Crissa wrote:Also, does anyone remember the communication times of the age of colonization?
-Crissa
Not directly off hand, and it’s not something you can easily Google on, but off the top of my head mail times in the 18th century were generally reasonable. Trans-Atlantic mail apparently had a problem (I finally found one web page) because at first the mail ships were sailing headlong into the
gulf stream.
But here he encountered a mystery, one that challenged his scientific curiosity as well as his practical business instincts. Mail sent from England to the American colonies was taking a long time to arrive—two months on average. And yet merchant ships, which were heavier and took a longer route than the mail packet ships, made the same trip from England in just a month and a half on average. It didn’t seem to matter whether the packet ships sailing from England enjoyed good weather or bad, whether the wind was in their sails or not—something still held them back. What, Franklin wondered, was causing the delays?
Getting a good answer to a question is sometimes a matter of knowing whom to ask. And in 1768, while on a trip to London, Franklin asked the right person: his cousin, Timothy Folger, a whaling captain and merchant from Nantucket, Massachusetts. What was it, Franklin asked Folger, that accounted for the speedy Atlantic crossings achieved by some ships sailing from England? The answer, Folger replied, was simple, at least to those prepared to understand that the shortest distance between two points on a map is not always the fastest. Land travelers going to a distant city know that they might have to make detours to avoid a mountain range or some other physical obstacle. The Atlantic Ocean, too, poses an obstacle that requires a detour in the interest of saving time.
That obstacle is the Gulf Stream, a pattern of currents carrying a river of warm ocean water in a counterclockwise direction up out of the Gulf of Mexico, along the coast of eastern North America, then eastwards across the chilly waters of the North Atlantic Ocean to the shores of northwestern Europe. The current moves eastwards at a rate of 3–4 miles an hour—a boon to ships traveling eastwards but a hindrance to ships trying to cross westwards. Running against the current could cost a ship as much as 70 miles a day in westward progress. Whalers like Folger knew about the Gulf Stream because its warm waters attracted an abundance of sea life, including plankton and fish and the whales that feed on both. But the packet ship captains carrying the mail from England to America, were ignorant of its existence.
Transatlantic mail took two months (although it should have taken one). Inter-colonial mail clearly took much less time, especially after Franklyn sets up his improvements to the system (one web site says he cut the times in half by the use of both night and day horseback riders).
