This is Part 1 of a new series featuring stamp errors. The first stamps we talk about were issued by the Republic of Palau, an island nation in the Pacific Ocean, 500 miles east of the Philippines and 2,000 miles south of Tokyo, forming the westernmost part of the Caroline Islands.
This block of four commemorative air mail stamps from Palau has old colonial scenes that incorporate images of stamps from the German colonial period 1885-1914. However, only one of the stamps is correct – a wrong image was chosen three times:
On the 44c. showing the raising of the imperial flag on Palau in 1885 with the 20 Pfennig stamp of the German Reich, the overprint ‘Schiffs brief’ is a mistake. Usually a sea post stamp should have been applied;
The 44c, early German trading post on Angaur with the 5 Pfg. stamp of the German Reich is overprinted ‘Marshall Islands’ and postmarked ‘ANGAUR / PALAU-INSELN / 14.3.1910’. Almost everything is wrong here, because ‘Angaur’ is a cancellation of the Caroline Islands and not the Marshall Islands.
Furthermore, a stamp from 1910 can never appear on the stamp shown, since it was withdrawn on September 30, 1901. In Angaur from 14.3. until 3.6.1910 stamps of the Marshall Islands were used – but not this overprint edition;
The 44c. Abai Meeting House based on a drawing by Prof. Krämer and his wife has a reproduction of the stamp of 5 marks of the Carolines with the stamp ‘PALAU’. The one error here is that the name of the professor should be ‘Krämer’ not ‘Kraemer’;
The 44c. with the small cruiser of the imperial navy ‘SMS Cormoran 1914′ with the reproduction of the 40 Pfg. franking stamp of the Caroline Islands is cancelled with a naval ship postmark No. 8 from August 31, 1914. Such a naval ship postmark was not permitted on a colonial stamp. The other mistake here is that the date of the ship’s visit, 1914, is incorrect. This ship last visited the Carolines in December 1913. In late 1914 the ‘Cormoran’ was in Tsingtao, China.
