Four centuries

Bermuda was the risk before it was the capital.

A lighthouse does not remove the hazard. It fixes the position of it, early enough to act on. For three hundred years Bermuda was the hazard — a reef line plotted in other people’s policies, a ruling that made a category of property uninsurable, a wartime staging post. What follows is the sequence of losses, judgments and capital that turned the hazard into the market. The pattern it makes is still the most useful thing to know when the next one arrives.