Ramage's Prize by Dudley Pope Read Free Book Online

received by an admiral …
    He ran a finger down the rest of the names and was surprised at the number and variety of jobs listed. They ranged from the receiver general to the superintendent and surveyor of mail-coaches; from the Postmaster-General’s chamber-keeper to the deliverer of letters to the House of Commons (at 6s 8d a day—presumably he starved when the House was not in session).
    The Post Office, in effect, was split into two sections, the Inland Letter Office and the Foreign Letter Office. The former employed four dozen sorters and more than a hundred letter-carriers (at 14s a week), but was far less complex than the Foreign Letter Office, whose comptroller was paid £700 a year—not much less than Sir Pilcher Skinner.
    Twenty letter-carriers presumably delivered the incoming foreign mail to the Lombard Street sorters, and carried the bags of outgoing foreign mail to the various ports to be loaded on board the packets—to Falmouth for the West Indies, Lisbon and America; Weymouth for the Channel Islands; and Harwich for Hamburg.
    There were five “mail ports” abroad and each had its Post Office agent (among them “J. Smith, Deputy Postmaster-General of Jamaica”), while elsewhere there were postmasters. And as he read their names, Ramage began to feel uneasy: the number of places listed brought home the enormity of the orders he had been given—from Quebec and Halifax at one end of the Atlantic to Surinam, Demerara, Tobago and Barbados at the other; from Hamburg and Lisbon on one side of the Atlantic to New York and Jamaica on the other.
    He pictured the packets sailing from Falmouth to deliver bags of outward mail at all these places and collect the inward, and realized the Cornish port was the centre of a giant cobweb, the lines reaching out thousands of miles across the Atlantic. Not straight lines, but lines gently curved as they met Trade winds, bent sharply as they rounded continents and islands, and sometimes forced back on themselves by gales and storms. Quebec, Halifax and New York were three thousand miles across the often stormy North Atlantic, much of it against strong headwinds; to Barbados was more than four thousand miles in a long dog-leg sweep past Spain and the west coast of North Africa, passing close to Madeira and the Canary Islands before picking up the North-East Trades for the long run across the Atlantic to a landfall at Barbados, with three hundred miles on to Antigua and another nine hundred to Jamaica. Another packet sailed a similar route towards Barbados before turning south-west for Demerara and Surinam, on the continent of South America.
    So much for the routes. He found his interest quickening as he came to the ships themselves. The
Kalendar
gave a list of “His Majesty’s packet boats, with their stations,” and beside each one was the name of her commander. There were twelve packets given for “W. India and America,” but seventeen commanders were listed. Five had blanks against their names—had their packets been captured? But, Ramage groaned inwardly, some of the packet people had let their patriotism swamp their imagination—one packet on the Lisbon and three more on the Hamburg route were named
Prince of Wales,
and two called
King George
were listed under Hamburg. The only way of distinguishing them was by the names of their commanders.
    Finally, reluctant to leave the coolness of the secretary’s office to go out into the scorching sun and noisy, dusty streets for his visit to the Deputy Postmaster-General, Ramage turned over another page and glanced at the “Postage of simple letters in British pence.” From Falmouth to any port in North America or the West Indies cost twelve pence, plus the inland postage to Falmouth. Thus a letter from London to New York or Jamaica cost eight pence to Falmouth and another twelve pence to cross the Atlantic. Sending a letter between the West Indies and North