Definition
Grosse avanture is a French maritime law term for the contract of bottomry — an agreement by which a shipowner borrows money using the ship (and sometimes its cargo) as security, with the lender's repayment contingent on the safe arrival of the vessel. If the ship is lost at sea, the lender loses the loan entirely; if the voyage succeeds, the lender recovers principal plus a premium reflecting the maritime risk assumed. The term is drawn from the French Ordonnance de la Marine and represents the civil law tradition's treatment of what English law calls bottomry.
Common Confusion
GROSSE AVANTURE and BOTTOMRY describe the same commercial transaction but arise from different legal traditions. Grosse avanture is the French civilian formulation; bottomry is the English common law and admiralty counterpart. Researchers moving between civil law sources (French, Spanish, Dutch maritime codes) and English admiralty materials will encounter both terms for the same instrument. The distinction is one of source tradition, not substance. A third term, respondentia, sometimes appears alongside both: respondentia pledges cargo rather than the hull, while grosse avanture and bottomry typically pledge the vessel itself, though historical usage is not always precise on this boundary.
Why It Matters in Research
Grosse avanture will appear almost exclusively in pre-20th-century sources and in materials engaging with French or broader civil law maritime tradition. Researchers working in early American admiralty law, Louisiana maritime records, or comparative maritime law scholarship are most likely to encounter it. Several points of caution:
First, the term is functionally obsolete in modern practice. Bottomry bonds themselves fell out of commercial use as marine insurance became standardized, and grosse avanture followed. Finding it in a modern source would be unusual enough to warrant scrutiny of the document's provenance.
Second, there is a minor discrepancy across the historical dictionaries worth noting: Black's First Edition cites the Ordonnance de la Marine at "liv. 3, tit. 5," while Black's Second Edition cites "liv. 8, tit. 5." Burrill's aligns with the First Edition. Researchers relying on the Ordonnance directly should verify the correct book and title reference rather than trusting either dictionary citation blindly.
Third, because grosse avanture sits at the intersection of maritime law and the law of loans and security, researchers may need to consult both admiralty and commercial law materials. The transaction's core feature — that repayment depends on the success of a contingent event — also gave it an early relationship to insurance concepts, and some historical sources treat bottomry as a precursor to marine insurance rather than a distinct instrument.
Finally, Burrill's entry is the most useful of the three for research purposes because it immediately cross-references bottomry and situates grosse avanture within a cluster of related French maritime terms, including the adjacent entry for GROSSE BOIS (timber rights), which has no connection to maritime lending and should not be confused with it despite the shared headword prefix.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three dictionary sources agree on the core definition: grosse avanture equals the contract of bottomry under French marine law, and all three cite the Ordonnance de la Marine as authority. The entries are brief and largely identical, reflecting the term's narrow technical scope and its role as a foreign-law cross-reference rather than a working term of English or American practice.
Black's First and Second Editions diverge only in the Ordonnance citation (liv. 3 vs. liv. 8), which is likely a transcription or edition error rather than a substantive difference. Burrill's is the most generous treatment, immediately directing the reader to the bottomry entry for substantive discussion — a clear editorial signal that grosse avanture functions as a label, not a distinct doctrine. None of the historical sources provide any functional analysis of how the contract operated, what formalities were required under the Ordonnance, or how French courts applied it. Researchers needing that depth must go to the Ordonnance itself or to treatise literature on French maritime law.
Jurisdictional Note
In American law, grosse avanture has relevance primarily in Louisiana, where the civil law tradition shaped early maritime practice, and in federal admiralty cases that engaged with French or Spanish colonial maritime law. Common law admiralty jurisdictions, including England and most American states, addressed this transaction under the bottomry label exclusively.