Lutine Bell

On the night of October 9 to 10, 1799, the frigate HMS Lutine, a former French ship that passed to the British after Toulon, is wrecked on the shoals of the Frisian Islands, off Vlieland and Terschelling. She carried a cargo of gold and silver bound for merchants on the Continent, insured by London underwriters, who paid the loss. Salvage has gone on for more than two centuries and most of the metal has never been raised. The ship's bell, though, is recovered in 1858, then hung at Lloyd's, and it has followed the market through its successive halls; today it sits on the rostrum, in the middle of the Underwriting Room at Lime Street. Its use came from a plain information problem, in a market that traded on news. When a ship was overdue, the underwriters carrying her hull or cargo reinsured their line in the overdue market, at a price that rose with each day without news. News reaching the Room therefore had to be known by everyone at the same moment, without an insider trading before the rest. One stroke announced a loss, two strokes the ship's return. The telegraph, then radio, made the bell useless for that purpose, and it cracked. It is now rung only for ceremonies, commemorations and great disasters, and each time the Room stops. Not to be confused with marine salvage in the legal sense, of which the Lutine wreck has remained a textbook case, nor with Lloyd's Open Form, the market's salvage contract.