Confederate Raiders and Marine Insurance
Mike Furlan
"When the Civil War erupted in 1861, Platt (who later became the seventh
president of the INA insurance company) was secretary of the insurance company,
having joined it the previous year. Before Fort Sumter was fired on, the
company had already inserted a war-risk clause into its marine policies,
relieving INA of any losses arising out of the conflict unless an extra premium
was paid.
The first INA-insured vessel to fall victim was the bark Rowena, captured by the
Confederate raider Jeff Davis a month after the fall of Sumter. Soon other
raiders were roaming the high seas, searching for Northern prizes. The
Confederate cruiser Alabama set sail from the British Isles, destroyed the
American whaling fleet off the Azores, then took nine prizes as she sailed
toward America. Two hundred miles off New York the Alabama turned south,
overtook and burned two Union merchantmen, and before long was reported wreaking
havoc along the courses followed by ships bound from Northern ports to
California or China.
Now Platt proved that, staid or not, he was capable of considerable ingenuity.
Most of the marine underwriters were reluctant to insure a ship departing, say,
for Europe if the Alabama had recently been sighted along that course.
But Platt took a different view of the matter. Considering that news of the
raider was at least a week old, and sometimes as much as two months old, when it
was received in Philadelphia, he reckoned that the cruiser would not dare remain
in the area, for Union men-of-war were scouring the sea for it. Therefore the
latest course on which the Alabama was know to have been lurking ought to be the
safest.
Of course the theory applied only to outbound vessels, but it did work. After
sixteen months, the Alabama had sailed around the world and seized forty ships,
but not one of them was insured by INA. By the end of the war, INA's losses to
the Confederate raiders totaled $11,169, compared with $36,971 for another
company, $16,397 for a second, $48,934 for a third, and a whopping $1,653,889
for a fourth company."
Carr, PERILS NAMED AND UNNAMED