The Opened Letter. Lindsay O'Neill

came late to hand having two Seas and a foreign Country to pass.”⁷⁸ To a degree, Perceval was lucky. An acquaintance of his found himself in Barcelona in 1711 during the War of the Spanish Succession and instructed Perceval to send his letters via Genoa where a merchant friend had connections and could send them to Barcelona.⁷⁹ Perceval was familiar with the difficulties of getting letters from the British Isles when traveling on the Continent. Years before, on the first of July 1718 he was especially frustrated when he sat down to pen letters from The Hague. On this day he wrote to his cousin and brother-in-law, Daniel Dering, who was watching over his affairs from London and to his brother, Philip, who was also in London. In both letters, after addressing business concerns and giving an account of his travels (he had bought lace for both of them and found Lord Cadogan surprisingly civil), he mentioned he was sorry and troubled that he had not heard from anyone.⁸⁰ He then folded the letters, addressed them, sealed them, and sent them on their way to London.

      These two letters could have made their way to London through public or private hands. As many correspondents did, he could have used a friendly messenger or a bearer to get the letter to England. However, he probably turned to the packet service operating out of Helvoetsluis (now Hellevoetsluis) in the Netherlands.⁸¹ Helvoetsluis was about thirty miles from The Hague, so Perceval could have hired a messenger to bring his letters to the port or perhaps he used the postal system of the Netherlands.⁸² Once they arrived in Helvoetsluis the letters would have sailed the next Wednesday or Saturday when the packet boats left for Harwich. Once in England the British Post Office embraced them and they made their way back to London and into the hands of Dering and Philip Perceval.

      John appears to have been wary of trusting his letters solely to the public postal systems when on the Continent even though the postal system there was more mature than the English system. The family of Tour and Tassis had run the post in the lands ruled by the Holy Roman Emperor since the end of the fifteenth century, but for men like Perceval the Continental posts were unfamiliar and they often relied on personal connections to collect their letters and provide them with a central location for the delivery of letters.⁸³ Perceval was sure to instruct Daniel Dering to send his letters for Amsterdam to Sir Alexander Cairns in London who would forward them to an Amsterdam merchant firm.⁸⁴ Cairns, an Irish baronet and MP, had continental and mercantile connections and Perceval also sent a letter and a box through Cairns’s brother Henry, a London merchant, four days before he wrote his letters from The Hague.⁸⁵ The death of the merchant in Amsterdam threw these plans into slight disarray, but while postal problems persisted throughout the trip, by 8 July, a week after his letter of complaint, Perceval appears to have begun to receive his letters, most probably because he had arrived in Amsterdam, a larger metropolis and the location where he had told Dering to forward his letters.⁸⁶ Perceval knew that letters to the Continent could easily be lost and that known hands increased the likelihood of a smooth delivery. In fact, he even had his Irish estate agent send his letters to Dering in London who summarized them in his letters to his cousin, streamlining the process.⁸⁷

      When writers sent letters across the Atlantic they followed many of the same procedures as continental correspondents. They often placed letters in the hands of merchants, and at times these letters fed into a distant postal system. While a colonial post was established later in the seventeenth century, no permanent packet service from England to the American colonies existed until the late eighteenth century. A number of individuals had attempted to develop packet services to the West Indies and New York, but none lasted.⁸⁸ Instead, some correspondents looked to government connections to get their letters across the Atlantic, but most colonial correspondents depended on merchant ships and their seasonal voyages.⁸⁹ Those living in the West Indies used the sugar ships to send letters, those in Virginia looked to the tobacco ships, and those to the north used the many merchant ships in and out of Boston or New York.⁹⁰ Once they arrived in Britain these letters could be delivered by hand or by the post to their receivers. Those living in Britain, who sent letters to the American colonies, simply reversed the process. Perceval’s friend Henry Newman sent one of Perceval’s letters to Rhode Island by a ship’s captain bound for Boston and assured him that it would find its way to its recipient within a day by the colonial post.⁹¹

      Like Henry Newman, Berkeley Taylor, and Daniel Dering before him, William Byrd II of Virginia sat down to write a letter to John Perceval. Byrd and Perceval had met in 1701 when Byrd accompanied the young Perceval on a trip around England and Byrd himself had almost joined Perceval on his trip through Holland and France in 1718.⁹² But by 10 June 1729 Byrd was back in Virginia, dipping his quill into his ink and giving Perceval his opinion on a colonial project and telling him of his rambles through the backcountry of Virginia as he assisted in determining the border between Virginia and North Carolina. He then folded the letter, addressed and sealed it, and probably gave it to the captain of a tobacco ship docked off his plantation, Westover, along the James River.⁹³

      Writing a letter was a different experience for those in the colonies. The deficiencies of the postal system frustrated many a London user, but they also knew they could send a letter at almost any time of day and expect a response from anywhere in England within five days. Colonists could use the intercolonial post for local letters, but to send letters to England they depended on seasonal ships that ferried their letters across 3,000 miles of ocean.⁹⁴ For this reason colonists often wrote multiple letters at a time so they could send them by the same ship. Byrd’s father wrote ten letters on 8 March 1686 and sent them all by the same ship’s captain.⁹⁵ Perceval did the same when traveling on the Continent, although writing two letters on the same day pales in comparison to the ten composed by Byrd. Merchant ships, not unlike visitors, provided a convenient opportunity to send letters that many writers could not refuse. Thus it should not come as a surprise that Byrd wrote his letter to Perceval in June, a time when many tobacco ships were probably headed to London.⁹⁶ Correspondents in England with colonial connections felt a similar pressure. A loving and concerned brother living near Liverpool was “not willing to let many Ships pass with out a line or two” for his brother in the colonies.⁹⁷

      The postal pace felt slower for colonists. All their letters from England came by ship and Byrd appears to have received few letters from those in the colonies or, at least, he rarely recorded them. English correspondents, on the other hand, only waited for the few Atlantic letters that flowed into their larger pool of British letters. The Byrds did not receive letters from Britain frequently, building up a sense of anticipation for incoming letters. As William Byrd II informed a distant correspondent, “Our Lives are uniform without any great variety, til the Seasons brings in the Ships. Then we tear open the Letters they bring us from our Friends, as eagerly, as a greedy Heir tears open his Fathers Will.”⁹⁸ Byrd also stated that if letters came in late in the day he would hide them from his wife so that she would sleep through the night.⁹⁹

      Once William Byrd II handed letters to ships’ captains things did not always go smoothly. While neither he nor Perceval voiced any complaints about this voyage, once the ship hit the high seas a whole host of problems could hold it up, from bad weather to war to pirates. Byrd usually directed his rants at the sea captains who delivered his letters. In one letter to Perceval, almost ten years later, he blamed a ship’s captain for not delivering his letter, stating, “These Tritons do now and [then p]lay us such slippery tricks, and are no more to be depended up[on than] the faithless element which they converse with.”¹⁰⁰ While it turned out that the captain had sent the letter on, he had not gone to Perceval looking for an answer, which in Byrd’s mind still made him the culprit.¹⁰¹ Sometimes captains were simply slow at delivering their letters. One kept letters for six weeks after his ship docked.¹⁰² Perceval was aware of these many dangers and made sure to send duplicates of his letters to Rhode Island, a practice embraced by many corresponding with distant locations.¹⁰³

      This particular letter, however, seems to have made it to Perceval without incident. Once in London the ship’s captain might have delivered it himself to Perceval, placed it into the hands of the merchants at Perry and Lane who were Byrd’s factors, or he might have sent it by a messenger to Perceval’s residence, placed it into the Penny Post, or left it at a local coffeehouse where letters from Virginia accumulated. By whatever