German Marine-Schiffspost Card

Back in May, I won a really nice MSP lot at the Vogenbeck auction, but due to COVID, it's taken forever to get here. I finally received it today, so here's another show-and-tell.

Normally, mail sent from German naval vessels received the circular MSP cancel shown on the other items in this thread. On rare occasion, however, a piece of mail would sneak through without being canceled. Note, these were not situations where there was a damaged or lost canceller, leading to provisional remedies, but rather mere negligence by the postal clerks.

When this happened, the mail would be canceled using a handwritten notation upon arrival at the Marine-Postbureau in Berlin. These cancellations are known in German as Nachträgliche Entwertungen, or subsequent cancellations.

The text on the card I just received reads "Ungestempelt von der Marine-Schiffspost No. 6 a/B S.M.S. Arcona eingegangen/Marine Postbureau 30./3/98" (Uncanceled by Marine-Schiffspost No. 6 on-board S.M.S. Arcona / Navy Post Bureau / 30 March 1898).

The card was sent from the corvette-cruiser S.M.S. Arcona in late-February/early-March 1898 while the Arcona was participating in the German defense of Tsingtao, Kiautschou.

S.M.S. Arcona

The reverse has a photo of Barracouta Bay (present-day Sovetskaya Gavan, Russia) on 17 Aug 1897 pasted to it, and I'm currently having the text translated. I believe is describes a stop along the Russian coast while en route to Kiautschou.

As of the publication of Pohlmann and Kessing's Handbuch und Katalog der deutschen Marine-Schiffspost und Marinepost 1895-1914 in 2009, ten of these MSP items with handwritten subsequent cancellations were known. Here are two of the others:


The use of handwritten subsequent cancellations stopped in early 1900, when the Berlin C1 postal cancel began being used instead.

7 months?!
That has to be a record, mine was elapsed 5 months from Canada.
The mail got through, that's the good news.
Nice story Postmaster.
Had to research "Corvette-Cruiser" a term not familiar to me,
wiki solved. Unusual though.

Rod,

I probably should have translated it as cruiser-corvette. The Kreuzerkorvette name for the type was only in use for about 10 years (1884-1893) by the Imperial German Navy, though the reclassifications of the ships of that type didn't occur all at once. There were 10 ships of that type in 4 classes, and the last of them was reclassified in 1899. The 4 ship classes were very different from each other, and were subsequently reclassified several times, eventually being called small cruisers with one exception that was reclassified as a large cruiser.

Here's the German Wikipedia page on the type.

And the 7 months wasn't all in transit. Herr Vogenbeck wasn't able to mail it for about 5 months due to limitations on what classes of mail could be sent.

Right you are.
I had not considered that.
We here in the country, are in a bubble all our own,
Covid is a thing I only see on TV.
It hasn't affected us much at all.
Can't imagine what is like in City and suburbs.

Etymology
Corvette: The lowest class of ship that can be rated as a "warship"
Cruiser :cruiser came to be a classification of the ships intended for cruising distant waters

I got the script deciphering back, so here's the card on the album page with translation.

Lovely touching letter, Postmaster.
I am having trouble finding "Barracouta Bay, Siberia"
any change of name you are aware of?

Tsing Tau = Quing Dao

Rod,

I, too, had a devil of a time finding it, as the name "Barracouta Bay" was apparently not official even at that time. If my research is correct, the name was used largely by European navies in the Far East, and it was called that because it was scouted by the British paddle sloop HMS Barracouta during the Crimean War.

It is today known as Sovetskaya Gavan, in Siberia, Russia, as is the town on the bay. You can see it on a map here.

I also searched for more info in the recipient, Berta Müller, c/o her father Heinrich Müller in Kiel and with an uncle Richard, but couldn't find anything.

Thanks Postmaster, nicely solved.
One wonders what soldiers were doing there in 1897, looks desolate (and cold)

Red Spot

Postmaster, Thank you very much for posting this material. It has been very interesting.

Would you mind telling me which service you used to translate the material? I have a decent amount of old Feldpost material that I would like to have translated (I have a difficult time with old German cursive handwriting).