In 1847, Mauritius was the fifth country in the world to issue stamps. The British had taken over the island only thirty-seven years before, in 1810, largely as a result of the fact that the French had used the island as a base to interrupt British shipments to and from India during wartime. The population of the colony was French, Creole, and Indian; English, though spoken by government officials, was not the language of the people.
The government order that called for stamps fixed the postage rates at 2 pence for internal letters and1 penny for intra-city letters. The stamps were crudely engraved, as the only person in the colony with any experience in engraving was a partially blind watchmaker who had never been a professional engraver. Five hundred of each value were ordered and, after some delay, delivered. In the left-hand panel, the engraver put the words "POST OFFICE" rather than "POST PAID" as the stamps were ordered. When the stamps were reordered, the wording was changed to "POST PAID" and it accounts for their extreme rarity. However, the "POST OFFICE" stamps were needed quickly, because the Governor's wife, Lady Gomm, was holding a fancy-dress bal at Goverment House adnthe stamps were wanted to send out the invitations.
Those that Lady Gomm did not use were place don public sale, and due to the popularity of the innovation, the stamps sold out very quickly. Most were used locally, a few on letters to France and at least one to India. Of the approximately thirty specimens of the Post Office Mauritius, slightly more than half are the One Penny Red, and the remainder are the Two Penny Blue. Oddly, the stamps were not discovered until 1864, by a French collector who traded them away because her albums did not have a space for them. In 1865 the items ended up, as did so many items at the middle of the last century, in the stock of the Belgian dealer Moens. Moens bought the original One Penny and Two Penny for about $35-- a fabulous sum in 1865 for postage stamps-- and sold them a few months later for about $100, as the world gasped at what lengths stamp collectors would go to satisfy their mania. Today, the stamps would sell together for $500,000.
In stamp collecting there are a number of rarities that sell for comparatively small sums. In certain specialized areas of philately, the collectors do not bid up to high levels on even the greatest rarities. Some town cancellations on early United States stamps and some perforation varieties are virtually unique, yet they sell for extremely modest sums. A rare item is an expensive item only if it is desired by a wide group of collectors and only if it has a history of high prices. Rarity alone does not make high price.
Indeed, even within the narrow confines of the high-priced rarities themselves (the megabuck wonders, as they may well be called), there is great inequity in price. The Airmail invert, for which there are eighty-five or so known examples extant, sells for about the same as one of the two Mauritius stamps, of each of which only about fifteen are known. And indeed, the very rare Z grills of the United States-- major stamps from a major collecting country-- sell for about the same as the Airmail invert, despite the fact that they are each at least about twenty times as rare.
Obviously, supply and demand affect prices, but that says so much that it says nearly nothing. Those contemplating the purchase of a high-price rarity would be wise to research the price trends and history of the specific stamp. For philately has its fashions, too, and what one generation desires another may well eschew.