Note 4 — No. III. Contract for conveying Mails between Suez and Aden, Ceylon, Madras, Calcutta, Penang, Singapore, and Hong Kong. COMMENCED JANUARY 1st, 1845.
Reading edition
This sum, of £148,000 for 70,080 miles, is at the rate of 42s. 6d. per mile. If the same amount for passage-money and parcels which the East India Company’s packets earned, as shown by their return made to Parliament, (No. 746,) for the same year, 1844-45, in which the Peninsular and Oriental Company’s proposal was made, namely—
For passengers £23,543
freight of parcels 2,764
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Total £26,307
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be deducted from the above sum of £148,000, it will leave for the net estimated cost of performing the Service between Bombay and Suez, by Government vessels, of the power of those of the Peninsular and Oriental Company, £121,693, being £41,693 in excess of the sum of £80,000, for which the Peninsular and Oriental Company offered to do it: or,
If this estimate of 42s. 6d. per mile be applied to the service between Suez and Calcutta, for which the Peninsular and Oriental Company receive £115,000 per annum, it will amount, for the annual mileage of that Service—115,000 miles—to £244,375, being no less than £129,375 in excess of the sum received by this Company—or if the passage-money on this line had been estimated at double the amount of that earned by the East India packets, on the Bombay and Suez Line, say, in round numbers, £52,000, an estimate certainly as high as prudence would have warranted in its then untested state, there would still be an excess of estimated expenditure, under Government management, of £77,375.