Indian Ship Letters 1814 - 1819 25 March 2004 The East India Company was involved in carrying Mails between England and India until 1854. It made no charge and received no Government remuneration for this service. This did not mean that the British Post Office did not meddle in, or attempt to control the Indian Mails, nor that relationships were harmonious. The Company's monopoly on trade with India meant that the mails between England and India could be carried only on the Company's vessels or occasionally on the Navy's ships. Some mails did travel to England on foreign vessels via their home country. The Company had been in the habit of making no charge for carrying mail between Britain and India. This applied equally to the mail of private individuals, the Government and the Post Office. It would receive mail from all over the country to be forwarded to India, bags would be sent from the Post Office and Government Departments and there was even a posting box at its offices in Leadenhall Street. Mails brought from India were generally passed to the Post Office and were subject to the normal ship letter charges levied by the Post Office and any inland postage - a situation that appeared to please everybody. Unlike the mails to other major countries the Post Office did not operate a Packet Mail to India. The reason had always been one of cost because of the great distance. In one respect free transit was a real benefit, but the use of Indiamen which were designed to carry freight rather than for speed did mean that the mails were slow, taking between 170 and 230 days and at times even longer. To the Post Office there was the advantage of dealing with only one private carrier to India. With the loss of the monopoly in 1813 any ship could carry the mails. The display illustrates the mails between India and Great Britain between 1780 and about 1880. This cut-off essentially represents the point at which the service entered the modern preflight era. From this point there was some improvement in speed and reduction in rates but the service was materially the same until Airmails. The text of the lecture is in the April and May issues of the London Philatelist. It deals with a much shorter period 1814 - 1819 and is primarily concerned with the negotiations of the Post Office with the East India Company, the Admiralty and private ship owners. The only route for ships to India was via the Cape of Good Hope until the Suez Canal was opened in 1869. The majority of mail continued to go via the Cape until 1830. From the early 1800's there was a growing demand for a faster mail service, which had not improved since the middle of the previous century. These demands lead to experiments with a sea route through the Mediterranean, overland across Egypt to the Red Sea, and then by sea to India. At first mail from India via Suez was landed at Falmouth. Once the rail link between London and Southampton was completed, Southampton became the port of landing for all Indian mails. Later, various overland routes to the Channel ports through Europe shortened the sea route from Egypt. [snip] Full text with images at: http://www.rpsl.org.uk/indian_ship_letters/index.html ----- Harshawardhan_Bosham Nimkhedkar Nagpur, India