summary of John Masefield's "Cargoes"

Background

John Masefield was born in Ledbury, England. After attending King’s School in Warwick, he went to sea at age fifteen on a large sailing ship, then worked for a time in New York City before returning to England in 1897. His experiences aboard the ship provided him the raw material that made him famous as a sea poet. In 1902, he published a collection of sea poems entitled Salt-Water Ballads, in which “Cargoes” appeared.

Summary

"Cargoes" is a short lyric poem consisting of three five-line stanzas, each of which describes a different kind of ship. The first two lines of each stanza describe the ship moving through water; the last three lines list the different cargoes the ships are carrying.

Stanza one's ship is a quinquireme, a large vessel which people like the ancient Phoenicians employed to trade across the Mediterranean Sea. These ships were propelled both by the wind and by men rowing. The prefix "quin" may refer to the five banks of oarsmen arranged vertically on each side of the ship. More probably, because five banks of oars would get hopelessly entangled, it refers to the five oarsmen manning the three oars in each vertical row. Masefield's ship departs from "distant Ophir," a region in either Arabia or Africa at the southern end of the Red Sea, and is being rowed to northern end of that sea. (Masefield must have intended the term "Palestine" to apply to the land at farthest reach of the present Gulf of Aqaba.) The ship's goal is a happy one, for Palestine is a safe "haven," and its skies are "sunny." This boat carries a cargo of animals, birds, exotic woods, and wine.

Masefield found many of his details in the Old Testament. Nineveh, an important Assyrian city, is often mentioned there, and many of the details of this stanza come from 1. Kings 10: ivory, apes, peacocks, and cedars. That chapter also mentions drinking vessels, though not the wine in them, and almug trees, which may be the same as sandalwood.

In Stanza two, the poem moves ahead about two thousand years to the sixteenth or seventeenth century and changes its focus to the West Indies. A galleon was a large sailing ship often used in trade between Spain and Latin America, a part of the world Masefield himself knew well from his days as a sailor. This "stately" (splendid, dignified, majestic) ship begins its journey at the Isthmus of Panama and progresses with a vessel's normal up-and-down motion ("dipping") through the verdant and beautiful islands of the Caribbean. Its cargo contains precious (emeralds and diamonds) and semi-precious stones, spices, and gold coins (a "moidore" is a Portuguese coin; the word means literally "coin of gold").

In Stanza three, the British ship is not so pretty as the previous two (it is "dirty") nor so big. A coaster is a small ship designed chiefly to carry goods along a coastline, not on the high seas. This coaster is propelled by a steam-engine (it has a smoke-stack), and it moves through the English Channel with a force and motion that resembles an animal's butting with its head. Part of its cargo are things to burn: wood for fireplaces and coal mined near Newcastle-upon-Tyne on the eastern coast of Britain. The rest is metal that has been processed or manufactured, perhaps in the British Midlands not far from Newcastle: metal rails with which to build railroad tracks, lead ingots or "pigs," items of hardware made of iron, and "cheap tin trays."

Theme

What ships carry reflects the culture, government, lifestyle, and technology of civilizations over the centuries. For example, in ancient biblical times (stanza 1), oar-propelled ships (quinquiremes) transported ivory, sandalwood, and cedarwood to construct, outfit, and maintain the palace and other buildings of King Solomon. They also carried exotic animals and wine to entertain him and his court. After Columbus discovered the New World, three- or four-masted sailing vessels (galleons) from Spain and other countries carried from the Americas the prizes of exploration and exploitation, as well as the spoils of war against native peoples or enemy ships. Their cargoes of gems, spices, and gold coins enriched the lives of the royalty and the nobility. Early in the twentieth century, commercial steamships traveling along coastlines hauled coal and wood to heat the homes of the masses or to fire the furnaces of factories manufacturing the tools and other products of a technically advanced civilization. They also carried materials to construct railroads for the transport of goods on land. Commoners as well as kings and counts shared in the benefits of ship cargoes.

Type of work and Structure

"Cargoes" is a lyric poem with three stanzas, each with five lines. The stanzas are alike in structure. For example, the first line of each stanza identifies a type of ship at sea, and the second line—beginning with an action verb ending in -ing—identifies a locale. The third line, a prepositional phrase, begins to list items in the cargo; the fourth and fifth lines complete the list. The second and fifth lines of each stanza end in masculine rhyme. In each stanza, the first line has twelve syllables and the second line has eleven syllables. Notice also that the first line of each stanza omits the definite article a before the first word. None of the stanzas has a complete sentence. The stanzas are in chronological order.