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I (Ernest Argyle) received a letter from a reader in New York in which he enclosed an old advertising envelope sent to the Norwegian office of the "Bremer-Linien" (Nordtyske Lloyd), Jernbanetorvet 11, Christiania, dated October 18, 1883 from Sweden. It is a printed envelope of the North German Lloyd Line, on an official Swedish Post Office envelope, embossed with a "Tolf Ore" stamp. The company have an engraved illustration of one of their ships on the left hand side of the envelope, and my correspondent desired to know the name of the ship, as the same engraving was to be seen on two postage stamps of Uruguay, issued in 1895 and 1897, both of the same design and of 20c. denomination, but the former printed in black and green, the latter in black and mauve.
I was always of the impression that the ship on the stamp design was the old Guion/Cunard steamship Oregon. This letter proves that the liner is the Elbe, for the vessel's code signal letters can be seen flying from the mizzen on the envelope engraving, whereas they are not seen on the stamp reproduction. The Elbe was built by John Elder and Company, of Glasgow, in 1881 and this 4,500-ton ship was an immediate success for she established a new record of eight days on the service from Southampton to New York in her inaugural year. She left on her maiden voyage on June 26, 1881 from Bremen via Southampton and New York. In 1895 she was sunk in collision with the steamer Craithie in the North Sea with the loss of 332 lives. The Elbe was a straight-stemmed. 2-funnelled, 4-masted, iron-hulled, single screw vessel, with a length of 418 ft., breadth 36 ft, and a speed of 16 knots.
Uruguay SG188 Sea Breezes 8/69