A mail tender is a small steamboat used to carry mail. As a tender it only carries mail for short distances between ship and shore, ferrying it to and from a large mail steamer.
The use of tenders for loading passengers and their luggage was well established even before the Edwardian heyday of ocean liners as the major means of intercontinental transport. They avoided the need to wait for these large ships to enter harbour and be docked, sometimes involving the wait for suitable tides. Tenders were also used by intermediate ports, where they could stand out to sea beyond a harbour bar and exchange passengers, without the large ship needing to enter port. In the Victorian times of several postal deliveries a day, speed was of the essence in transporting mails and the slightest time advantage would be seized upon.
Passenger tenders such as the SS Traffic could be quite large, being able to ferry 1,000 passengers – a comparable number, although a shorter journey, to the liner itself. Mail tenders were often much smaller than this. Passenger tenders were usually owned by the shipping lines and would only service their own vessels, mail tenders were often owned by national post offices and would attend any mail ships.
In his memoir The Uncommercial Traveller , Charles Dickens describes a voyage from New York to Liverpool on Cunard's first screw steamship Russia, and meeting the mail tender out of Queenstown, Ireland. [1] Queenstown, today named Cobh, was an important port for the Irish transatlantic trade. Being only a small harbour though, it relied on tenders. Only a few passengers were to be put ashore on Dicken's voyage and so they too were ferried by the mail tender. In 1868 the Post Office Surveyor and novelist Anthony Trollope gave Dickens another encounter with a mail tender, when their ships crossed paths in New York. Possibly trading on his role as consultant for the trans-atlantic mail service, he arranged to have a mail tender ferry him between ships, merely to meet his friend Dickens. [2]
With the development of fast railways, passages along a coast could also be speeded up by mail tenders. In 1907 the Lady Evelyn was purchased by Canada's Postmaster General to act as a mail tender for the mouth of the Saint Lawrence River on Canada's East Coast. This was to replace an older steamer, the Rhoda, described in parliament by Lemieux as 'a disgrace'. [3] Liners for the inland port of Quebec City would pass by the small tender port of Rimouski, 200 miles downstream. Mail offloaded by tender here could be taken by train to Quebec much faster than on the liner.
In the years immediately before World War I, Queenstown was still a regular intermediate stop by tender for the liners Lusitania and Mauretania. Fishguard in South West Wales also developed, particularly as a mail offloading port from where the mail for London could be rushed by train along the West Wales and South Wales Main Lines, arriving only about five hours later. The mail tender came alongside first and was turned around in as little as fifteen minutes. Passengers were then carried in a separate tender, taking a slightly more leisurely twenty five minutes. [4]
The Cunard Line is a British shipping and cruise line based at Carnival House at Southampton, England, operated by Carnival UK and owned by Carnival Corporation & plc. Since 2011, Cunard and its four ships have been registered in Hamilton, Bermuda.
Goodwick is a coastal town in Pembrokeshire, Wales, immediately west of its twin town of Fishguard.
Transatlantic crossings are passages of passengers and cargo across the Atlantic Ocean between Europe or Africa and the Americas. The majority of passenger traffic is across the North Atlantic between Western Europe and North America. Centuries after the dwindling of sporadic Viking trade with Markland, a regular and lasting transatlantic trade route was established in 1566 with the Spanish West Indies fleets, following the voyages of Christopher Columbus.
Cobh, known from 1849 until 1920 as Queenstown, is a seaport town on the south coast of County Cork, Ireland. With a population of 14,418 inhabitants at the 2022 census, Cobh is on the south side of Great Island in Cork Harbour and home to Ireland's only dedicated cruise terminal. Tourism in the area draws on the maritime and emigration legacy of the town.
RMS Lusitania was a British ocean liner launched by the Cunard Line in 1906. She was the world's largest passenger ship until the completion of Mauretania three months later and was awarded the Blue Riband appellation for the fastest Atlantic crossing in 1908. Lusitania was sunk on her 202nd trans-Atlantic crossing, on 7 May 1915 by the German submarine U-20, 11 miles (18 km) off the Old Head of Kinsale, Ireland, killing 1,197 passengers, crew and stowaways. The sinking occurred about two years before the United States declaration of war on Germany, but significantly increased American domestic public support for entering the war.
The White Star Line was a British shipping line. Founded out of the remains of a defunct packet company, it gradually rose up to become one of the most prominent shipping companies in the world, providing passenger and cargo services between the British Empire and the United States. While many other shipping lines focused primarily on speed, White Star branded their services by focusing more on providing comfortable passages for both upper class travellers and immigrants.
RMS Aquitania was an ocean liner of the Cunard Line in service from 1914 to 1950. She was designed by Leonard Peskett and built by John Brown & Company in Clydebank, Scotland. She was launched on 21 April 1913 and sailed on her maiden voyage from Liverpool to New York on 30 May 1914. She was given the title of Royal Mail Ship (RMS) like many other Cunard ocean liners since she carried the royal mail on many of her voyages. Aquitania was the third in Cunard Line's grand trio of express liners, preceded by RMS Mauretania and RMS Lusitania, and was the last surviving four-funnelled ocean liner. Shortly after Aquitania entered service, the First World War broke out, during which she was first converted into an auxiliary cruiser before being used as a troop transport and a hospital ship, notably as part of the Dardanelles Campaign.
RMS Mauretania was a British ocean liner designed by Leonard Peskett and built by Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson on the River Tyne, England for the Cunard Line, launched on the afternoon of 20 September 1906. She was the world's largest ship until the launch of RMS Olympic in 1910. Mauretania captured the eastbound Blue Riband on the maiden return voyage in December 1907, then claimed the westbound Blue Riband for the fastest transatlantic crossing during her 1909 season. She held both speed records for 20 years.
RMS Britannia was an ocean liner of the British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, later known as Cunard Steamship Company. She was launched on Wednesday 5 February 1840, at the yard of Robert Duncan & Company in Greenock, Scotland. The ship and her Britannia-class sisters, Acadia, Caledonia, and Columbia, were the first ocean liners built by the company.
Royal Charter was a steam clipper which was wrecked off the beach of Porth Helaeth in Dulas Bay on the northeast coast of Anglesey, Wales on 26 October 1859. About 450 people died, the highest death toll of any shipwreck on the Welsh coast. The precise number of dead is uncertain as the complete passenger list was lost in the wreck, although an incomplete list is retained in the Victorian Archives Centre in Victoria, Australia. The Royal Charter was the most prominent among about 200 ships wrecked by the Royal Charter Storm.
The Inman Line was one of the three largest 19th-century British passenger shipping companies on the North Atlantic, along with the White Star Line and Cunard Line. Founded in 1850, it was absorbed in 1893 into American Line. The firm's formal name for much of its history was the Liverpool, Philadelphia and New York Steamship Company, but it was also variously known as the Liverpool and Philadelphia Steamship Company, as Inman Steamship Company, Limited, and, in the last few years before absorption, as the Inman and International Steamship Company.
RMS Teutonic was an ocean liner built for the White Star Line in Belfast and was the first armed merchant cruiser.
The Puget Sound mosquito fleet was a multitude of private transportation companies running smaller passenger and freight boats on Puget Sound and nearby waterways and rivers. This large group of steamers and sternwheelers plied the waters of Puget Sound, stopping at every waterfront dock. The historical period defining the beginning and end of the mosquito fleet is ambiguous, but the peak of activity occurred between the First and Second World Wars.
SS Otway was a UK steam ocean liner owned by the Orient Line, built by Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company of Glasgow, Scotland, launched in 1908 and completed in 1909.
SS Traffic was a tender of the White Star Line, and the fleetmate to the Nomadic. She was built for the White Star Line by Harland and Wolff, at Belfast, to serve the Olympic-class ocean liners. In Cherbourg, her role was to transport Third Class passengers and mails between the port and the liners anchored in the harbour, while the Nomadic was tasked with transporting First Class and Second Class passengers.
The Greycliffe disaster occurred in Sydney Harbour (Australia) on 3 November 1927 when the harbour ferry Greycliffe and the Union Steamship Company mail steamer Tahiti collided. The smaller ferry was cut in two and sank with the loss of 40 lives, the deadliest incident on Sydney Harbour.
RMS Ivernia was a British ocean liner owned by the Cunard Line, built by the company C. S. Swan & Hunter of Newcastle upon Tyne, England, and launched in 1899. The Ivernia was one of Cunard's intermediate ships, that catered to the vast immigrant trade. Like her sisters, she saw military service during World War I, and was sunk in 1917 after being struck by a torpedo.
The Great Western Railway's ships operated in connection with the company's trains to provide services to Ireland, the Channel Islands and France. Powers were granted by Act of Parliament for the Great Western Railway (GWR) to operate ships in 1871. The following year the company took over the ships operated by Ford and Jackson on the route between Wales and Ireland. Services were operated between Weymouth, the Channel Islands and France on the former Weymouth and Channel Islands Steam Packet Company routes. Smaller GWR vessels were also used as tenders at Plymouth and on ferry routes on the River Severn and River Dart. The railway also operated tugs and other craft at their docks in Wales and South West England.
PS America was a paddle wheel steamship of the White Star Line, built in 1891. Together with her sister ship PS Ireland, she tendered the various White Star Liners which stopped to embark passengers at Queenstown, Ireland.
The RMS Lusitania was a British-registered ocean liner that was torpedoed by an Imperial German Navy U-boat during the First World War on 7 May 1915, about 11 nautical miles off the Old Head of Kinsale, Ireland. The attack took place in the declared maritime war-zone around the UK, three months after unrestricted submarine warfare against the ships of the United Kingdom had been announced by Germany following the Allied powers' implementation of a naval blockade against it and the other Central Powers.