This article by Gray Scrimgeour and Ian Kimmerley describes mailed items from an extensive correspondence (1937–1942) involving Henry Porter, a trans-Pacific cable repair worker based in Victoria, British Columbia. Most of the correspondence is between Porter while he was travelling and his family in Victoria. There also are some cable-work related covers. Most of Porter’s trips were aboard the Cable Ship Restorer, the repair ship owned by the Commercial Pacific Cable Company. These voyages are verified by information from contemporary newspaper articles.
Porter’s mail — from places such as Honolulu, Midway, Wake, Guam and Manila — usually was sent by air mail via U.S. Foreign Air Mail (FAM) Route 14, the Pacific Route of Pan American Airways (PanAm). For Canadian postal history, this correspondence, which remarkably has been kept intact for four-fifths of a century, provides extremely rare examples of Canadian mail across the Pacific.
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