Mail tender

The use of tenders for loading passengers and their luggage was well established even before the Edwardian heyday of ocean liners as the major means of intercontinental transport.

In his memoir The Uncommercial Traveller, Charles Dickens describes a voyage from New York to Liverpool on Cunard's first screw steamship Russia, and meeting the mail tender out of Queenstown, Ireland.

In 1868 the Post Office Surveyor and novelist Anthony Trollope gave Dickens another encounter with a mail tender, when their ships crossed paths in New York.

In the years immediately before World War I, Queenstown was still a regular intermediate stop by tender for the liners Lusitania and Mauretania.

Passengers were then carried in a separate tender, taking a slightly more leisurely twenty five minutes.