[270] Broadly speaking, shipowning was hardly a specialist occupation in mid-19 century Spain. The legal framework ruling commercial activity in that period, the Codigos de Commercio (Commercial Codes) of both 1829 and 1885, did not distinguish clearly between 'ship-owner' and 'ship-investor'; the codes gave the ship's master the responsibility both for running the ship and for its economic management. Although the term 'shipowner' had already appeared in the Commercial Code of 1829 and was maintained in the updated code of 1885, both legal compilations obliged the shipowner to have an aptitude for trading and to 'be incorporated in the directory of merchants of the province'. In fact, up to the last decades of the 19th centur, we can hardly find a shipowner who refers to himself by this term; he would have been more likely to call himself a 'merchant'.