Definition
Passage money is the fare paid by a passenger for transportation by sea — that is, the sum charged for carrying a person aboard a ship or vessel from one place to another. It is the maritime equivalent of a ticket price and covers the conveyance of the passenger themselves, not the movement of cargo.
The term is historically distinguished from freight or freight-money, which refers to compensation paid for the carriage of goods and merchandise. This distinction matters because different legal rules, remedies, and obligations traditionally governed the shipowner's duties to passengers on one hand and to cargo interests on the other.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Not independently defined; passage in general use refers to a journey or transit, and money is straightforward currency.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Passage" included the act of traveling, especially by water, as well as the right or permission to pass. "Passage money" would have been understood by a general reader as the cost of such a journey.
The gap here is narrow but real: in ordinary speech, the phrase is intuitive. In maritime law, however, passage money carries technical weight — it determines which body of rules applies (passenger carriage law versus freight law), affects liability regimes, and has historically governed the enforceability of the carrier's lien and the conditions under which a shipowner could refuse or expel a passenger.
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Common Confusion
Passage money is frequently conflated with freight in older maritime records and pleadings, particularly when ships carried both passengers and goods on the same voyage. The two are legally distinct: freight compensates for cargo transport and attaches to the goods themselves; passage money compensates for personal carriage and is owed by or on behalf of the individual traveler. Confusion between the two in historical documents can affect how courts and researchers interpret the nature of a contract, the applicable duty of care, and available remedies.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in maritime law, admiralty practice, or transportation history will encounter passage money primarily in 18th- and 19th-century sources, where the term appears with regularity in contract disputes, ship charter records, emigration records, and admiralty court proceedings. By the 20th century, the phrase largely gave way to fare in both popular and legal usage, and modern shipping and aviation statutes typically use fare, ticket price, or transportation charge rather than passage money.
The most important navigational trap is anachronism: searching modern legal databases for passage money will return limited results, while historical admiralty records — particularly those involving transatlantic emigrant ships — use the term extensively. Researchers should cross-reference with freight and freight-money to understand how courts drew the line between the two in a given case.
In contract disputes, the characterization of a payment as passage money versus freight could determine which party held a lien, what remedies were available for non-performance, and what statutory protections applied. Emigrant passenger acts in the United States and the United Kingdom from the 1800s regulated the conditions of carriage and sometimes specified the rights of passengers who had paid passage money but were denied carriage or subjected to substandard conditions — a distinct body of law from ordinary freight-of-goods regulation.
The term also appears in the context of labor migration and indentured service, where passage money was sometimes advanced by an employer or agent and treated as a debt owed by the worker, creating distinct legal and equitable questions about enforceability. This usage is largely absent from the legal dictionaries and is worth flagging for social-legal historians.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Both Black's Law Dictionary (1st and 2nd editions) define passage money identically: the fare of a passenger by sea, distinguished from freight or freight-money paid for goods. The entries are brief and primarily taxonomic — they establish the term's place in the taxonomy of maritime compensation rather than analyze its doctrinal significance.
Neither edition addresses the statutory context of emigrant passenger regulation, the question of liens for unpaid passage money, or the conditions under which passage money could be forfeited or recovered. Researchers should treat the dictionary entries as definitional anchors, not comprehensive guides. The substantive law surrounding passenger carriage obligations lived in admiralty treatises, statutory codes, and case law rather than in these short dictionary entries.
The identical wording across both editions suggests the term was considered settled rather than contested — a classification term rather than a term with evolving legal content. This stability also means the dictionaries offer little help with historical disputes about the term's edges.
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Jurisdictional Note
Passage money as a legal category is primarily a matter of admiralty and maritime law, which in the United States falls under federal jurisdiction. Variation is more likely to appear between national legal systems (e.g., English admiralty law versus American admiralty law) than between U.S. states, as maritime law is generally uniform federally. Researchers examining British, Canadian, or Australian historical sources should account for differences in the relevant passenger acts and admiralty procedures.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
No direct match in the Law Mind Encyclopedia. The encyclopedia entries identified — UCC Article 2 passage of title, money laundering, and purchase money mortgages — address unrelated concepts despite surface terminological overlap with "passage" and "money." Researchers should consult primary admiralty and maritime sources directly.
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