Packet boat
medium-sized boat designed for domestic mail, passenger, and freight transportation
Packet boats were medium-sized boats designed mainly for domestic mail and freight transport in European countries and in North American rivers and canals. Eventually including basic passenger accommodation, they were used extensively during the 18th and 19th centuries, and had regularly scheduled services.
In the 18th century, packet boats were put into use on the Atlantic Ocean between Great Britain and its colonies, where the services were called the packet trade. In the later 19th century, steam-driven packets were used extensively in the United States on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, servicing rivertowns such as St. Joseph, St. Paul, Galena and St. Louis and providing communication and supplies to be carried overland to more distant forts and trading posts.
History
Packet craft were used extensively in European coastal mail services since the 17th century, and gradually added minimal passenger accommodation: "firing" (i.e. a place to cook), drinking water (often tasting of indigo or tobacco, which the water casks had previously held), and a place to sleep. Scheduled services began to be offered, but the time taken by journeys on sailing ships depended a lot on the weather.
The public source identifies “Packet boat” as medium-sized boat designed for domestic mail, passenger, and freight transportation. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Packet, boat and medium-sized.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2065452. The Library of Congress control number is sh85096524. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Packet boat” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.