1898 Revenues: Cancel for July 29: Atlantic Mutual Insurance

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Cancel for July 29: Atlantic Mutual Insurance

ATLANTIC MUTUAL

JUL 29 1901

INSURANCE.

Founded in New York as the Atlantic Insurance Company in 1838, the company would become a "mutual" insurance firm in 1842. By the 1850s the company was the largest marine and general insurance firm in North America.

The company was the only marine insurer in New York for generations, and consequently is associated with some very famous shipwrecks, including:

Titanic - Atlantic sold the policy for most of the ship's coverage.
Mary Celeste - this brigantine is famous for having been found adrift in the Atlantic with no crew and no explanation for her abandonment.
SS Central America - this sidewheeler was loaded with gold from California when it sank in a hurricane. The wreck was found in 1987 by the Columbus-American Discovery Group. Atlantic and a group of other insurance companies sued for claim to the wreck. Atlantic lost the case and Columbus-American was awarded 92% of the find.

Today the firm is located at 100 Wall Street and specializes in personal property/casualty insurance for wealthy individuals with high-value assets to protect.

Screen capture from current Atlantic Companies site that you can find here.

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Unusual Ink on the 1898 Series Dollar Values

THESE STAMPS ARE BOTH SCOTT R191! From fugitive ink to color changelings with unknown origins. These are both copies of R191. Can only exposure to light produce the color changes you see in stamp on the right? Or possibly a soak in bleach or other chemical? I doubt it. These stamps have so many examples of changelings that there must be something else happening. The ink used on this dark green series of stamps was different than that known on any other BEP printed stamps, never mind the varnish square. It is likely the BEP was experimenting with ink on this issue. Inks are discussed further if you click on the stamps.

Collecting Cancels

Welcome to 1898 Revenues, a website that features the stamps used to pay the Spanish-American war taxes imposed by the US Government starting in July, 1898. But while this site features those stamps in general, a focus is on their cancels, and on the firms that applied them. Unlike US postage stamps, which were canceled by the US Post Office and now Postal Service, revenue stamps were ordered to be canceled by their users in such a way that the identity of the user and the date was included in the cancel. This makes the collecting possibilities nearly endless, so that a single variety of stamp, for example, the 2 cent battleship stamp intended to pay documentary taxes, had potentially millions of different users, and therefore as many different cancels. Please browse the site and discover the collecting possibilities, made so much more accessible now through online sales. Cancels on these stamps have become much more interesting and accessible with the massive amounts of archival and historical data available on line. Rather than hours spent in libraries or with heavy volumes to identify cancels, search engines allow for cancel sleuthing at home.

Battleship Proprietary Printed Cancels: Updating the Joyce/Chappell Lists

In the 1950s, Morton Dean Joyce updated a list of printed cancels on the battleship proprietaries compiled by Clarence Chappell. Joyce's is a very long list consisting of more than one hundred companies and thousands of cancel dates. In the years since Joyce completed his list, many new cancel dates have been demonstrated to exist, and an update of the 1950s list is needed.

This site is attempting that update. Using the Joyce/Chappell lists and the former collection of Henry Tolman (ARA #25) as a base, a gradual effort will be made to post updated lists to the best of my knowledge, making a call for those that can contribute new dates and new images of those cancels.

Following in this column are quick links to excel files of these lists by company. Also are links to the posts that I have made on this blog regarding these companies and their cancels.