[stevenwoo]

Life was much slower paced, and it sounds like all these letters are on very high quality paper for the time so it makes sense these were very deliberate expression of communication. These undelivered letters from wives and mothers to their husbands serving aboard a French warship that was captured are like a snapshot in time, and the historian writes that many were possibly written by scribes hired for their literacy. To give some idea of how much slower paced, the tragedy of the one wife who died a year after sending her letter who probably never knew the fate of her husband.