Royal Rotterdam Lloyd
former Dutch shipping company
Royal Rotterdam Lloyd (Koninklijke Rotterdamsche Lloyd or KRL) was a Dutch shipping line that was established in Rotterdam in 1883 as Rotterdamsche Lloyd (RL). It became "Royal Rotterdam Lloyd" in 1947. RL mainly operated scheduled passenger and mail services between Rotterdam and the Dutch East Indies. Its independent existence ended in 1970, when KRL merged with four other Dutch shipping companies to form the Nederlandsche Scheepvaart Unie (NSU). In 1977 NSU became Nedlloyd.
History
Willem Ruys (1809–1889) was a shipbroker, freight forwarder and insurance agent in Rotterdam. In 1838 he entered into his first partenrederij, trading with the Dutch East Indies and the Far East. After the Suez Canal opened in 1869, his son Willem Ruys (1837–1901) expanded the company in 1872 with a steamship service to Batavia.
In 1875 Willem Ruys founded Partenrederij Stoomboot Reederij "Rotterdamsche Lloyd". In 1881 the company was renamed Stoomvaart Maatschappij "Rotterdamsche Lloyd".
“Royal Rotterdam Lloyd” enters the record as former Dutch shipping company. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Royal, Rotterdam and Lloyd can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1781679. VIAF identifies the subject as 145069213. The Library of Congress control number is n88215908. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1883, 1947, 1970 and 1977.
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This entry incorporates text from “Royal Rotterdam Lloyd” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.