Definition
In admiralty and prize law, a cruise is a voyage undertaken by an armed vessel for a specific, defined purpose. Two related senses appear in the historical sources:
1. A voyage made for the purpose of making captures jure belli — that is, capturing enemy vessels as lawful prizes of war.
2. A voyage or expedition in quest of enemy vessels or fleets expected to sail along a particular track at a certain season of the year.
The term carries geographic and temporal precision: a cruise implies a definite place of commencement, a defined cruising area (called the "rendezvous" or "cruising latitude"), and a termination point. It is not a voyage at large. Anderson's Dictionary captures this concisely: cruise "[i]mports a definite place, as well as time of commencement and termination."
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Primarily a surname of Anglo-Norman origin; as a common noun, a leisure voyage by ship.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 does not define "cruise" as a standalone entry but cross-references it to "cruse," a small bottle — reflecting that the nautical sense was treated as self-evident.
The gap here is significant. Modern readers will recognize "cruise" almost entirely through the lens of commercial leisure travel. The legal term is narrower, more purposive, and historically bound to the law of naval warfare and prize capture — contexts that have no counterpart in the modern recreational sense.
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Why It Matters in Research
**Prize law context is essential.** Every substantive historical definition of "cruise" in the Law Mind corpus arises within the framework of prize law — the body of law governing the capture of enemy ships and goods at sea during wartime. A researcher encountering "cruise" in an admiralty opinion or prize proceeding should read it as a technical term of art, not a general voyage reference.
**The definiteness requirement matters for insurance and prize disputes.** Because a cruise imports a defined geographic area and time frame, insurance policies covering a vessel "during a cruise" or "on a cruise to [a given latitude]" were interpreted with precision. Whether a vessel had departed on, completed, or deviated from its stated cruise was a live question in both insurance and prize cases.
**Burrill's citation is the key primary source.** Burrill traces the term directly to Justice Story's opinion in *The Brutus*, 2 Gallison's Reports 526, 538–539 (C.C.D. Mass. 1815), a foundational prize case. Black's (2nd ed.) also cites this case as *The Brutus*, Fed. Cas. No. 2,060. Researchers should treat Story's language there as the authoritative judicial elaboration of what a "cruise" encompasses legally.
**Modern usage has largely displaced the legal term.** Contemporary admiralty law does not use "cruise" as a term of art in the prize sense, because prize law itself has largely fallen dormant since the mid-twentieth century. The term appears in modern sources almost exclusively in the commercial context of cruise ship regulation, which is governed by a wholly different body of law (passenger vessel statutes, maritime tort, Coast Guard regulations). Do not import historical prize-law definitions into modern cruise industry litigation, or vice versa.
**Rapalje & Lawrence entry appears corrupted.** The Rapalje & Lawrence text in this corpus combines partial text from the "cruise" entry with material from an unrelated entry on marital cruelty and judicial separation. This is a transcription or compilation artifact. Researchers should not rely on Rapalje & Lawrence for this term without consulting the original.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries converge on the prize-law sense of the term and draw heavily from one another — Bouvier, Black's (1st), and Black's (2nd) share nearly identical language, tracing ultimately to Story's *Brutus* opinion. Burrill is the most explicit about the primary source, citing Story by name and volume.
Anderson's is the outlier and the most useful for a general definition: "any voyage for a given purpose" with the definiteness requirement as to place and time. This broader formulation is more useful where the term appears outside a prize context, as in marine insurance disputes.
None of the historical dictionaries address the modern commercial cruise industry, which did not exist in its current form when these works were compiled. The silence is expected but worth flagging for researchers working with twentieth-century materials.
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Jurisdictional Note
Prize law in the United States is a federal matter exclusively, vested in federal admiralty jurisdiction. The historical definitions of "cruise" in these sources reflect American and English prize law practice. Variations in prize-law doctrine between the U.S. and Great Britain may affect how "cruise" was defined in treaty contexts or mixed prize commission proceedings.
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