Waiting outside Acre
During the siege of Acre in 1189–1191, a swimmer named ‘Isa carried letters and money through the blockade at night. Crusader forces surrounded the Muslim-held city while Saladin’s army tried to relieve it from outside. 18
Saladin’s chronicler, Baha al-Din Ibn Shaddad, describes ‘Isa diving beneath enemy ships. When he reached Acre, he released a bird to signal his safe arrival.
One night, the bird did not come. ‘Isa had set out with three purses containing a thousand pieces of gold and a packet of letters. The gold was the troops’ pay. Days later, people on the shore inside Acre found his body. The money was still tied to him. The letters had been wrapped in oiled silk. 17
Saladin was still fighting for the kingdom of Jerusalem after the death of his opponent Baldwin IV in 1185. At Acre, the war continued with the city’s garrison cut off from his relief army. ‘Isa’s route ran between them. 1829
TWO JOBS / ONE CONNECTION
How the garrison confirmed a delivery
SWIMMER → ACRELetters and money enter the city
ACRE → WAITING OUTSIDEA released bird signals safe arrival
Normal arrival sequence described by Ibn Shaddad. On the fatal trip, the expected bird did not arrive. Schematic, not a map; exact loft location is not supplied.Source 17 ↗
Before the Crusades: a token, then a letter
The ancient writer Aelian tells of Taurosthenes, an Olympic victor, releasing a pigeon with a purple token to take news of his victory to his father on Aegina. Aelian also reports a rival, supernatural explanation. His later account gives us a story about a particular victory, with no evidence of a routine Olympic postal service. 20
Written dispatches appear in accounts of the siege of Mutina in 43 BC. Pliny describes Decimus Brutus sending letters tied to pigeons’ feet out to the consuls’ camp. Frontinus describes Hirtius sending a pigeon carrying letters into the city. These later accounts describe communication in different directions. 215
MAKE A PREDICTION
A pigeon has delivered your message. Can you send it straight back with a reply?
Choose an answer, then follow the explanation below.
Before the pigeon could fly, it needed a boat
A homing pigeon heads for a familiar loft. To send a message there, someone first has to carry the bird away.
On Great Barrier Island, about 90 kilometres northeast of Auckland, birds arrived on the weekly steamer and flew back with messages. A regular service began in 1897. 4
Rival companies soon sold pigeongrams. Each issued prepaid stamps, which were private labels rather than official New Zealand postage. A reply service eventually carried messages from Auckland to the island at twice the price. For messages to the island, the service needed birds that would home there. An underwater cable ended it in 1908. 4
People used the service for ordinary errands as well as urgent news. Te Ara records shopping lists written on lightweight tissue paper, known as “flimsies”. The request could beat the weekly steamer. 164
HOW IT WORKED
The flight is the return leg.
The weekly steamer transported the birds away from their home loft before they could carry messages back.
Schematic of the initial island-to-Auckland service. Not a geographical map. Sources: Te Papa, 4 and Te Ara, 16.Source 4 ↗ Source 16 ↗
See real pigeon-post paper and stamps ↗
Te Papa’s surviving Great Barrier flimsy, 26 and the original stamps show the material objects behind the service. Archival images are linked, not reproduced.Source 26 ↗ Original stamps ↗
How tiny was the handwriting?
Ghubar, Arabic for “dust”, was a minute script used for pigeon post, as the Metropolitan Museum’s study of Islamic calligraphy explains. 22
Calligraphy historian Sheila Blair, quoted in a manuscript catalogue, describes ghubar letters as usually less than 3 millimetres, sometimes as small as 1.3 millimetres. These measurements concern the script generally, including its use in miniature Qur’ans and other works. They describe the script, rather than a standard size for every pigeon-post message. 23
Paper size and word counts varied by service.
THREE DIFFERENT MEASUREMENTS
Handwriting, film size and word limits
A handwritten character
A reported small example in descriptions of ghubar; letters generally described as under 3 mm. Not an Acre measurement.
Script reference, 23 ↗A surviving film
The whole Paris microfilm specimen in the National Postal Museum. Photographic reduction, not microscopic handwriting.
Museum object, 6 ↗A service limit
French decree, 10 November 1870. Address included. A rule for individual letters, not the total payload of a bird.
Decree, 24 ↗Figures refer to different objects and contexts. Displayed type is enlarged for reading; it does not reproduce historical handwriting at actual size.
Forty words, or four yes-or-no answers
Gaston Tissandier, who flew mail out of besieged Paris by balloon, wrote of the anxious families waiting for those letters. The pigeon service offered a way to send news back into the city. 24
The word count affected the bill. A French decree of 10 November 1870 allowed letters sent by microscopic photography and pigeon to contain up to 40 words, including the address, at 50 centimes per word. 24
A cheaper option allowed four yes-or-no answers. The Paris correspondent enclosed a special card in a letter sent out of the city. The recipient filled it in; the answers could then come back by pigeon. The reply cost one franc, besides the five-centime card. 24
Across the Channel, the British Post Office’s notice of 16 November set a 20-word limit for its private messages to Paris, with special counting rules for names and addresses. Messages had to be in French. Political and military information was barred. These limits belonged to particular services; they did not measure how much a pigeon could carry. 25
Photography allowed many dispatches to travel in a small load. A surviving Paris pigeon-post film in the National Postal Museum measures 6.7 × 4.7 centimetres. That is the size of the whole specimen, rather than an individual message or handwritten letter. 6
The film was enlarged on arrival. Clerks then transcribed its messages. Writers could use ordinary-sized script because the camera did the shrinking. 15
PARIS / 1870–1871
How Paris received photographic messages
- 01 / MESSAGE
Written information
- 02 / REDUCE
Photograph at miniature scale
- 03 / FLY
Pigeon carries the microfilm
- 04 / ENLARGE
Transcribe and read
Process schematic, not a reconstruction of equipment or film size. Object record, 6 · Reading process, 15.Source 6 ↗ Source 15 ↗
Could an enemy read the message?
Wartime codebooks could replace a word or phrase with a short group of letters. The groups could then be encrypted using a shared secret key. This could conceal the meaning of a captured message; a code could also save space. 30
A pigeon’s remains found in a Surrey chimney illustrate the difficulty for anyone intercepting such a note. The leg canister held a handwritten message. It consisted of 27 five-letter groups. It was undated. GCHQ assumed it came from the Second World War. The agency reported that deciphering it required the relevant codebooks and any further encryption material. 30
A signal has an agreed meaning, as the Acre bird did when it confirmed an arrival. A code substitutes agreed symbols or groups for meanings. Encryption transforms a message using a system and, typically, a key. Making a message tiny can help conceal it. Keeping its meaning secret after interception requires something more.
Ibn Shaddad records the Acre bird as a signal and says nothing about an attached note. Any wording or cipher remains unknown. 17
Pigeons on screen
Youssef Chahine’s Saladin the Victorious (1963) places an Arab Christian named Issa among Saladin’s trusted men. Film scholar Imed Ben Labidi discusses the character as part of Chahine’s vision of shared Arab identity. Ibn Shaddad’s account, by contrast, calls the swimmer ‘Isa a Muslim. The religious identity changes in the telling. 1917
Valiant (2005) turns fictional wartime messenger pigeons into the heroes of an animated adventure. In Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), pigeon communication belongs to a modern city. Jarmusch described a real rooftop pigeon keeper among his inspirations. 2728
Pigeon
Carry the bird outward.
Let it fly back with the message.
Messenger dog
Train the route and destination.
The dog runs without an escort.
Horse, mule, sled team
Move the rider, mailbag or load.
Support the journey along the way.
Three useful ways to understand the cases below, not an exhaustive taxonomy.
A message on a dog’s collar
A 1918 British training film follows a messenger dog with a tube on its collar. The dog crosses obstacles and reaches a collection point without a person running beside it. Imperial War Museums’ catalogue describes the sequence, along with treatment for a dog whose paws had been burned by mustard gas. 7
Dogs also carried civilian mail by pulling sleds. The National Postal Museum preserves one used on Ed Biederman’s route between Circle and Eagle in Alaska, where regular dogsled mail lasted until 1963. 8
How a ruler heard from an empire
When news reached Susa that Xerxes had taken Athens, the Persians celebrated. The next report brought mourning: people “feared for Xerxes himself”, Herodotus writes. Herodotus places his description of Persian horse couriers between the disaster at Salamis and the reaction at home. 31
A dispatch passed between men and horses stationed along the route, a sequence Herodotus compared to a torch relay. Herodotus describes a man and a horse for each day’s stage. The dispatch continued with the next pair. 1
Augustus wanted faster reports from Rome’s provinces. According to Suetonius, he first placed young men at intervals along military roads, then introduced vehicles. Suetonius explains the benefit: “the same men who bring the dispatches from any place can, if occasion demands, be questioned as well.” The arriving courier could answer questions. 32
Marco Polo describes mounted express messengers in Kublai Khan’s domains carrying urgent dispatches to governors, or bringing news “when any Baron has revolted”. Fresh horses stood saddled at the posts. Foot-runners formed a separate service. Polo describes clerks at their posts recording each runner’s arrival and departure. 33
THE RELAY PRINCIPLE
Changing horses and couriers
- RIDER + HORSE A
Carry the message to a station
- HAND OVER
The dispatch continues; the animal rests
- RIDER + HORSE B
Carry it to the next station
Simplified explanation of the Persian system described by Herodotus, 1. Station spacing and journey times are not shown.Source 1 ↗
News of a president, carried west
In 1861, Californians waited to learn what the new president, Abraham Lincoln, had said in his inaugural address. The message travelled west through both telegraph and horse post. The Pony Express National Museum describes it reaching Fort Kearney by telegraph, crossing to Placerville by Pony Express, then continuing along the coast by wire. 35
The National Park Service gives the delivery time for the March 4 address as seven days and 17 hours. News of the new administration’s policies could reach California while the secession crisis was unfolding. 34
The Pony Express usually covered more than 1,800 miles, about 2,900 kilometres, in roughly ten days. It operated only in 1860–1861. Official termination came in October; the last letters completed their journeys in November. 3
MAKE A PREDICTION
What advantage did dogs have on the long Barrow–Kotzebue route?
Choose an answer, then follow the explanation below.
Why dogs replaced the reindeer
Reindeer carried US mail in northwestern Alaska from 1899 into the early 1910s. On the Nome–Candle route, they were reported to complete the journey in eight days, roughly half the time dog teams needed. 9
The much longer Barrow–Kotzebue route caused trouble in 1903–1904. Its 1,300-mile round trip, about 2,090 kilometres, proved too much for the deer without changes of animals. Dogs made the second trip. Fresh dogs were available in Indigenous villages along the route; trained replacement reindeer were not. The speed comparison and the failed journey belong to two different routes. 9
Another trail: Australian mail camels
Library & Archives NT catalogues Thomas A. Bradshaw’s photograph “Mail camels” at Alice Springs Telegraph Station, dated 24 June 1907.Open the record, 10 ↗
The mail still has hooves
For the Havasupai community at Supai, inside the Grand Canyon, mule mail remains a working service. USPS’s May 2026 account describes deliveries five days a week along a nine-mile descent, about 14.5 kilometres. 11
Each mule can carry up to 200 pounds, about 91 kilograms, with the load balanced across its body. Going down takes about three hours. The climb back takes about five. 11
USPS, May 2026. Maximum load, not average load.Source 11 ↗
Three stories to check before repeating
The Liège postal cats: the tale of cats delivering Belgian mail traces back to William L. Alden’s satire, according to a VRT/RTBF investigation. It should not be presented as a documented postal experiment. 12
The Waterloo pigeon: the Rothschild Archive finds no evidence that a pigeon brought the bank news of the 1815 victory. It does preserve pigeon messages from 1846. 13
Cher Ami: the Smithsonian calls the “eighth and last pigeon” detail legend. Its stated uncertainty concerns whether Private Omer Richards carried Cher Ami into the forest with three other birds. 14
Back at Acre
The letters and gold reached Acre with ‘Isa’s body. Ibn Shaddad, in the 1897 English translation, writes: “Never before have we heard of a dead man delivering a message entrusted to his care.” 17
What unusual route carried the post where you live? In Poland, a trail begins on 18 October 1558, when Zygmunt II August established the Kraków–Vienna–Venice connection using relay horses. A local archive may hold the letters sent along such a route. 2