ROMANCE OF INSURANCE

Shannon News, 2 November 1926, Page 3

ROMANCE OF INSURANCE

PERILOUS MARINE POLICIES ."THE OLDEST IN EXISTENCE.". What is believed to be the oldest marine insurance policy in existence has been added to the antiquities of Lloyd's. This interesting document relates to the voyage of the good ship St. Ilary, which set out from Marseilles in 1584 for Syria. No original, English policy is knbwn to exist before that covering certain goods in. the Three Brothers and draAvn up la. 1656. Marine insurance may, how-' ever, be traced' back far more remotely into the past, as it antedates business in connection with Are and. life. One authority refers to it having originated in Lombardy in the Twelth century; it Us .referred to ia a Pisan ordinance of the early fourteenth century, and was known in Venice about the time that our Henry V. was winning immortality at court.

That to Italy must be ascribed the honour of having initiated the system, says the London "Daily Telegraph'*,, is further suggested by the fact that the first policies issued in Englandwere in Italian, Our native language; seems to have made its bow in this connection 30 years before the Armada wae sighted, being employed to safeguard the Sancta Crux from theperils incidental to a trip "from, any 1 porte of the Isles of Indea of Calicut unto Lixborne." No specific accidents were mentioned in the policy. The signatories contented themselves with istating: "We will that this assurans shall be so strong and good as the most ample writings in the strete of London, or in the burse of Antwerp." A more detailed form was used in, Shakespeare's day to cover the Tiger,, a vessel that has won immortality from that line in "Macbeth": Her husband's to Aleppo gone, master of the Tiger. The writer adds: "When we consider the risks that were inseparable from travel by sea in those distant years, we can only admire tho courage of agents who were prepared to accpt any obligation for them. Before even the largest harbours -were adequately lighted or the most crowded channels charted, while nautical calculations were primitive and Barbary piracy a flourishing profes-' 1 sion, and when every foreign port was something of a danger zone, business men were so bold as to add I up all these assorted ills and to keep their optimism alive. "The -later agents of Edward Lloyd's coffee house in Tower Street lived in a desperately uncertain age, but the risks they ran were slender in comparison with those of the pioneers For any one who is inclined to dismiss the history of commerce aa uninspiring the beginning's of marine insurance may be offered as an eyeopener."