risks encountered in sailing unknown seas in the midst of well-known
dangers.

Marine insurance of the regular kind was, of course, a very different
thing. It was already of immemorial age, going back certainly to
medieval and probably to very ancient times. All forms of insurance on
land are mere mushrooms by comparison. Lloyd's had not been heard of.
But there were plenty of smart Elizabethan underwriters already
practising the general principles which were to be formally adopted two
hundred years later, in 1779, at Lloyd's Coffee House. A policy taken
out on the _Tiger_ immortalized by Shakespeare would serve as a model
still. And what makes it all the more interesting is that the
Elizabethan underwriters calculated the _Tiger's_ chances at the very
spot where the association known as Lloyd's transacts its business
to-day, the Royal Exchange in London. This, in turn, brings Elizabeth
herself upon the scene; for when she visited the Exchange, which Sir
Thomas Gresham had built to let the merchants do their street work under
cover, she immediately grasped its full significance and 'caused it by
an Herald and a Trumpet to be proclaimed The Royal Exchange,' the name
it bears to-day. An Elizabethan might well be astonished by what he
would see at any modern Lloyd's. Yet he would find the same essentials;
for the British Lloyd's, like most of its foreign imitators, is not a
gigantic insurance company at all, but an association of cautiously
elected members who carry on their completely independent private
business in daily touch with each other--precisely as Elizabethans did.
Lloyd's method differs wholly from ordinary insurance. Instead of
insuring vessel and cargo with a single company or man the owner puts
his case before Lloyd's, and any member can then write his name
underneath for any reasonable part of the risk. The modern
'underwriter,' all the world over, is the direct descendant of the