160,000 letters seized by British warships will be scanned and published
September 18, 2018 11:44 AM   Subscribe

"You can't love me anymore if you don't answer. I will now stop writing. I give up." A cache of 160,000 letters, posted between 1652 and 1815 but seized by British warships and never delivered, will be scanned and posted online for all to see. A large percentage have never been opened. For many that were, it's tragic to imagine that they were never received: an indentured servant writing to her father, apologizing for whatever she did wrong and begging him to send clothes because she doesn't have any, or a wife writing to her distant husband saying that he must not love her any longer because he is not responding to her letters.
posted by quarantine (26 comments total) 61 users marked this as a favorite
 
"Sorting and digitizing all the mail is expected to take 20 years at a cost of 9.3 million Euros ($14 million Cdn)."

20 years to scan in all these letters! Scanning in paper is not a job task I envy, I have 30 or so full sketchbooks of my own I've never been able to sit down and scan in more than one or two of in total. The costs for having someone else do it have also been high the couple times I've looked. Add in having organize hundreds of years old material and compile everything, I can totally see how it'd turn into such a long and expensive job. I just hope they have a good way of sharing these as they are digitized. It will be interesting to hear when distant relatives discover old letters from ancestors.
posted by GoblinHoney at 11:52 AM on September 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


Precious beyond words. Thank you; I'll dig into this when I can find it online.
posted by Countess Elena at 12:05 PM on September 18, 2018 [3 favorites]


Oh, that's heartbreaking, and look at the beautiful script, which is... not going to be OCR'd, is it? People will have to read and transcribe them. I wonder if they will crowdsource it, like the weather reports in shipping logs.
posted by clew at 12:10 PM on September 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


no no, there is a little steam-powered AI computer that wears a bowler hat and specializes in doing OCR on 18th-century handwriting. plz do not debate this important headcanon
posted by prize bull octorok at 12:14 PM on September 18, 2018 [38 favorites]


"seized by British warships and never delivered." Yet they went to the trouble of carefully storing them all.

Assholes.
posted by jetsetsc at 1:26 PM on September 18, 2018 [9 favorites]


Something that surprises a lot of people is the Black Rock City (the temporary community built for the Burning Man festival) has a Post Office. Mail is delivered there and then volunteers carry it throughout the city. This can be a difficult process because most attendees only have a rough estimate of where they will be camping before they arrive so the addresses are not always the most accurate. I volunteered to deliver this year the same as I have for the previous five. I brought my best dress clothes from home. Dress pants; dress shirt; tie; vest. I knew that my look was not in line with the Burning Man norm and also that my dry cleaner would have some stern words for me upon my return. I delivered twenty-three pieces of mail this year which was fewer than I usually do (my high was in 2015 when I delivered over a hundred). When people asked me why I was dressed so fancy I told them:

Delivering mail is a fucking honor and I want people to know that I am proud to do it.

I also wrote fourteen letters to people back home and mailed them while I was there. Postal delivery is one of the few things that I hold sacrosanct. It would be unfair to say that this is entirely the fault of Terry Pratchett because it started well before I picked up my first Discworld novel but he certainly added fuel to that particular fire. I write somewhere near a hundred letters, postcards and greeting cards a year.

The article above quickened my heart rate and breathing in a way that very few things posted on MetaFilter manage.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 1:45 PM on September 18, 2018 [50 favorites]


"seized by British warships and never delivered." Yet they went to the trouble of carefully storing them all.

Assholes.


Since they were seized by British warships, it's a fairly safe assumption that in most cases the country under whose flag the captured ships flew was at war with Great Britain. That...kind of complicates mail delivery.
posted by praemunire at 1:59 PM on September 18, 2018 [4 favorites]


no no, there is a little steam-powered AI computer that wears a bowler hat and specializes in doing OCR on 18th-century handwriting. plz do not debate this important headcanon

I hate to break it to you, but this is just silly.

This cries out for an old Royal Mail peaked cap, not a bowler!
posted by Celsius1414 at 2:04 PM on September 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


Enough for many Bartlebys.
posted by Segundus at 2:53 PM on September 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


Nothing says university summer project quite like a cataloging exercise: Here's a sack, here's your login, see you at the picnic in August!
posted by Cris E at 2:54 PM on September 18, 2018 [3 favorites]


BRB, adding this link to my "things to write novels about" file.
posted by jacquilynne at 3:01 PM on September 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


Oh, that's heartbreaking, and look at the beautiful script, which is... not going to be OCR'd, is it? People will have to read and transcribe them.

I wonder... I have a digital pen that somehow is mostly able to read my handwriting. It’s not great at it, but honestly, I’m shocked that it gets close. (I wish it would then tap into the autocorrect dictionary, cuz sometimes Its so close but maddeningly far.) I have not looked at what the state of handwriting OCR is, but it clearly exists.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 3:20 PM on September 18, 2018


I was curious as to why the cost of the project was given in Euros, and then I saw at the end of the article The project is funded by the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities.
posted by Azara at 3:40 PM on September 18, 2018 [3 favorites]


I'm suddenly reminded of that heartbreaking letter in Jean de Florette/ Manon des Sources.
posted by doctornemo at 4:13 PM on September 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


Since they were seized by British warships, it's a fairly safe assumption that in most cases the country under whose flag the captured ships flew was at war with Great Britain. That...kind of complicates mail delivery

Of course. But once peace was declared, wouldn’t it be a civilized act to return the letters to their country of origin?
posted by Miko at 6:24 PM on September 18, 2018 [4 favorites]


Oh, that's heartbreaking, and look at the beautiful script, which is... not going to be OCR'd, is it? People will have to read and transcribe them.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that the Vatican was working on this, so that they could better digitize their own archives...

And I went looking and it was a metafilter post. Of course.
posted by spindle at 6:29 PM on September 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


There are some efforts to build modern OCR tools for old handwriting. Check out Transkribus if you’re into that kind of thing.
posted by adamsc at 7:20 PM on September 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


So, I don't know, but I'm guessing that these papers ended up stored where they did under the name they had because for a long time captured vessels and their contents were actually treated as effectively the personal property of the crew; the spoils ("prize") would be divided up according to various arcane rules once in port. It's how Capt. Wentworth in Persuasion made his fortune. "Valueless" items like letters probably got dumped into storage. I can't find it excessively mean-spirited that no one went back, for free, through bags and bags of outdated letters months or years later, when the conflict had ended, and then arranged and bore the cost for international delivery--not exactly a matter of putting on a stamp and popping it in the mailbox--to people who might not even be alive, or in the same place anymore.
posted by praemunire at 8:12 PM on September 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


The letters were evidence in High Court of Admiralty prize jurisdiction trIals. They weren't keeping them to deny correspondence to their enemies, but to show that they stole captured the ship fair and square.
When a ship was captured by the British the High Admiralty Court decided who the rightful owner of the ship and its cargo was. That is why everything found on board, including all forms of documents were kept until the case had finished.
At which point, said documents were tossed into storage, and sat (or fell off) on a shelf for a few hundred years. The letters can be matched to the metadata of the crew interrogations:
Crew members that had been captured were all interrogated by means of a standardised list of questions. The answers provide a treasure trove of information about ordinary and not so ordinary sailors: their country of origin, their profession, their ship and its cargo, the flag under which it sailed, the port of departure, the port it had tried to reach, the date the person was captured.
posted by zamboni at 10:17 PM on September 18, 2018 [8 favorites]


I find this stuff fascinating - many thanks for the post, quarantine. The UK National Archives' press release about this project mentions that these letters are drawn from their very miscellaneous HCA 30 and HCA 32 collections, the former, for example, also containing "accounts in respect of ships detained under embargoes, 1806 to 1840; affidavits, 1662 to 1807; an apprentices' (fishermen) register, 1639 to 1644; [...] bail bonds (prize agents), 1803 to 1827; [...] ships' logs, 1862 to 1888; slave trade papers and proceedings, 1805 to 1877..." and much else besides. See also the Prize Papers project website and twitter feed.
posted by misteraitch at 1:38 AM on September 19, 2018 [2 favorites]


kept until the case had finished.

Yes, TFA mentions that. It's still interesting to me that it got lost in the bureaucratic morass of empire. It's still fair to expect better, to expect an eventual return.

I have read a lot about mail censorship during wartime, but I have never before thought about intercepted mail as an international issue. I have to rush off to work now, but am bookmarking the idea of looking around to see what international conventions or rules of war, if any, discuss what should happen to intercepted mail once peace is achieved.
posted by Miko at 4:46 AM on September 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


the idea of looking around to see what international conventions or rules of war, if any, discuss what should happen to intercepted mail once peace is achieved.

As far as I can tell, special status for postal correspondence only starts to be a thing in the mid 19th century. Before that, it seems to be treated as just another kind of cargo. I'm not seeing much on the modern practice of returning intercepted mail, since most international law seems to work on the assumption that you're not (legally) intercepting mail.

There's specific allowances made in the 1848 US/Great Britain Postal Convention and the 1861 US-Mexico Postal Convention for the safe conduct of mail vessels, but things really get rolling with the US Civil War, where the US agrees that
public mails of any friendly or neutral power, duly certified or authenticated as such, shall not be searched or opened, but be put, as speedily as may be convenient, on the way to their designated destination.

This is then expanded in the 1907 Hague Convention XI to include belligerents:

Article 1. The postal correspondence of neutrals or belligerents, whatever its official or private character may be, found on the high seas on board a neutral or enemy ship, is inviolable. If the ship is detained, the correspondence is forwarded by the captor with the least possible delay.
The provisions of the preceding paragraph do not apply, in case of violation of blockade, to correspondence destined for or proceeding from a blockaded port.
Observation of the article in WWI was complicated, and I didn't start looking into WW2.

These days, the UPU has the following:
2 As regards the maintenance of postal relations in cases of disputes, conflict or war, Congress adopted
resolution C 37/Lausanne 1974, given below:
“Congress,
“Considering the peaceful and humanitarian role played by the Universal Postal Union in helping to bring
peoples and individuals together,
“Convinced of the need to maintain postal exchanges, as far as possible, with or between regions afflicted
by disputes, disturbances, conflicts or wars, and,
“In view of the initiatives taken and the experience of certain Governments or humanitarian organizations
in this field,
“Appeals urgently to the Governments of member countries, as far as possible and unless the United
Nations General Assembly or Security Council has decided otherwise (in accordance with art 41 of the
United Nations Charter), not to interrupt or hinder postal traffic – especially the exchange of correspondence
containing messages of a personal nature in the event of dispute, conflict or war, the efforts made in this
direction being applicable even to the countries directly concerned, and
“Authorizes the Director-General of the International Bureau of the UPU:
i to take what initiatives he considers advisable to facilitate, while respecting national sovereignties,
the maintenance or re-establishment of postal exchanges with or between the parties to a dispute,
conflict or war;
ii to offer his ‘good offices’ to find a solution to postal problems which may arise in the event of a
dispute, conflict or war.”
It is understood that each DO is the sole judge of what constitutes exceptional circumstances. The provisions
of the Parcel Post Regulations on steps to be taken in the event of temporary suspension and resumption
of services are given in art 17-219.
posted by zamboni at 9:54 AM on September 19, 2018 [6 favorites]


Parasite Unseen, I would be interested in hearing more stories of attempting to deliver mail at Burning Man. What happens to the ones you can't track down?
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:11 AM on September 19, 2018


The few samples of handwritten/pointed pen script are so interesting!
posted by GhostRider at 12:55 PM on September 19, 2018


Maybe in hundreds of years, all the metafilter comments that never got any favourites will be uploaded to the galactic tensornet by post-human historians and all of my witty contributions will finally find some audience. "Its tragic to imagine that this very clever comment was never read" - a planet sized AI will think, after taking mere picoseconds to review the whole archive.
posted by memebake at 2:36 PM on September 19, 2018 [2 favorites]


jenfullmoon, when one cannot locate the recipient the letter is supposed to be returned to the Post Office. I seem to recall that three attempts at delivery are supposed to be made in order to minimize the chances of a letter not reaching its intended recipient as the result of having the bad luck to be given to a careless, unmotivated or incompetent volunteer carrier.

Packages can also be sent to the BRCPO. In order to avoid theft packages are not given to volunteers; packages are held at the Post Office and volunteers deliver notices to recipients that there is a package waiting for pick up. The recipient can then pick up their package after showing ID.

Feel free to MeMail me if you have any further questions; I love talking about this stuff.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 9:25 PM on September 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


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