With the peace which followed Waterloo the fighting times of the Packet Service came to an end, and in a few years the introduction of steam navigation began a completely new order of things. The Post Office gave up her packets, Falmouth was given up as a mail station, and the era of mail contracts began; and if we measure distance by time instead of mileage, the shrinkage of the world became more marked year by year. It is interesting to trace this in the story of what is now called the Atlantic Ferry. The first vessel to cross the Atlantic by steam was the _Savannah_ in 1819, but she was partly under sail, and she took thirty-five days to make the passage. The _Royal William_ crossed under steam in 1831; but she took forty days over the voyage. Up to that date, therefore, steam power was scarcely a rival to the sailing vessel. Indeed there were cases in which sailing vessels had crossed the Atlantic under favourable conditions in less than fourteen days. In 1838, however, a great advance was made. First the _Sirius_ and then the _Great Western_ in that year made record passages, the one in eighteen and a half days, the other in thirteen and a half days. The latter vessel made passages for several years, and her average per voyage was fifteen days and a half. Then in 1840 came the contract with the Cunard Company to carry the mails for the British Government, and the history of that company has been a continuous breaking of records and of improvement in services. The names of the huge vessels belonging to this company which have successively lowered the Atlantic record are familiar to most of us, and they belong in a special way to the story of the Post Office. There was the _Britannia_ in 1840, which began with a voyage of fourteen days, and the _China_ in 1862 and the _Batavia_ in 1870 reduced this record considerably. Then followed in 1881 the _Servia_, the first of the modern type of vessel; in 1884 the _Umbria_ and _Etruria_ with speeds of 19 knots an hour; in 1893 the _Campania_ and _Lucania_ with 22 knots; and in 1895 the _Lusitania_ and _Mauretania_ with 25 knots. The record has now been reduced to considerably under five days. The present contract is for a weekly service to the United States _via_ Liverpool and New York. The British Post Office only pays its contractors for the weight of mails actually carried, and reserves the right to send specially addressed letters by foreign ships: most famous among these are the vessels of the Hamburg-American line, which have at different times held the Atlantic record. The White Star line has also since 1877 been regularly employed by contract to carry the mails between Liverpool and New York, and the _Teutonic_ and the _Majestic_, completed in 1889 and 1890, were the first merchant ships constructed with a view to their use as auxiliaries to the British navy.