[2] Now reduced to £20,500.
[3] Note, the sum of £3500 was deducted subsequently by the Admiralty, in consequence of their superseding the small vessel engaged in the Ionian Mail Service by packets of their own; and this sum became thereby reduced to £28,500.
[4] This sum, of £148,000 for 70,080 miles, is at the rate of 42s. 6d. per mile. If the same amount for passage-money and parcels which the East India Company’s packets earned, as shown by their return made to Parliament, (No. 746,) for the same year, 1844-45, in which the Peninsular and Oriental Company’s proposal was made, namely—
| For passengers | £23,543 | ||
| freight of parcels | 2,764 | ||
| ——— | |||
| Total | £26,307 | ||
| ——— | |||
be deducted from the above sum of £148,000, it will leave for the net estimated cost of performing the Service between Bombay and Suez, by Government vessels, of the power of those of the Peninsular and Oriental Company, £121,693, being £41,693 in excess of the sum of £80,000, for which the Peninsular and Oriental Company offered to do it: or,
If this estimate of 42s. 6d. per mile be applied to the service between Suez and Calcutta, for which the Peninsular and Oriental Company receive £115,000 per annum, it will amount, for the annual mileage of that Service—115,000 miles—to £244,375, being no less than £129,375 in excess of the sum received by this Company—or if the passage-money on this line had been estimated at double the amount of that earned by the East India packets, on the Bombay and Suez Line, say, in round numbers, £52,000, an estimate certainly as high as prudence would have warranted in its then untested state, there would still be an excess of estimated expenditure, under Government management, of £77,375.
[5] See Lord Auckland’s expression, p. 77.
[6] Five weeks, and not months, being all the time necessary for a communication between Ceylon and Southampton, the word “months” might be taken to be a typographical error, were it not that the evident drift of the following question is to make out a case against the Company of tardiness in sending out another vessel to replace the alleged defective “Lady Mary Wood.”
[7] The investigation has since been completed, and the Admiralty have acquitted the Company of the charge of overloading the vessels, and of any breach of contract. One principal cause of the vessels being occasionally beyond the time stipulated in the contract, in arriving at Hong Kong, was, that in defining the time in the contract no allowance was made for the north-east monsoon on the passage eastward, as is done for the south-west monsoon on the passage westward. The grievance to the Hong Kong merchants could, however, have been but of trifling importance, as the steamers, even when behind contract time, always arrived so as to afford to the China merchants ample opportunity to answer letters by the return mail. No complaints from China were made prior to the Company extending the terminus of the China Line to Bombay, and thereby coming in competition with the opium clippers in the carrying of that article to Hong Kong.
[8] Subscriptions referred to above: