Blue Mauritius: The 1847 Post Office Stamps

The stamps collectors call the Red Mauritius and Blue Mauritius are the one penny and two pence issued by the British colony of Mauritius on 21 September 1847 — the first stamps produced anywhere in the British Empire outside Britain itself. Five hundred of each were printed from a single copper plate that carried one engraving of each value, and about 27 examples across both values were recorded as surviving as of 1981.

They are inscribed POST OFFICE at the left side. The replacement issue of 1848 reads POST PAID instead, and the change generated the most persistent story in philately.

Their prices sit at the very top of the market. In 1993 the Bordeaux cover, the unique envelope carrying both values together, sold through David Feldman SA in Geneva for 5,750,000 Swiss francs. In June 2021 a "Ball cover" — an invitation posted by the governor's wife — sold at Christoph Gärtner for a figure reported at over €11 million, about US$11.2 million, the highest price ever paid for any philatelic item.

The famous version of the story says that the engraver was supposed to write POST PAID and absent-mindedly wrote POST OFFICE, the words displayed on the building where he worked, and that the slip is why the stamps are valuable.

Researchers have shown this is not what happened. The wording was deliberate: POST OFFICE was the legal name of the colony's postal department, and Barnard engraved what the department was actually called. The 1848 change to POST PAID reflected a change in how the stamps were used, not the correction of a blunder.

The stamps are valuable for a much duller reason: five hundred of each were printed, they were used on ordinary mail, and hardly any survived. The story is worth knowing mainly so you can discount sellers who use it as a selling point.

Joseph Osmond Barnard was an Englishman from Portsmouth who reached Mauritius in 1838 by hiding on a ship. He settled on the island and worked as an engraver, and when the colony decided to issue stamps he was the person available to cut the plate.

The result shows it. The engraving is competent but not refined, and the plate carried a single impression of each value, so every stamp had to be printed separately. Nothing about the production suggests anyone expected the stamps to matter beyond the following year.

That is the usual shape of a great rarity. The Mauritius stamps, the British Guiana one cent and the Hawaiian Missionaries were all small, unglamorous local jobs done to solve an immediate problem, by people whose names survive only because of what they printed.

Mauritius rarities have been chased by serious money for well over a century. In 1904 the future King George V, then Prince of Wales, paid £1,450 for an unused blue two pence — a sum that reads oddly small now and was extraordinary then.

The two headline covers show why envelopes beat single stamps. The Bordeaux cover carries both the one penny and the two pence together and is the only item of its kind; it made 5,750,000 Swiss francs through David Feldman SA in 1993. The Ball cover is an invitation to a ball given by the governor's wife, Lady Gomme, and its sale at Christoph Gärtner in June 2021 set the record for any philatelic item.

An envelope proves the use, the date, the rate and the route. A stamp on its own proves only itself, which is why the market pays a multiple for the paper around it.

Because these stamps are famous, images of them have been printed on album pages, exhibition souvenirs, cigarette cards, commemorative sheets and outright forgeries for over a century. Mauritius itself has issued modern stamps reproducing the 1847 designs, and those are ordinary modern stamps.

Three quick checks rule out most candidates. The 1847 stamps were issued imperforate, as all stamps of the 1840s were, so an example with perforations is not one. They were printed one at a time from a small engraved plate, so the impression is uneven and the lines are coarse under magnification, where a modern photolithographed reproduction is clean and regular. And the paper is period paper, not bright white.

If something survives those checks, stop and get an opinion rather than a valuation. Our guide to spotting a fake stamp has the longer list, and rare stamps of the world puts these stamps next to the other national rarities.

Photograph the stamp and the app identifies it, which will usually tell you immediately whether you are looking at an 1847 design or a modern commemorative of it.