Definition
Quick despatch is a contractual standard in maritime shipping law requiring that a chartered vessel be loaded or unloaded with reasonable speed, as measured by the customary commercial practices of the port where the operation occurs. When a charter party specifies quick despatch, the shipowner and charterer are not bound by a fixed number of days for loading or unloading; instead, the operative question is whether the work was completed within the time ordinarily expected under the conditions and usages of that particular trade and port.
The phrase functions as an implied benchmark rather than a precise numerical obligation. Its content is supplied by evidence of what is normal at the relevant port — how many hatches are typically worked, what equipment is ordinarily used, what hours are customary — and deviation from those norms without justification constitutes a breach of the despatch obligation.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Despatch" (variant spelling of "dispatch") means the sending off of something, or the prompt execution of a task. "Quick" simply means fast or prompt.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Despatch is defined as the act of sending away with promptness; speed in performance; haste.
The ordinary sense of "quick despatch" captures the flavor of the legal term but misses its technical content. In law, the standard is not merely subjective speed; it is calibrated to port custom and trade usage. A charterer who genuinely worked fast by ordinary standards but deviated from the established method — using fewer hatches than customary, or inferior unloading equipment — can still be found in breach. Speed alone does not satisfy the obligation if the method is commercially substandard.
Core Elements
Because quick despatch is a fact-intensive standard, courts and arbitrators look to several specific factors:
Port custom: What method, equipment, and pace does the trade customarily employ at that port for that cargo? This is the baseline.
Method of discharge or loading: Departure from the customary method — such as working cargo from a single hatch when four are available, or using inferior equipment — is strong evidence of failure to achieve quick despatch.
Timing of berth assignment: Delay attributable to port congestion or to the shipowner's failure to secure a berth promptly may or may not count against the despatch period, depending on who bears that risk under the charter.
Causation: The question is whether the deviation from custom caused delay. Incidental inefficiency that did not extend the overall time is generally not actionable.
Why It Matters in Research
Quick despatch sits at the intersection of charter party construction and demurrage law, and researchers must pay close attention to two recurring problems in historical sources.
First, the term appears in charter parties alongside related but distinct phrases: "customary quick despatch," "as fast as the vessel can receive/deliver," and fixed lay-day clauses. These are not interchangeable. Older admiralty decisions sometimes conflate them, and Bouvier's entry itself arises from a case turning on whether the qualifying word "customary" modified and potentially softened the quick despatch obligation. Researchers using pre-twentieth-century sources should check whether the charter party language included "customary" as a modifier, because courts treated that word as importing port usage rather than an absolute speed requirement.
Second, the Bouvier entry is fragmentary — the citation trails off at "28 U." — and researchers cannot rely on it for the underlying case authority. Any case-level research into the doctrine must go to the admiralty reporters directly, particularly to early federal circuit decisions from the major commercial ports (New York, Baltimore, New Orleans), where quick despatch disputes arose most frequently in the nineteenth century.
For corpus navigation: quick despatch questions almost always travel with demurrage disputes. If a vessel was not quickly despatched, the question immediately becomes whether demurrage accrues, at what rate, and who bears the cost of delay attributable to port conditions outside the charterer's control. Lay days and despatch clauses are typically construed together, so researchers should not treat quick despatch entries in isolation from demurrage materials.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's is the primary historical dictionary source here, and its treatment is illustrative rather than doctrinal. The entry proceeds by example — presenting the facts of a specific charter party dispute — rather than offering an abstract definition. This is characteristic of Bouvier's maritime entries, which tend to anchor legal standards in concrete commercial situations.
The facts Bouvier recites are revealing: a steamer chartered with customary quick despatch, arriving March 8, berthed March 10, beginning discharge March 11 and completing March 20; discharge conducted from only one of four available hatches and by "sticks" rather than platform scales. The holding — that this was not customary quick despatch — confirms that the standard is methodological as well as temporal. The courts were not simply measuring elapsed days; they were asking whether the charterer employed the full and proper commercial apparatus for the work.
What historical dictionaries including Bouvier's do not supply is a working definition of what "customary" port practice consists of in any given context. That content was always supplied by trade evidence, expert testimony, and local admiralty practice — none of which a dictionary entry can capture. Researchers should treat Bouvier's entry as a pointer to the doctrine's structure, not a substitute for the underlying admiralty case law.
Jurisdictional Note
Quick despatch is primarily a federal admiralty doctrine in the United States, governed by maritime law and the law of the flag or the governing law chosen in the charter party. English admiralty decisions have been influential given the volume of British shipping cases construing similar charter party language, and English and American courts have generally reached compatible conclusions on the relationship between custom and the despatch obligation.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Demurrage (for the consequences of failure to achieve quick despatch and the calculation of delay costs); Charter Parties (for the broader contractual framework within which despatch obligations operate).