Evice and Wilson 1940 A MANUAL OF MARITIME LAW. CONSISTING OF A TREATISE ON SHIPS AND FREIGHT AND A TREATISE ON INSURANCE. TRANSLATED FROM THE LATIN OF ROCCUS. Rocco, Francesco WITH NOTES. BY JOSEPH REED INGERSOLL. 3808 The Maritime Law is not the law of a particular country, but the PHILADELPHIA: PUBLISHED BY HOPKINS AND EARLE. Fry and Kammerer, Printers. 1809. PREFACE. . THE works of Roccus, though of great celebrity. are read only by the professed civilian. The ensuing treatises contain principles of utility to the merchant and the mariner, yet they are known to them only through the medium of quotations scattered through a great variety of later authors. The excellence of the work is sufficiently manifested by the respect with which its author is uniformly noticed, and the confidence with which his opinions are cited by almost every writer on the same subject, since his time. It has been thought advisable to unlock the stores which have been heretofore concealed from those for whom they were intended, and to present to the American merchant the Treatises of Roccus, in an English dress. FRANCESCO Rocci, or Roccus, as he is commonly called, by affixing a Latin termination to his name, according to the custom of the learned in former ages, was an eminent jurist of the city of Naples, and one of the judges of the Magna Curia, or supreme court of that kingdom. He flourished about the middle of the seventeenth century, and his two treatises, on ships and freight, and on insurance, were first published at Naples in the year 1655. Since that period, several editions have been printed in various parts of the continent of Europe; among these, one of the most esteemed is the edition published at Amsterdam in the year 1708, by the learned Westerween, from which the following translation has been made. Besides these two tracts on which our author's fame principally rests, he has published two hundred opinions on various questions of jurisprudence, from which his Dutch editor, Westerween, has selected fourteen, relative to subjects of maritime law, which are printed at the end of his volume, under the title of Selecta Responsa. They are remarkable for the same sound logic, depth of learning, and discriminating acumen, by which the rest of his works are so eminently distinguished. |