You can sense the longevity of ship brokerage Jacq Pierot Jr & Sons when you learn that cargoships with sails were among its first S&P deals.

Or maybe it’s the story of how the Netherlands-based firm lost its business during the German occupation of World War II, with one son fighting in the Dutch resistance.

Then you can follow the thread across the Atlantic in 1946 to new headquarters in Manhattan, and the day in the early 1950s that the next generation of Pierots, Jacques III and Robert Sr, caught hell from their elders for daring to make a “long-distance” phone call from New York to a shipowner...