Antique 1910s - 1920s Titanic International Mercantile Marine Preferred Stock Certificate 📜 Light Green

What Did the Titanic's Parent Company Issue? 📜 A Genuine Artifact from the Titanic Era

Size: 12" x 8"

The company printed across the top of this certificate owned the Titanic. Not on paper you'd notice - the word Titanic isn't anywhere on it - but through the White Star Line, which belonged to the International Mercantile Marine Company, and that's who issued this.

It's a certificate for ONE HUNDRED shares of 6% Cumulative Preferred Capital Stock of the INTERNATIONAL MERCANTILE MARINE COMPANY, INCORPORATED UNDER THE LAWS OF THE STATE OF NEW JERSEY, engraved by the American Bank Note Co. of New York in olive green. Up top is a harbor scene with a four-funnel liner, tugs and barges; down below sits a classical woman with a pair of dividers, the engraver's way of saying navigation. The printed terms promise preferred dividends for every year after December 1st 1902, and the margin names the registrar, the Central Union Trust Company of New York.

📜 What you get

Every one of these was really issued - registered to a holder, signed, and cancelled when it was retired, with round punch holes. There are two versions: Style 1 has the punch holes only, and Style 2 also has J.P.M. perforated through the top vignette - that's J.P. Morgan & Co., IMM's own bankers, cancelling the paper. You'll get one of the same era, color and share class as the pictures, and the dates, numbers, names and signatures are different on every sheet.

🏦 How the registrar dates it

Here's a nice bit of detective work. The Union Trust Company and the Central Trust Company of New York merged in 1918 to become the Central Union Trust Company, and in May 1929 Central Union merged with the Hanover Bank. So a sheet with Central Union Trust as registrar was registered somewhere between 1918 and 1929 - right in the IMM's last good stretch, after its 1915 receivership.

🚢 Morgan's Shipping Trust

In 1902 J. Pierpont Morgan set out to roll the big Atlantic steamship lines into one combine, and on October 1, 1902 International Mercantile Marine was incorporated in New Jersey with Clement Griscom, Bernard N. Baker, J. Bruce Ismay and John Ellerman. New Jersey law let one company hold the stock of others, which mattered: an American couldn't just own British ships, but he could own the companies that did. Inside a year IMM had White Star, the American Line, the Dominion Line, the Atlantic Transport Line, the Leyland Line and the Red Star Line, plus working agreements with the two big German lines. The papers just called it the Shipping Trust.

White Star answered Cunard's fast Lusitania and Mauretania with size instead of speed - three huge sisters authorized in 1908 and built by Harland & Wolff in Belfast: Olympic, Titanic and Britannic. When Titanic went down on her maiden voyage on the night of April 14-15, 1912, she flew the British flag and White Star's colors, but the money behind her ran up to IMM. The trust went into receivership in 1915, came back out, and in time became United States Lines.

🛳️ The liner in the picture

Everybody wants that four-funnel ship to be the Titanic. The certificate never names her, and the same harbor engraving shows up on IMM paper from December 1902 - years before the Olympic class was even authorized - so she isn't any of the three sisters. It's still a wonderful thing to frame and tell the story over.

🚢 About these

They're 12 by 8 inches. Frame one in a den or a study, hang it with your Titanic books, or give it to somebody who's read everything about that night. The supply is finite - nobody's issuing International Mercantile Marine stock again, and once these last certificates are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.