Her Majesty's Mails

The home contracts dwindle into insignificance before those of the foreign service. The foreign packets travel over the immense distance of 3,000,000 of statute miles each year. As the cost of the whole service is nearly a million pounds annually, the average charge per mile is 6s. 4d. The average speed of the foreign packets is ten miles an hour. The principal contracts are those for the Indian and Chinese mails, entered into by the Peninsular and Oriental Steam-navigation Company, and for which the sum of 253,000l. is paid yearly. In this service, packets sail four times a month from Southampton, and other mails are met at Marseilles at the like intervals. A fleet of steamers, of not less than 1,100 tons, are engaged for a system of relays established in the Mediterranean, and also between Suez and Bombay, Suez and Calcutta, and Bombay and China. The Australian mails are carried out to Ceylon in the Indian packets, when, on arrival at that point, another fleet of steamers, engaged from the same company on a supplementary contract of 134,672l. a-year, carry them between Point de Galle and Sydney. An additional line of packets to the Antipodes, viâ Panama, will be run in January, 1865. The West Indian are the worst paying of all the foreign mails, costing twice as much as they yield.[168] The Royal Mail Steam-packet Company is paid the enormous sum of 270,000l. a-year for their conveyance. The North American mails are carried by Messrs. Cunard & Co. for the sum of 176,340l. a-year. Eight steam-vessels are employed by this firm, leaving Liverpool once a-week, and travelling also between New York and Nassau once a-month. Sir Samuel Cunard himself contracts for the Canadian mails, receiving the yearly sum of 14,700l. These supplementary packets sail from Halifax, on the arrival of the Cunard steamers from Europe, to Bermuda and St. Thomas, and also to Newfoundland. The Canadian contract costs less than any other on the foreign service.