The “Princess Elizabeth,” homeward bound from Barbados and Jamaica, was taken on February 28th, by the “Actif,” a Privateer carrying fourteen guns and a hundred and thirty men. The “Swallow” carried the outward mails of February 1st, for the same islands, while the “Sandwich” took out those of February 15th and March 1st. Three consecutive mails were thus on board these two Packets; and even the most anxious of merchants, sending important letters in triplicate by successive mails, might fairly have thought his precautions adequate to the risks. How great then was the anger and alarm when the news arrived that both Packets were captured and the three mails lost may be easily conceived. Even more alarming than the present loss was the apprehension for the future raised by the great force of the Privateers concerned in these captures. The “Du Gay” which captured the “Sandwich” carried no less than two hundred men and eighteen guns; while the captor of the “Swallow” was armed with sixteen guns (nines and sixes) and a hundred and twenty men. How, the Postmaster General demanded, could the Packets be expected to resist such force? And the merchants, echoing the question, declared that impossibility to be the basis of their whole argument; for the Packets, they asserted, had no more effective power of resisting Privateers than so many wherries from Blackfriars stairs. The prayer of the merchants’ memorial was that the Packets might be so equipped as to enable them to resist any enemy of equal size. This, as the Postmaster General pointed out, meant that each one of the Post-Office fleet should carry at least fourteen guns and one hundred men—a proposition which would involve rebuilding every Packet afloat, since no one of them was constructed to carry such an armament; and besides, that great capital expenditure would more than treble the charges of the Service, which already resulted in a yearly loss of over £12,000, exclusive of the liabilities for captured Packets, amounting at this time to more than £34,000.