Chapter Three
Before seeing the Deputy Postmaster-General, Ramage went to Government House to call on the Governor's secretary in his large and immaculately tidy office. Thankful to be sitting down in a cool and friendly room, Ramage chatted for a few minutes, politely refused a rum punch and then asked if he could borrow a copy of the Royal Kalendar for ten minutes.
The secretary was a few years older than Ramage and obviously assumed that any visitor had a favour to ask of the Governor. He looked relieved when he gave Ramage the small, thick volume. "Want to see how your name is rising up the Navy List?" he asked jovially.
Ramage laughed. "Progress is so slow that I need look only once a year!"
The Kalendar listed nearly everyone employed in Government offices at home and abroad, and gave many other details ranging from the ships of war in commission to the names of the staff of the City of London Lying-in Hospital. The information about the General Post Office (ranging from the fact it was "Erected by Act of Parliament, 27 December 1660, Lombard Street" to a list of nearly two hundred offices open for the delivery and collection of the Penny Post) covered eight pages.
Ramage saw that the political leadership was divided between two Joint Postmasters-General, Lord Auckland and Lord Gower, each of whom received a salary of £5,000 a year. The Secretary, Francis Freeling, received £500 a year - hardly overpaid. Except, he noticed in another section, Freeling was also the "Principal and Resident Surveyor", at £700 a year, which gave him a total of more than that 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 fourteen shillings 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 America - a part of the way round the edge of the spider's web, as it were - cost four pence.
Well, anything more he was to learn about the Post Office would have to come from Mr Smith. He gave the Kalendar back to the Governor's secretary, once again refused a rum punch, borrowed a pencil and some paper to make some calculations and left, tucking the papers in his pocket.
The Deputy Postmaster-General of Jamaica was a man with a mania for tidiness. Although the enormous outer office looked like a cross between a counting house and a warehouse, with sorters working on the local mail at a long bench along one wall and the canvas mailbags hanging from hooks along another, Mr Smith's own room was as neat as a column of printed figures.
He worked at a large, square, mahogany table on top of which smooth pebbles held down piles of papers whose edges fluttered in the breeze coming through the jalousie at either end of the room. The piles were spaced out with geometric precision, as if the pebbles were chess men.
On top of each pile under the weight was a neatly written label indicating what it contained, and a scrutiny of the labels showed the scope of Mr Smith's work. The largest pile was marked "Inward packetboats - lost", and next to it was "Outward packetboats - lost". Another large pile contained "Complaints - from committee of West India merchants", and next to it, "Complaints - from private citizens". Yet another said simply, "From Lombard Street, miscellaneous". Directly in front of him was a small pile which said: "From Lord Auckland".
In contrast to the neatness of his table-top, Smith was a large, gangling man with heavy features and large hands seemingly too clumsy to handle papers: they were, in size, the hands of a labourer. Yet Smith not only had one of the most coveted jobs in Jamaica - in peacetime, anyway - but he did it supremely well. He had it and, despite the influence and patronage of other claimants, held it because without him the Post Office's foreign section in Jamaica became chaos.
Unmarried, and with a widowed sister in Cumberland as his only relative, he lived for the mails. Until recently his life had had a series of fortnightly peaks. Every two weeks - in normal times - the packet arrived and he went on board to meet the commander, inspect the sealed bags of incoming mail, sign for them and supervise their removal on shore to his office before arranging for the outgoing mail to be brought out and stowed on board.