Today in Postal History
This UPU postal card was sent from the island of São
Vicente.
São
Vicente
is in the northwest corner of the Cape
Verde Islands at 16° 50' N. and 25° W.
It is about 550 miles west of Dakar.
The card was issued just for the Portuguese province of Cape
Verde.
The UPU rate was 30 reis.
The indicia is similar to Portugal's King Luiz stamps of the period.
I would think that putting together all of the UPU cards
for each province of Portugal would be quite a challenge.
Cape Verde is now an independent nation.
The postal card was cancelled with a purple double oval
handstamp.
The double oval fits the card's format well.
The destination of the card was San
Nicolás de los Arroyas in the province of Buenos Aires, Brazil.
San
Nicolás de los Arroyas * is near Rosario about 150 miles
northwest of Buenos Aires.
The card transitted Buenos Aires on July 7 and reached San
Nicolás de los Arroyas the same day.
Its arrival was marked by a destination CDS on both sides.
A twenty-five day passage from such an out of the way place
seems to me to have been a pretty good result for 1888.
*Warning: this link
downloads a helper for your browser and the pictures
take some time to load but the panoramic pictures it shows are a lot of
fun.
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