Definition
Di colona is a term from Italian and historical maritime law describing a profit-sharing contract between the owner of a vessel, the captain, and the mariners, under which all parties agree that the proceeds of a voyage will be shared among them according to their respective interests. Rather than the crew receiving fixed wages, all participants — owner, master, and sailors — hold a stake in the outcome of the voyage. The term derives from Italian maritime practice and appears primarily in civil law and Continental European maritime legal sources.
Common Language
This is pure legal and maritime jargon with no meaningful counterpart in ordinary English usage. The section is omitted accordingly.
Common Confusion
Di colona is sometimes conflated with other forms of maritime profit-sharing, including the respondentia and bottomry arrangements, but those are loan-based instruments secured against cargo or hull respectively, not employment contracts. The closer analogy is lay system (see RELATED TERMS), the profit-share arrangement used in American whaling, which operates on structurally similar principles without using the Italian terminology.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter this term almost exclusively in two contexts: Continental European maritime law sources from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, and historical accounts of the American whaling industry. Bouvier's entry is notable in explicitly connecting the Italian legal concept to New England whaling practice, where the lay system functioned as its practical equivalent. This cross-reference is a useful research bridge: if you are working in American maritime sources on whaling-era labor arrangements and compensation disputes, di colona is the civil law ancestor of the terminology you will find domesticated into English-language sources as "lay" or "share" contracts.
The term is absent from most English common law dictionaries because the concept never fully migrated into common law maritime doctrine by that name. Researchers using English-language legal sources from the same period will need to search under lay system, share voyage, or profit voyage to find analogous arrangements. Failure to recognize the equivalence can cause researchers to miss comparative materials and underestimate how well-developed the theoretical framework for these contracts was in the civil law tradition before American courts addressed the same issues.
In historical sources, the concept is also relevant to questions of seamen's rights and remedies. Under a di colona arrangement, the mariner is not a mere wage earner but a participant with a contingent interest, which affects the nature of claims available to him in admiralty. Courts and scholars treating wage liens, forfeiture, and the rights of distressed seamen had to distinguish between wage-based and share-based employment, and the di colona framework informed that analysis in civil law jurisdictions.
Note also that the contract implicates the shipowner's liability to third parties — when all parties are jointly interested in the voyage's proceeds, questions of agency, authority, and shared loss take on a different character than in a straightforward employment relationship.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary provides the primary English-language dictionary treatment of this term. Bouvier defines it as the contract among owner, captain, and mariners "that the voyage shall be for the benefit of all," and cites Targa (chapters 36 and 87) and Emerigon's Treatise on Maritime Loans (section 5) as the primary authorities. Both Targa and Emerigon are works of French and Italian civil law maritime scholarship; their treatment situates di colona firmly within the civilian tradition rather than the common law.
Bouvier's entry is brief but practically significant in its observation that New England whalers "are owned and navigated in this manner and under this species of contract," confirming that by the mid-nineteenth century American legal writers recognized the functional equivalence between the Italian doctrinal form and domestic whaling practice. This is one of the cleaner examples in Bouvier of a civil law concept being mapped onto an American commercial reality without formal adoption of the civil law terminology in American courts.
No entry for di colona appears in standard English common law dictionaries of the period, including Jacob's Law Dictionary or Tomlin's, reflecting the term's civilian rather than common law provenance. Researchers should not expect coverage in those sources.
Jurisdictional Note
Di colona as a named legal category is a creature of Italian and French civil law maritime doctrine. American courts addressing equivalent arrangements in the whaling industry used domestic terminology and did not typically invoke the civil law label, though the underlying economic and legal structure was functionally identical.