Definition
A maritime contract by which the owner of goods entrusts personal property to the master of a ship for sale on their joint account. The arrangement embeds two distinct legal relationships simultaneously: a mandate (mandatum), by which the property owner authorizes the ship's master to dispose of the goods; and a partnership, by which profits derived from the sale are divided between the two parties. The goods owner supplies the capital; the ship's master supplies the labor, skill, and authority to sell. Each bears a corresponding share of the risk and reward.
Common Confusion
ACCOMENDA is sometimes loosely equated with a simple agency or consignment arrangement, but it is neither. In a pure agency, the agent acts for the principal's account alone and takes no share of profits or losses. In an accomenda, the master participates as a quasi-partner in the venture, not merely as an executor of instructions. It also differs from a commenda (the land-based ancestor discussed in commercial history), though the two share structural DNA. Researchers should not assume that a source using "commenda" and "accomenda" interchangeably is doing so with precision.
Core Elements
The accomenda rests on three operative features that define its legal character:
1. ENTRUSTMENT OF PROPERTY. The goods owner physically delivers property to the ship's master. Title and risk questions turn on the terms of entrustment and the law governing the voyage.
2. DUAL CONTRACT STRUCTURE. Black's and Bouvier's both identify the mandatum and the partnership as coexisting within a single transaction. The mandatum gives the master legal authority to sell; the partnership governs profit allocation. Courts analyzing disputes under an accomenda must determine which contractual layer controls the issue at hand.
3. JOINT ACCOUNT. Sales proceeds are not held entirely for the goods owner. The master's entitlement to a share of profits is the defining commercial purpose of the arrangement and separates the accomenda from pure consignment or bailment.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter accomenda primarily in historical maritime law sources — admiralty treatises, colonial-era shipping records, and civil law commentaries — rather than in modern case law. The term is largely obsolete in contemporary American practice, displaced by more precisely defined instruments such as consignment contracts, joint venture agreements, and agency arrangements governed by the Restatement (Third) of Agency.
Several research traps are worth flagging. First, because the accomenda straddles mandate and partnership, historical disputes about it appear under both headings in digests and indexes; a search confined to one category will miss relevant material. Second, the term surfaces in civil law jurisdictions (French, Spanish, Italian legal traditions) with slightly different contours than its common law treatment, and researchers working with colonial American or Louisiana records should account for that variance. Third, Black's 1st and 2nd editions carry nearly identical text on this entry, so apparent corroboration between those two sources is not independent confirmation — they likely share a common drafting source.
The accomenda's dual-contract structure has conceptual relevance beyond its immediate maritime context. It anticipates questions that arise in modern joint venture and agency law about when a party who performs services on another's property becomes a partner rather than an agent. Researchers tracing the development of partnership law or the agent-partner distinction may find the accomenda a useful historical reference point.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (1st and 2nd editions) and Bouvier's Law Dictionary are in close agreement on the core definition, all three describing the arrangement as a contract between a goods owner and a ship's master for joint-account sale, and all three identifying the mandatum and partnership as the two constituent contracts. Bouvier adds the clarifying note that "one party risks" — gesturing toward the risk-allocation dimension of the arrangement — though the entry as preserved in the source material is truncated and does not complete the thought.
None of the three sources addresses what happens when the ship's master sells at a loss, misapplies the goods, or becomes insolvent before accounting to the owner — practical questions that would have arisen in litigation. This silence is characteristic of definitional dictionary treatment and should prompt researchers to look beyond these sources to admiralty treatises and civil law commentators for substantive doctrine.
Jurisdictional Note
The accomenda is rooted in the civil law tradition and appears most frequently in legal systems with Mediterranean or Continental commercial origins. In the United States, it is most relevant to Louisiana law and to early colonial maritime practice. Common law jurisdictions absorbed similar commercial functions through agency and partnership doctrine rather than through the accomenda label.