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, 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)
“It is easier to appear worthy of a position one does not hold, than of the office which one fills.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“we know our end
A packet of worm-seed, a garden of spent tissues.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“In public buildings set aside for the care and maintenance of the goods of the middle ages, a staff of civil service art attendants praise all the dead, irrelevant scribblings and scrawlings that, at best, have only historical interest for idiots and layabouts.”
—George Grosz (1893–1959)