PROBABLY THE LAST OF THE TIN CAN MAIL
Dear Stamp Collector
As a junior schoolboy stamp collector in the early 1950s I used to read stories of the intrepid postmen of Tonga whenever they made the headlines in comics including the and the . Even alongside such stars as Hopalong Cassidy and Roy of the Rovers, the canoe heroes who paddled out into the Pacific in all weathers to pick up metal drums filled with mail for Tonga won my admiration. The drums had been tossed from passing ships as the canoeists approached. They hooked the drums, lashed them to the outsides of their canoe, then paddled manfully towards the beach of a tiny offshore island named Niuafoou, where an opportunist colonizer named W. G. Quensell had established a mail handling service for correspondence and small packages arriving or leaving Tonga. Letters in the newly arrived drums were examined and each struck with a cachet that read ‘TIN CAN MAIL’. Mail arriving from non-English speaking countries received an equivalent marking in the appropriate language. On delivery to a Tongan address, or whenever an addressee called for his/her mail, W.G. Quensell received a small payment. He marked outgoing mail in the same way and his canoe postmen took it, in drums, to rendezvous with passing ships.
