Honest weight
Every cask is weighed twice, once at the cooper’s bench and once at the quay, and both figures go on the manifest. If they disagree, you are charged the lower one.
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About usThe Seven Seas Company
Three hundred and thirty-nine years of honest weight, salt spray and yellow cargo. We are still in the same yard, and two of the curing sheds are the original timber.
Our story
It started with a cargo nobody wanted
In 1687 Barrabas “Barrie” Quill took payment for a debt in eleven tons of green bananas, on the reasonable assumption that he could sell them before they turned. He could not. By the second week he was giving them away on the Port Royal quay.
What he noticed, and what nobody had thought worth noticing, was that the bananas stacked nearest the salt store were still firm a month later. Barrie was not a scientist. He was a man with eleven tons of a problem and an idea about salt.
The cure took him four years to get right and has changed remarkably little since. Six days over cedar smoke, turned twice a day by hand, sealed in oak the same afternoon. Every yard on the Caribbean has tried to copy it. None of them turn the racks by hand, which is, we suspect, the whole trick.
We are still family-held, still cutting from the same windward groves, and still replacing any cask that turns without asking questions. The company has changed hands within the family nine times and has never once been sold outside it.
The house in numbers
339
Years in the same yard
9
Generations of the family
312
Hands on the payroll
1 in 400
Casks replaced under guarantee
Ship’s log
Three centuries, abridged
1687
A debt paid in bananas
Barrabas Quill accepts eleven tons of green fruit against a bad debt and spends a fortnight failing to sell it on the Port Royal quay.
1691
The cure is settled
Four years of ruined batches produce the salt-and-cedar method still in use. The first cured cask is opened after fourteen months at sea and pronounced “entirely edible, which was the surprise.”
1703
The scurvy guarantee
After a naval surgeon connects the cure to the health of two provisioned crews, the house begins indemnifying voyages against scurvy. No claim has been paid since.
1740
Royal Warrant
Granted after the fleet victualled at Port Royal returns from a fourteen-month commission with its complement intact.
1782
The grog line
Thrift becomes a business. The overripe crop, previously thrown into the harbour, is pot-stilled instead. Within nine years it outsells the fruit.
1834
Fibre rigging
A rope-maker’s daughter, apprenticed in the curing house, notices the stem waste rets like flax. The first coil is laid the following spring.
Today
Forty-three ports
Two thousand four hundred vessels provisioned last season, from single-hull traders to nineteen-ship fleets. Same yard, same cure, same guarantee.
How we trade
What we hold to
The guarantee is not a clause
A turned cask gets replaced on the strength of a cooper’s mark. No inspection, no correspondence, no lawyers from the bilge. It has worked this way since 1691.
Hands before margin
The racks are turned by hand because machines bruise the fruit, and the people who turn them share in the season. It costs more. It is also the entire competitive advantage.
The crew
Who you will actually deal with
Small house, few layers. If you trade with us you will know these people by name within a season.
Morwenna Quill
Ninth-generation Owner
Runs the house and the windward groves. Ninth of her line to hold the yard, and the third to refuse an offer for it.
Sven Thorvaldsen
Master Cooper
Forty-one years at the bench. Every cask that leaves the yard carries a mark he approved, and he has rejected more than he likes to admit.
Anya Pumpernickel
Chief Quartermaster
Builds the standing manifests for every fleet account. If your ships are victualled before you berth, it is because she has already done the arithmetic.
Diego Leclerc
Treasure Accountant
Keeps the counting house, sets the doubloon rate each quarter, and is the reason our settlement terms are as generous as they are.
Where to find us
The yard at Port Royal
Barrie’s Banana Factory, Cooper’s Wharf, Port Royal, Jamaica. The counting house is the stone building with the yellow door; the curing sheds are the ones you can smell from the harbour.