Hello hello! I'm working my way through Burr's diary and he talks a decent amount about potentially lost letters that were meant to travel to him from overseas, and how they were likely entrusted to a passenger who hasn't been able to locate him just yet. What would you say were the benefits of sending letters with individual passengers, rather than entrusting them to the captain directly?
Sending transatlantic mail in the 18th century was an exercise in patience and frustration - if you could help it, you’d use a postal service instead of relying on friends.
Broadly speaking, letters could be transported in one of two ways.
The first was to use an official packet service. You would drop your letter off with your local postmaster, who would assign the bag of mail to the captain of a packet boat (so named because they transported smaller “packets” and letters rather than bulky cargo - though they also functioned as passenger boats).
Source
The packets provided regular mail delivery on a reliable 4-to-6-week schedule. From the mid-to-late 18th century, two packet boat services ran between Falmouth in England and the American colonies - a southern service calling in at islands in the West Indies and at Charleston, and a northern one calling at New York. From there, mail would be distributed to the various states or towns by official mail riders, and dropped off at central collection points - for example, in London, many colonies has a coffee house that served both as a meeting place and as an official hub for postage.
But if the packet service wasn’t running (say, for example, there was a war on), you had to revert to option two - find a friend who was travelling in the right direction and ask them to carry the letter for you. This had the benefit of being free (the recipient was the one who usually paid for the postage) but was much less reliable.
For one, many passengers relied on packet ships for personal transport, and arranging passage on another kind of ship was much more difficult. Letters were frequently delayed or misplaced (the smart practice was to create multiple copies that could be sent through different people) - and and that’s if your friend didn’t get stopped and searched, or have their mail confiscated (often on very flimsy grounds).
And, of course, this friend would need some way to track you down on the other side - often with only a rough sense of the city or region you were in, based on information that was months old. If you moved around as much as Burr, it was asking a lot - so I’m not surprised he spent a long time waiting for letters, some of which never arrived.
