History of the Post-Office Packet Service between the years 1793-1815 / Compiled from Records, Chiefly Official

by Arthur H. Norway

It was a Harwich Packet which was concerned in this curious case; and it may be that the Postmaster General thought it unnecessary to apply a strict rule to a station on which the Packets came but rarely into conflict with the enemy. The circumstances were as follows:—

On June 16th, 1808, the “Earl of Leicester,” Captain Anthony Hammond, homeward bound from Gothenburg with mails and passengers, was met about ten leagues to the westward of the Scaw by a gale of wind which obliged her to bear away for Marstrand. On the way thither she encountered two Danish vessels laden with corn from Jutland for their army in Norway. Now, under his instructions Captain Hammond had nothing to do with these vessels, but to leave them alone. It is true this country was at war with Denmark at the time; but the “Earl of Leicester” was neither one of H.M. cruisers, nor a letter of marque, and had no business to involve herself in the matter. Captain Hammond never asserted that the Danish vessels attacked him. Indeed both he and they had quite enough to do at the moment with their own affairs, for a full gale of wind was blowing, and all the ships were labouring heavily. Nevertheless Captain Hammond, it being as he said “too rough to board them,” ordered them to regard themselves as prizes, and to follow him.

The two Danish ships being unarmed had no choice but to obey these orders, and Captain Hammond made joyfully for Marstrand with his prizes. He had not proceeded very far when one of them flew signals of distress, and made known that she was in danger of sinking. Captain Hammond lowered a boat and at great risk took the crew out of the foundering vessel, which went down as soon as the boat had got clear of her. The remaining prize duly reached Marstrand, and was handed over to the British Consul at that port, to await the decision of the Admiralty Court. The crews of both vessels were liberated, on giving a promise to do their utmost to secure the release of the crew of the “Unity” Packet, captured in the previous November.

On board the “Earl of Leicester” were three Swedish passengers, who were so far from feeling satisfied with Captain Hammond’s conduct on this occasion that they addressed a special letter of complaint to the Postmaster General. In this letter they by no means admit that the prizes were picked up by Captain Hammond as he went along, in the casual way detailed by him, without delay or interruption to his voyage. On the contrary, they assert roundly, that he chased the two little vessels during a whole night, keeping up a continual fire both of cannon and musketry; that the “Earl of Leicester” was far past Schagen when the prizes were first seen, which of itself proved that Captain Hammond put in to Marstrand with no other motive than that of realizing them secure; and they add: “On account of this chase and capture, in which, in our opinion, Packets have no right to engage, our voyage to England was entirely broken off, because, during the above hostile operations, we were in continual anxiety and fear, loaded guns being carried about in the cabin where we lay, and several shots fired from them; and we had reason to fear that the war-like scene might soon be acted again, wherefore we did not venture to pursue our voyage on board the said Packet, but returned to Gothenburg.”

Captain Hammond, in reply to these charges, maintained that three gentlemen who, by their own admission, were extremely frightened, and to his knowledge were also lamentably sea-sick, were not the most trustworthy witnesses of what occurred, and with this argument, together with some evidence that the return to Marstrand was really made necessary by the weather, the Postmaster General remained content. The matter was dropped; and Captain Hammond, after waiting some five years, during which time the Admiralty Courts considered his case in their pleasant, leisurely way, received the value of the prize.

Smuggling was a practice very frequently charged against the Packet Service by its critics who, towards the end of the last century, raised an outcry loud enough to become heard in Parliament. It may be feared that the charge was by no means groundless. Indeed it would be strange if it were, seeing that throughout the west of England, if not elsewhere, the game of eluding the revenue laws was played with infinite zest and enjoyment by all classes of society. Falmouth itself was a nest of smugglers. The old town was full of hiding-places. The women entered into the sport with audacious ingenuity; and probably there was neither man, woman, nor child in the town, with the possible exception of the revenue officers, who did not regard the success of a smuggler as a triumph for his kind against men who were scarcely to be distinguished from foreign enemies.

It is true there was a high officer of the Post-Office at Falmouth, whose duty it was to discover malpractices of every kind, and report them to the Postmaster General. The contractor, from whom the Packets were hired at their first institution, had long since disappeared.

The Packets were hired from the commanders; and over these officers was set an agent, to whom each one of them was responsible for his actions. This agent was not Postmaster. His duties did not extend beyond the foreign mails and the conduct of the Packet officers and seamen. He was the link which united the sea service with the internal system of the Post-Office. His duties were multifarious and of the greatest consequence to the welfare of the service.

It is perfectly clear that the duties of a controlling officer cannot be properly performed unless he keeps his affairs and interests totally distinct from those of his subordinates. The misfortune was that the agents at Falmouth in the last century could not grasp this principle, but departed from it so far as to have trading relations with the commanders. The agent dealt in naval stores: the commanders supplied their Packets with spars and cordage from his stock.

This was not the only way in which the agent’s affairs became entangled with those of the men he was placed at Falmouth to control. The Packets, though nominally owned by the commanders, with whom the Government contracted for their hire, were in most cases really the property of a syndicate, or of private individuals, who put forward the commander to represent them, on condition of receiving the larger part of the emoluments. This capitalist in the background was frequently no other than the agent himself.