Definition
A place designated in advance for persons, troops, or vessels to assemble or meet. In legal and quasi-legal contexts, rendezvous carries a predominantly spatial meaning — it names the appointed location, not merely the act of gathering. Its legal use clusters in two domains:
1. Military law: The pre-designated location where troops are ordered to assemble, whether for mustering, deployment, or reorganization. Orders specifying a rendezvous establish both a duty to appear and a reference point for determining desertion, absence without leave, or failure to report.
2. Admiralty and maritime law: The pre-arranged point at which a fleet, convoy, or individual vessel is directed to appear — typically for purposes of joining a convoy, receiving sealed orders, or rendezvous with a protecting warship. Convoy instructions routinely specified a rendezvous position by latitude and longitude or by named anchorage. Failure to reach the rendezvous on time could affect a vessel's entitlement to convoy protection and, critically, its insurance coverage under policies conditioned on sailing under convoy.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A meeting or date; an agreement to meet at a certain place and time; a place where persons customarily meet.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A place appointed for a meeting, or at which persons customarily meet; especially, the appointed place for troops or ships of a fleet to assemble; also, a place for enlistment; a meeting by appointment.
The common and legal meanings share the same core sense — an appointed meeting place — with little semantic gap. The legal significance lies not in a divergent meaning but in the legal consequences that attach to the designation: duties of military obedience, conditions of insurance coverage, and the legal status of vessels that fail to appear. A rendezvous in ordinary speech is a convenience; in admiralty and military law it can carry enforceable obligations and affect liability.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in admiralty sources will encounter rendezvous most frequently in the context of convoy law, which was heavily litigated throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Marine insurance policies of that era often conditioned coverage on a vessel sailing "with convoy," and convoy instructions specified rendezvous points where the merchant fleet was to assemble before the warship's arrival. Whether a vessel had properly kept the rendezvous — or had justifiable cause for missing it — bore directly on policy validity. English prize court and insurance decisions from this period use the term with precision, and researchers should read rendezvous in those sources as a legally operative location, not merely a descriptive one.
In military law sources, rendezvous appears in courts-martial records and in Articles of War commentary. Orders to repair to a rendezvous created a legal duty, and departure from or failure to reach the rendezvous could constitute the actus reus of a military offense. American sources from the Revolutionary War and Civil War periods use the term extensively in muster and enlistment records, where rendezvous also acquired a secondary administrative meaning as a place of enlistment — a usage reflected in Webster's 1913 but absent from the historical legal dictionaries.
The historical legal dictionaries present the term narrowly and consistently. Neither Black's edition provides the enlistment-office meaning that appears in general dictionaries of the same era, suggesting that the legal sources were tracking the term's military-operational and admiralty uses rather than its administrative ones. Researchers should not assume that a "rendezvous" in a nineteenth-century military administrative record carries the same implications as one in a court-martial specification or a convoy instruction.
The term is infrequent in modern American statutory or case law outside of military and maritime contexts, and researchers should be cautious about importing modern colloquial connotations into historical legal documents where rendezvous invariably names a place, not merely an event.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (1st and 2nd editions) and Bouvier's Law Dictionary are in close agreement, differing only in minor phrasing. All three define rendezvous as a place appointed for meeting and flag its specific application to naval convoy assembly and military troop assembly. Bouvier omits explicit reference to ships meeting their convoy while Black's includes it; the substantive content is otherwise identical across all three sources.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: the legal consequences of missing a rendezvous, the administrative enlistment-office meaning, or the term's role in insurance coverage analysis. Researchers relying solely on these dictionary entries for admiralty research will underestimate the term's legal weight in that context. Treatises on marine insurance and convoy law — and the case law surrounding them — are necessary to recover the full legal significance of the term as it operated in practice.
Jurisdictional Note
Rendezvous as a legal term of art is largely uniform across common law jurisdictions given its grounding in shared admiralty and military law traditions. Jurisdictional variation is not a significant research concern for this term; the relevant distinctions run across time periods and subject-matter domains rather than across jurisdictions.