three round trips each year, not more or less, independent of contrary winds and other mishaps. Thus they could generally sail on the published date from both sides of the Atlantic. As already discussed, this punctuality made the North Atlantic business communications the best existing at the time.
600 Britnor, 9.
601 Steele (1986), 283.
The Falmouth packets made the West Indian round trip in 87 days on average. The longest round trip took 107 days and the shortest only 73 days. Within these limits, it would have been rather easy to organize a better working system, similar to the North Atlantic line traffic model. As there was a packet leaving from England regularly bi-monthly, there could have been one leaving from the other end correspondingly. Now there was a packet leaving regularly from Falmouth, but the time between two packet departures from Haiti at the other end of the voyage could vary between two and 34 days, not to mention the two ships that departed on the same day in April 1840.
Unfortunately, the system was too complicated to allow simple solutions. The same packets that carried the Guiana mails to Barbados and the answers home to England also carried mails for Halifax and Bermuda until mid-1840, when the Cunard Line took over the North Atlantic route by its new steamers.602 In addition, they sailed the long mail routes to Vera Cruz and Tampico as well as to Bahia, Pernambuco and Rio de Janeiro. The last mentioned route was so long and therefore unpopular among packet captains that the ships were not normally sent there twice in succession. The stormy Halifax route with its raw winter winds was a similar case. As the mail routes were not equally long, scheduled mixed round trips were not easy to organize.
Although the South American packet route was the longest, it was not actually very much longer than the route to Mexico. The average duration of the round trip to Rio de Janeiro was 133 days and to Vera Cruz 126 days in 1840.603
The South American route
The South American route had existed since 1808 as part of the good relationship between Britain and the Portuguese Royal family living in exile in Brazil during the war time. The sailings were originally only to Rio de Janeiro, with a call at Madeira and Tenerife on the way outwards, but as the trade developed between Britain and Brazil, demand arose for an additional port of call in South America. In April 1817, the "merchants of Liverpool and London" represented to the Postmaster General that Pernambuco as well as Bahia should be included as ports of call "as it would be a great convenience to the Trade". A committee of captains at Falmouth considered that the voyage out and home to Rio would not be lengthened by touching Pernambuco by more than a week to ten days.604
The service on that route was certainly not easy, and the customers were not happy either. The coast of Pernambuco was reported by packet captains to be dangerous in the extreme, having neither lighthouses to direct vessels by night nor a port in which a packet could take shelter by day, and not the smallest assistance could
602 See the sailing lists of Arnell & Ludington, 69.
603 The figures are calculated from the sailing lists of Howat, 81; and from Lloyd's List 1840.
– The official length of the round voyage Falmouth – Rio de Janeiro – Falmouth was 18 weeks. See Howat, 5.
604 See Howat, 1-6. - In practice, the system was more complicated. On those journeys starting from Falmouth in January-June each year, the packets called at Bahia and Pernambuco on their homeward voyage. On the journeys commencing from Falmouth in the second half of the year, Bahia and Pernambuco were touched at the outward voyage. And in 1832, when the Post Office service to South America was totally taken over by the Admiralty, this was adjusted once more so that the respective months were February-July and August-January. See Howat, 65. The reason for the odd six-month arrangement was simply that the running order of the South American ports of call depended on the prevailing winds.
See Pawlyn, 111.
be rendered from the shore. Strong gales were not the only problems during the early packet voyages. Captures by privateers and pirates caused several serious losses, and sometimes the ships had such a lack of crew that they were not able to sail on schedule. Heavy loss of life was not only due to action on board during the wartime captures, but at least 99 men were killed by yellow fever between 1780 and 1828 on board the packets.605
The merchants trading between Pernambuco and Britain complained a year or so after the arrangement had been made that the packets did not stay long enough to enable them to reply to the letters brought from Britain. In a number of instances, the packet had only remained a day or less. It was essential for the merchants to have sufficient time to receive their mail, absorb the contents and write replies to their trading contacts in Britain. As a result of the representation made, instructions were issued by the Secretary of the Post Office that packets should stay at Pernambuco for 48 hours, as they did at Bahia, unless it was detrimental to their safety.606
The sailing lists of Howat do not enable the calculation of all voyage lengths during the first years of packet service, as the arrival dates in Rio are not recorded. A comparison between the length of the home trips from Rio to Falmouth gives us the following results:
Table 37. Average duration of packet sailings from Rio de Janeiro to Falmouth, 1820-1850
1820 1830 1840 1850 Days on
average 62.2 60.1 58.7 51.9
Source: Sailing lists of Howat, 13, 77, 81, 86. – The packets called at Bahia and Pernambuco on six homeward voyages out of 12 each year.
It is interesting to note that the average sailings shortened by about ten days from the 1820s to the 1850s even if the route arrangements remained the same and all these trips were conducted by government sailing packets.607 Here the difference was clearly in the technical improvements of the vessels.
As already described in connection with the Falmouth packet sailings to Halifax (see Chapter V.2.) the Admiralty took over the Post Office administration of the mail packets in 1823 as part of the post-war arrangements. The ships which the Admiralty introduced in packet service were slow ten-gun brigs and sloops, later packet brigs. The first category packets were small men-of-war, mainly 230-240 tons, and built for general naval purposes in the 1820s. The ships were modified and re-equipped for mail service, mostly including the reduction of the armament to six
605 Howat, 5, 10, 16-18; and Pawlyn, 54-56, 66-68.
606 Howat, 6.
607 In 1830, there was a double service to South America, conducted by both the Post Office and the Admiralty. The Post Office packet sailings covered the route Falmouth – Rio de Janeiro – Montevideo – Buenos Aires – Montevideo – Rio de Janeiro – Falmouth and did not make a call at Bahia or Pernambuco. Their average home voyage from Rio took 51.3 days.
(Howat, 61) In three cases, the mails were transferred from the packet to a man-of-war in Rio, however. These changes caused serious protests among the local merchants as well as the Post Office in England due to confusion in sailing schedules and differences in postage rates. See Howat, 54-55.
guns, but they were never really suitable for this duty. The later packet brigs were built in the 1830s especially for the mail service. They were larger, about 360 tons, and more seaworthy than the older ones. Before these rearrangements took place, nine of the 25 naval packets of the first category were lost at sea between 1827 and 1840. Several of them just disappeared.608
In table 37, the year 1840 happens to be in the middle of the shift period, when the Admiralty had already replaced part of the old men-of-wars with new-model packet brigs. Five of the monthly trips from Rio were conducted by the newer, purpose-built vessels. Their average sailing time was 51 days, while the trip by the old vessels took 64 days on average. In 1850, only newer ones were left in service, and the average sailings had reduced to less than 52 days.609
As mentioned, an average packet round trip between Falmouth and Rio de Janeiro took approximately 133 days. This was not the same as the information circle, however. By 1840, the packet system had been organized in a way which in four cases out of 12 made it possible to send an answer to a letter by the packet which was leaving from Rio earlier than the one which had carried the mails from England. Even this small arrangement reduced the length of an average information circle by eight days, from 133 to 125 days, without any changes in the duration of sailings. Table 38 shows how this worked.
Despite the varying length of sailings, the information circulation could have been clearly faster during the period of Post Office sailing packets, if the arrivals and departures had been better coordinated. Only four times out of 12 were the merchants in Rio de Janeiro able to reply to their letters immediately, while in the rest of the cases, the earlier packet had already left the port when the next one arrived with the latest news. In these four cases, the information circulation enabled by the combined service of two packets was several weeks shorter than the single vessel's round trip.
Calculating from the beginning of 1840, the Falmouth packet service could offer fewer than three consecutive information circles between England and Rio de Janeiro that year. The first circle started by the departure of the Alert on 10 January 1840, the second by the Delight on 5 June and the third by the Express on 9 October.
As can be noticed in Table 38, two of the circles clearly benefited from the possibility to send the answer from Rio de Janeiro by an earlier packet.610
Even if the information circulation to Rio de Janeiro can be considered rather fast compared with e.g. the much nearer located Demerara, the situation was worse if the letters proceeded to Argentina or Uruguay. The mail sailings to Buenos Aires started in 1824, and as long as the Post Office packets served on the route, they continued from Rio to Montevideo and Buenos Aires on their trip from Falmouth.
The long sailing seemed to be too much for the Navy officers, as the system was
608 Howat, 29, 32-35.
609 See the list of Admiralty packets in Howat, 32-35. It is a more complete list than the one in Lloyd's Register 1840. – The longer route via Bahia and Pernambuco on homeward sailings half of the year did not explain the difference. There were new and old vessels on both routes, and the new ones were typically faster on both routes throughout the year. See the sailing lists of Howat, 81. – As an exception to the rule mentioned, the Seagull which was the last Falmouth packet in service was of middle-size, 280 tons.
610 This opportunity remained occasional even in 1850, when it was possible only three times out of 12 to send an answer to a letter by an earlier departing packet. Additionally, one packet left on the same day when the packet from England arrived, thus giving only a slight opportunity to somebody close to the port to send an answer to a letter by that vessel. See sailing lists of Howat, 85-86.
changed when the Admiralty gradually replaced the private contract packets. Starting from late 1832, there was a branch packet service between Rio and the southern ports.
In 1830, the Post Office packets made the round trip from Falmouth via Rio and Montevideo to Buenos Aires and back again in 170 days on average. In two cases it was possible to send the answers from Buenos Aires by an earlier packet. This reduced the length of one information circle by ten and another by 23 days. The average duration of one information circle was thus 168 days.611 The system enabled two full information circles with Buenos Aires during that year, starting from Falmouth on 23 January and ending at the same port on 11 December 1830. The third circle started from Falmouth on 24 December; this packet arrived at Rio on 18 February, 1831. At least two days at both ends need to be added for inland transmission to and from Liverpool.
Table 38. Falmouth packet round trips and the length of information circles, Falmouth – Rio de Janeiro, 1840.
Source: Calculated from the sailing lists of Howat, 81. – The options to send replies to the letters with an earlier packet are marked in bold. – An average sailing from Falmouth to Rio de Janeiro took 48 days, varying between 42 and 54 days. The sailing to the other direction took 57 days on average, varying between 42 and 73 days.
* February had 29 days in 1840.
** Six trips of the year were conducted via Pernambuco and Bahia.
611 Calculated from the sailing lists of Howat, 61.
The Admiralty system for Bueros Aires was more complicated. Table 39 (in the end of the book) depicts how it worked in 1840. The route consisted actually of several parts. Firstly, as depicted in Table 38, the outward sailing from Falmouth to Rio de Janeiro took 48.5 days on average, varying between 42 and 54 days. The branch packet was ready to sail for Buenos Aires within three to five days after the Falmouth packet had arrived. The sailing took 12 days. The average waiting time in Buenos Aires was ten days, varying between seven and 22 days. The trip back to Rio was typically more difficult than the voyage down; it took 20 days on average. The next Falmouth packet took the mails and left within ten days on average. The delay varied between two and 19 days, however. The homeward trip from Rio to Falmouth took 57.3 days on average, nine days more than in the other direction.
As can be noted in Table 39, the departures of the Falmouth packets from Rio de Janeiro were organized so that the mails from Buenos Aires could always proceed by the next packet after the one which had brought the mails from Europe. This was a major improvement compared with other Admiralty ruled routes where the next ship had often just left when the auxiliary service arrived with the mails, but the system itself was rather slow with changes of ships and waiting at ports. Even if some vessels were apparently better than ten years earlier, the length of an average information circle did not reduce very much within a decade, only from 168 to 162 days.612
The Falmouth packets stayed at Rio for approximately 27 days on average, while it took almost 43 days on average for the branch service to make the round trip to Montevideo and Buenos Aires. With respect to the mail service between England and Brazil, it was obviously wise to organize the sailings to Argentina and Uruguay as a separate branch service and thus speed up the information transmission to and from Rio de Janeiro. One could say, however, that some more efficiency at the ports could easily have reduced the length of the information circles by at least one week.
Now, two weeks were used on average for taking the European mails to the branch packet at Rio, and the branch packet mails to the leaving Falmouth packet at the same port on the way back home.
The Mexico route
The packet route to Mexico was established in 1826, and taken over by the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company together with the West Indian route in 1842.613 As far
612 Calculated from the sailing lists of Howat, 61, 81, 94.
613 See Howat, 27; Kenton & Parsons, 2-3, 8, 21. – There was also a French government mail packet line between Bordeaux and Vera Cruz in 1827-1835. The monthly service of the
"Paquebots Réguliers aux frais du Gouvernement" was ceased in mid-1835. The last ship was to sail from Bordeaux for Martinique, Haiti and Vera Cruz on 1.7.1835. A new service was started by Compagnie Général Transatlantique's steamers as late as 1862. The early French sailing packet service enabled about the same information circulation from Bordeaux to Vera Cruz as the Falmouth packet service did from England. A round trip normally took about five months and two information circles could be carried out in 11 months. Salles gives the
"Paquebots Réguliers aux frais du Gouvernement" was ceased in mid-1835. The last ship was to sail from Bordeaux for Martinique, Haiti and Vera Cruz on 1.7.1835. A new service was started by Compagnie Général Transatlantique's steamers as late as 1862. The early French sailing packet service enabled about the same information circulation from Bordeaux to Vera Cruz as the Falmouth packet service did from England. A round trip normally took about five months and two information circles could be carried out in 11 months. Salles gives the