Definition
Things caught and held in the possession, custody, power, and dominion of a party, with a present capacity to use them for that party's own purposes. The term is a term of art in maritime and whaling law, describing the physical product of a whaling voyage — most commonly blubber or pieces of whale flesh cut from the whale and stowed on or under the deck of a vessel.
The operative legal significance of the term arises in the context of marine insurance. A policy insuring a whaling vessel's outfits (the gear and supplies carried at the voyage's start) was interpreted to extend protection to catchings that were substituted for those outfits in the course of the voyage — that is, as outfits were consumed or expended, the catchings acquired in their place stepped into the insured position.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Simply the plural of "catching" — things that are caught, or instances of catching.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Catching" as an adjective meant infectious or contagious; as a noun, the act of seizing or apprehending something.
The gap between the common and legal meanings is meaningful. In ordinary English, "catchings" carries no legal weight and suggests only a general act of capture. In maritime insurance law, the term is a defined category of insured property with specific legal consequences: catchings must be in actual possession with a present capacity for use, and they occupy the legal position of the outfits they replace. The distinction between a thing casually caught and a thing legally qualifying as catchings — with all attendant insurance coverage implications — is not intuitive from the common meaning alone.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is almost exclusively relevant to historical maritime insurance disputes arising from American and British whaling voyages, concentrated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Researchers will encounter it primarily in case law from federal admiralty courts and Massachusetts state courts, where whaling was the dominant industry.
Several research traps apply. First, the term will not appear in modern legal databases with any frequency; searches should be directed toward historical reporters and maritime law treatises of the nineteenth century. Second, the precise legal boundary of what qualified as catchings — particularly whether blubber stowed below deck had the same status as blubber on deck, and whether catchings processed or refined before arrival had a different character — was a live question in the case law. Researchers should not assume the definition was uniformly settled.
Third, the coverage-substitution doctrine embedded in the term (catchings stepping into the place of consumed outfits under an insurance policy) represents an early articulation of principles that later developed into broader doctrines of insurable interest and substituted performance in marine insurance. Researchers tracing the history of marine insurance doctrine may find catchings cases instructive beyond their narrow subject matter.
The Black's references to "1 Story, 603" point toward Justice Joseph Story's circuit court opinions, which were influential in shaping American admiralty law. Story's handling of whaling insurance cases is a productive starting point for understanding how catchings was applied judicially.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both the first and second editions of Black's Law Dictionary offer nearly identical definitions, indicating the term was stable in legal usage across the editions and did not undergo significant doctrinal evolution between them. The definitions agree on the two essential elements: actual possession with present capacity for use, and the specific inclusion of blubber and whale flesh.
Both editions cite insurance cases to anchor the definition, confirming that catchings was not a term of property law generally but a term that earned its legal definition through marine insurance litigation. The second edition cites Rogers v. Insurance Co. as its supporting authority, which provides researchers a concrete starting point in the case law.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: the term's relationship to cargo classification in admiralty, whether catchings had any relevance outside the whaling context (e.g., fishing voyages), and what happened to the doctrine as whaling declined. These are gaps that primary source research would need to fill.
Jurisdictional Note
The term arose primarily in American admiralty and maritime law, with Massachusetts and federal circuit courts generating most of the relevant precedent. It has no meaningful modern jurisdictional variation because the whaling industry that gave rise to the doctrine no longer operates at commercial scale.