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