Norddeutscher Lloyd

The company was founded by the Bremen merchants Hermann Henrich Meier and Eduard Crüsemann on 20 February 1857, after the dissolution of the New York based Ocean Steam Navigation Company, a joint German-American enterprise. The new shipping company had no direct association with the British maritime classification society Lloyd's Register, but by the mid-19th century, "Lloyd" was commonly used to refer to NDL (an earlier user of the term in the same context was the Trieste-based Österreichischer Lloyd, originally intended to be modelled on Lloyd's of London).

H. H. Meier became NDL's first chairman of the supervisory board, and Crüsemann became the first director of the company (German Aktiengesellschaft – AG). Crüsemann was in charge of both cargo services and passenger transport, which was growing significantly as a result of emigration. The company was also active in other areas, including tugboats, bathing, insurance, and ship repair (the last of which it still provide). The first office of the company was located at 13 Martinistraße in Bremen.

The company started with establishing a route to England prior to starting a transatlantic service. In 1857, the first ship, Adler, began regular passenger service between the Weser region (where Bremen is located) and England. On 28 October 1857, it made its maiden voyage from Nordenham to London.

Just one year later, regular, scheduled services were started between the new port in Bremerhaven and New York using two 2,674 GRT steamships, Bremen and New York. International economic crises made the first years of NDL extremely difficult, and the company took losses until 1859. In the following years, passenger connections to Baltimore and New Orleans were added to the schedule, and the company first rented (and then purchased in 1869) facilities on the waterfront in Hoboken, New Jersey.

In 1867–1868, NDL began a partnership with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, which initiated the Baltimore Line; until 1978, it had its own ships. In 1869, Crüsemann died at the age of 43 years. From 1877 to 1892, the director of NDL was Johann Georg Lohmann. He established a new policy for the company, emphasizing building fast liners. Eventually H. H. Meier and Lohmann fell out over the direction of the company. In 1892, a 5,481 GRT twin-screw steamship (the company's first) was christened H.H. Meier after the founder; this helped to heal the breach between them.

Foundation of the German Empire

During the Gründerzeit at the beginning of the German Empire, NDL expanded greatly. Thirteen new ships of the "Strassburg class" were ordered. A route to the West Indies, offered from 1871 to 1874, proved unprofitable, but it was replaced by a permanent route to the east coast of South America. On the transatlantic route, the HAPAG, the Holland-America Line, and the Red Star Line were by then all fierce rivals. Beginning in 1881 with Elbe, eleven fast steamships of from 4500 to 6,900 GRT of the so-called "Rivers-class" (all named for German rivers), were introduced to serve the North Atlantic route.

In 1885, NDL won an agreement to provide postal service between the German Empire, Australia, and the Far East. The associated subsidy underwrote further expansion, beginning with the first large-scale order placed with a German shipyard for three mail steamships for the major routes and three smaller steamships for branch service from AG Vulcan Stettin. It was a requirement of the agreement that the ships be constructed in Germany.

By 1890, with 66 ships totaling 251,602 GRT, NDL was the second largest shipping company in the world, after P&O, with 48 ships totaling 251,603 GRT, and dominated shipping to Germany with 31.6% of the traffic. NDL was also carrying more transatlantic passengers to New York than any other company, due to its dominance in steerage, which consisted mostly of immigrants. In cabin class, it carried only slightly more passengers than Cunard and White Star Line. New York accounted for 42% of NDL's passenger traffic, and 15% to other US ports, but only 16.2% eastbound from New York. Its westbound South Atlantic service represented 17.3% of its passengers; eastbound from South America represented only 1.7%.