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runs in from the Strait of Belle Isle to Natashquan, more than two hundred miles along the north shore of the Gulf, among a perfect labyrinth of islands. Next, the business side. As only a single instance can be given, and as ordinary business management in shipping circles more or less {173} resembles what is practised in other commercial affairs, the special factor of marine insurance will alone be taken, as being the most typically maritime and by far the most interesting historically. Ordinary insurance on land is a mere thing of yesterday compared with marine insurance, which, according to some, began in the ancient world, and which was certainly known in the Middle Ages. It is credibly reported to have been in vogue among the Lombards in the twelfth century, and on much the same principles as are followed by Canadians in the twentieth. It was certainly in vogue among the English before Jacques Cartier discovered the St Lawrence. And in 1613, the year Champlain discovered the site of Ottawa, a policy was taken out, in the ordinary course of business, on that famous old London merchantman, the _Tiger_, to which Shakespeare twice alludes, once in _Macbeth_ and again in _Twelfth Night_. Modern practice is based on the Imperial Marine Insurance Act of 1906, which is a development of the Act of 1795, which, in its turn, was a codification of the rules adopted at Lloyd's in 1779. Nothing shows more unmistakably how supreme the British are in every affair of the sea than these striking {174} facts: that 'A1 at Lloyd's' is an expression accepted all the world over as a guarantee of prime efficiency, that nearly every shipping country in the world has its own imitation of Lloyd's, nearly always including the name of Lloyd, and that the original Lloyd's at the Royal Exchange in London is still unassailably first. Most people know that Lloyd's originated from the marine underwriters who used to meet for both business and entertainment at Lloyd's coffee-house in the seventeenth century. But comparatively few seem to know that Lloyd's, like most of its imitators, is not a gigantic insurance company, but an association of carefully selected members, who agree to carry on their completely independent business affairs in daily touch with each other. Lloyd's' method differs from that of ordinary insurance in being conducted by 'underwriters,' each one of whom can write his name under any given risk for any reasonable p
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