By sail & steam

Today, we are inundated with ways to correspond internationally; and even when we need to send or take delivery of a physical item, we can coordinate and track it in real time from our mobile phone. Of course, it wasn’t that long ago that the situation was very different. For hundreds of years the people of Britain and her empire were reliant upon the Post Office Packet Service for delivering mail and correspondence around the world.

Regular, organised voyages for sending royal correspondence across the Channel arrived with the Normans, and routes gradually became more established for sending mail ‘pacquettes’. By 1512, Henry VIII had appointed a ‘Master of the Posts’ – effectively the founding of the Royal Mail. The role was later formalised as postmaster general. By the 1620s, Dover in Kent was already well established as a packet station for sending cross-Channel correspondence.

Eventually, these packet ships sailed from various ports across England and Wales, covering