Coffee House by Hogarth

Happy National Coffee Day! I don’t know who decided that today was National Coffee Day, nor even why we should necessarily be celebrating it.   However, as a confirmed and happily contented coffee addict, perhaps this is a good time to reflect on coffee, ships and shipping.

Coffee may have had a far greater impact on shipping than even, dare say it, rum. The first English coffee houses sprang up in London around 1650. Edward Lloyd started Lloyd’s coffee house on Tower Street in 1668.

It soon became popular with merchants and ships captains. By 1692, Lloyd began publishing a weekly newsletter, Ships Arrived at and Departed from several Ports of England, as I have Account of them in London … [and] An Account of what English Shipping and Foreign Ships for England, I hear of in Foreign Ports. It would later take the more succinct name of Lloyd’s List, which is now one of the oldest continuously published newspapers in the world.

Edward Lloyd’s coffee house was also frequented by a new class of investor, the underwriters, who provided the first insurance.  They would sign their names to the bottom of an agreement pledging to make good a portion of the losses if the ship was lost at sea in return for a fee or a percentage of the profits. From Lloyd’s coffee house,  Lloyd’s of London grew to become the world’s largest insurance and reinsurance marketplace.

It became apparent that the underwriters needed a basis for determining which ships were seaworthy and which ships were not. Initially this took the form of a list of ships worthy of insurance but would grow to become the first classification society,  Lloyd’s Register , founded in 1760.

So coffee played a key role in shipping  insurance, regulation,  and news and communications – all of which continue to be central to ship operations today.

My own association with coffee and ships is rather more direct. I began my career as a young naval architect working for Moore McCormack Lines which shipped, among other cargoes, coffee from South America and Africa. I still have vivid memories of walking through the dockside warehouse where pallets of bagged green coffee, carried north by break-bulk cargo liners, were stored until they could be carried off by truck to the roasters.  The pallets were stacked high and seemed to extend as far as the eye could see.  The smell of the unroasted coffee was lush, verdant and earthy with a hint of spice.   It smelled alive and exotic.   Simply wonderful.

And now, if you will excuse me, I need another cup of coffee.