126 THE SEA. 



to Lloyd's to read his letters and attend sales." Later,, Steele and Addison both spoke of 

 it in the same light. " The veritable, personal Lloyd/' says Esqtiiros, " as we see, 

 has made a great deal more noise in the world after his death than he ever did during 

 his lifetime.'" The name of the coffee-house keeper has become inseparably connected 

 with the greatest maritime institution of the world. 



The original Lloyd was a wonderfully good example of a pushing London citizen. 

 Little was, speaking in these later days, known of Edward of that ilk till Mr. Frederick 

 Martin unearthed, in the vaults of the Royal Exchange, a long-forgotten series of its 

 archives. Then he found " huge stores of manuscript papers and immense leather-cased 

 folios, partly singed in the great fire which, in 1838, destroyed the Royal Exchange 

 above them." Now we know that Lloyd, early in the reign of Charles II., kept a coffee- 

 house in Tower Street, and contrived to make it the gathering point for the under- 

 writers, who had been previously scattered all over the city. This house was near the 

 Custom House, the Navy Office, and the Trinity House, as well as to the Thames " below 

 bridge/' and the position was obviously a good one for the purpose. Having surrounded 

 himself with a growing connection in Tower Ward, Lloyd found himself in a position 

 to approach the haunts of the leading merchants and bankers, and we find him in 1093 

 securely established at the corner of Lombard Street and Abchurch Lane, near the spot 

 where the Lombard Street post-office now stands. Here he held periodical auction sales 

 'by the candle/ and started a weekly paper devoted to maritime affairs, the first of its 

 kind : indeed it was, saving the London Gazette, the only London newspaper yet in 

 existence. But he now met a severe blow, for, as we learn from Macaulay, " the 

 judges were unanimously of opinion that this liberty (of printing) did not extend to 

 gazettes/' and that, by English law, no man not authorised by the Crown had the right 

 to publish political news. The said political news in this case consisted of mere headings 

 and brief paragraphs, as, " Yesterday the Lords passed the Bill to restrain the wearing of all 

 wrought silks from India," or that they had received a "petition from the Quakers." 

 Lloyd had to succumb and stop the publication, but his sales of ships and cargoes 

 increased, so that in fifteen or twenty years Lloyd's had become the recognised London 

 centre of maritime business, including marine insurance. From this comparatively small 

 beginning has sprung the all-pow T erful organisation whose agents are to be found in every 

 part of the habitable globe. 



c: When/' says a writer already quoted, " I landed, about three years back, upon one 

 of the group of rocks lost in the bosom of the waves, and which are called the Scilly 

 Islands, there was only one thing which brought London to my mind, and that was the 

 name ( Llo} r d's, in letters of brass, on the door of one of the least poor-looking houses. 

 I might have gone much further afield, into some of the still wilder islands of the Old 

 or New World, and there, even at the very ends of the earth provided only that there was 

 a town or port of some sort I should have found an agent of this English society. 

 The definition of Lloyd's which was given by a City merchant can now be better 

 understood by us. 'It is/ said he, 'a spider planted in the centre of a web which 

 covers the whole sea, and the shipwrecked vessels are the dead flies/ " * 



*" English Seamen and Divers." 



