The Post Office Packet Service dates to Tudor times and ran until 1823, when the Admiralty assumed control of the service. Originally, the Post Office used packet ships to carry mail packets to and from British embassies, colonies and outposts. The vessels generally also carried bullion, private goods and passengers. The ships were usually lightly armed and relied on speed for their security. That said, Britain was at war almost continuously during the Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries with the result that packet ships did get involved in naval engagements with enemy warships and privateers, and were, occasionally, captured.
Read more about Post Office Packet Service: Stations, Wartime Service, Admiralty Control, Later Developments, See Also, References and Sources
Famous quotes containing the words post office, post, office, packet and/or service:
“A demanding stranger arrived one morning in a small town and asked a boy on the sidewalk of the main street, “Boy, where’s the post office?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, then, where might the drugstore be?”
“I don’t know.”
“How about a good cheap hotel?”
“I don’t know.”
“Say, boy, you don’t know much, do you?”
“No, sir, I sure don’t. But I ain’t lost.””
—William Harmon (b. 1938)
“I can forgive even that wrong of wrongs,
Those undreamt accidents that have made me
Seeing that Fame has perished this long while,
Being but a part of ancient ceremony
Notorious, till all my priceless things
Are but a post the passing dogs defile.”
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“Notwithstanding the unaccountable apathy with which of late years the Indians have been sometimes abandoned to their enemies, it is not to be doubted that it is the good pleasure and the understanding of all humane persons in the Republic, of the men and the matrons sitting in the thriving independent families all over the land, that they shall be duly cared for; that they shall taste justice and love from all to whom we have delegated the office of dealing with them.”
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“we know our end
A packet of worm-seed, a garden of spent tissues.”
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“Night City was like a deranged experiment in Social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you’d break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone ... though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)