Pacific Mail Steamship Navigation Company (PMSS)

In late 1847, New York entrepreneur William H. Aspinwall expressed interest in establishing a regular mail steamship service over the Isthmus of Panama and up the coast to Oregon. In early 1848, the U.S. government granted the subsidy, but in the meantime California became the end station for Pacific Mail steamers. The PMSS was incorporated in New York in 1848 with Aspinwall as president.

Between 1854 and 1903, PMSS formed a close relationship with the Panama Railroad and the Panama Railroad steamship line, which served the ports on the Pacific coast of Central America. Mexican and Central American exporters and government officials complained often of the poor service of PMSS, especially in the 1870s and 1880s, when it was manipulated by transcontinental railroad interests. At this time, the German Kosmos and Roland lines initiated their competitive service in Central America. The PMSS prospered in the shipping boom of World War I but encountered hard times in the 1920s and the Great Depression, and it went bankrupt in 1938.

See alsoPanama Railroad .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

F. N. Otis, History of the Panama Railroad; and of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company (1867).

John Haskell Kemble, The Panama Route, 1848–1869 (1943).

Raymond A. Rydell, Cape Horn to the Pacific: The Rise and Demise of an Ocean Highway (1952).

K. Jack Bauer, A Maritime History of the United States: The Role of America's Seas and Waterways (1988).

Additional Bibliography

Schoonover, Thomas David. The United States in Central America, 1860–1911: Episodes of Social Imperialism and Imperial Rivalry in the World System. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.

Wiltsee, Ernest A. Up the River: Steam Navigation above the Carquinez Strait. San Francisco: Book Club of California, 2003.

                                       Thomas Schoonover