At Falmouth then the Post-Office located itself in the year 1688, with two Packet boats hired from a contractor, one Daniel Gwin, who appears to have received a salary of £70 per annum, in addition, doubtless, to whatever he could make indirectly out of his contract. Probably his gains were considerable. At any rate the Government made none, for the accounts show from year to year a loss of several thousand pounds upon the maintenance of these two boats, from which, indeed, the revenue seems seldom to have received more than £450. Expensive as the Corunna Packets proved to be, it may be presumed that the promoters of the Service were not dissatisfied with it; for early in the new century they proceeded to develop it. The West Indian trade was becoming important enough to make its wishes felt. The merchants engaged in it may probably have represented that the regular communication now established with Corunna gave their colleagues in the Spanish trade more facilities than they enjoyed. All Governments have found it difficult to resist such an argument; and accordingly, in 1702, Packets were established at Falmouth to ply to Barbados, Jamaica, and certain places in the Southern States of North America. Two years later a Service with Lisbon was set up; and the Post-Office Service at Falmouth began to assume the form which it preserved until within the memory of men now living. It is no part of the present writer’s purpose to trace in detail all the events which went to make up the history of the Packet Station at Falmouth during the last century. Such a task would doubtless throw much light on naval history, and some, perhaps, on other subjects not without their share of interest. The materials are scanty, however, and the record might be dreary reading. The personal recollections which would have lit the story up and made it real are lost beyond recall. What has come down to us is hardly more than the bald record of administrative changes—at such a time there were two West India Packets, at another four; under one regime they touched at Charlestown and Pensacola, while under its successor their voyages were restricted. There were such changes of rule in regard to victualling the sailors, such and such difficulties in controlling them; and so on. It is nothing but an arid waste of technicalities, almost devoid of interest save for the professed student of naval or commercial history. One or two facts stand out from this mass of detail, and arrest attention as we pass it by. There is the occasional mention of a sea fight, in which so many men (in proportion to the number of the crew) were killed and wounded, as to create a strong desire to know the details.