Definition
In admiralty and prize law, *commeatus* is a Latin term meaning provisions, stores, or supplies — specifically the food, drink, and consumable necessities carried aboard a vessel. The term appears in the law of nations and prize proceedings to describe the character of a ship's cargo or contents as provisions rather than contraband or other goods subject to condemnation.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering *commeatus* will find it almost exclusively in admiralty and prize law contexts, particularly in decisions from British admiralty courts of the Napoleonic era and earlier. The term signals a narrow but technically important classification: whether shipboard goods qualified as provisions (and thus potentially subject to different treatment under the law of nations) or fell into some other category affecting their seizure and condemnation.
The single Burrill citation — *The Haabet*, 2 Rob. Adm. R. 182 — points to Sir William Scott's court of admiralty in England, the dominant source of prize law precedent during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Researchers working with American prize cases from the same period will find that U.S. courts frequently looked to Robinson's Admiralty Reports for guidance. When combing prize records for cargo classifications, be alert to the fact that *commeatus* may appear in Latin without translation in both English and American opinions of this era; glossaries are rarely provided.
The term has no meaningful modern usage. It does not appear in contemporary admiralty statutes, the Federal Rules, or modern treatises. Its practical significance is confined to historical research in prize proceedings predating the mid-nineteenth century.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill defines *commeatus* simply as "Provisions," supported by a single admiralty citation. The definition is accurate as far as it goes but provides no context for how the classification mattered legally — that is, how the characterization of goods as *commeatus* bore on questions of seizure, condemnation, or neutral rights. Researchers should not expect historical dictionaries to carry this term beyond its bare Latin gloss; the substantive treatment belongs to the prize law treatises (Vattel, Wheaton on international law, and the Robinson Reports themselves) rather than to legal dictionaries.
No other shelf sources in the Law Mind corpus include this term, which itself reflects how specialized and archaic the word is. The absence of the term from later American law dictionaries (Bouvier, Black's) confirms that it passed out of active legal use as prize proceedings declined and English-language terminology standardized.
Jurisdictional Note
The term originates in English admiralty practice and the law of nations as applied by British prize courts. American admiralty courts adopted the same vocabulary during the early national and antebellum periods. It has no meaningful foothold in civil law or non-admiralty jurisdictions.