First year-Introduction to English Literature

By: Hayder Gebreen

Cargoes
By: John Masefield
Summary (general meaning): In each one of the 3 stanzas, Masefield
describes a different kind of ship. The first two lines of each stanza describe
the ship moving through water; the last three list the different cargoes the
ships are carrying.
Form: “Cargoes” is a short lyric poem consisting of three five-line stanzas.
Analysis (detailed meaning):
Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

The ship in stanza 1 is a quinquireme, a large vessel rowed by groups of

five oarsmen. Masefield’s ship is being rowed from “distant Ophir,” a
region in either Arabia or Africa at the southern end of the Red Sea, to the
northern end of that sea. (Masefield must have intended the term
“Palestine” to apply to the land at the farthest reach of the present Gulf of
Aqaba.) The ship’s goal is a happy one, for Palestine is a safe “haven” with
sunny skies. 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. Many of the details of
this stanza—ivory, apes, peacocks, and cedars—come from 1 Kings 10.
That chapter also mentions drinking vessels, though not the wine in them,
and “almug trees,” which may be the same as sandalwood trees.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,

Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amethysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

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First year-Introduction to English Literature
By: Hayder Gebreen

In stanza 2, 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 began
its journey at the Isthmus of Panama, and it progresses with a vessel’s
normal up-and-down motion (“dipping”) through the verdant and beautiful
islands of the Caribbean. Its cargo contains precious stones (emeralds and
diamonds), semiprecious stones, spices, and gold coins. (A “moidore” is a
Portuguese coin; the word means literally “coin of gold.”)

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,

Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

In stanza 3, the British ship is neither 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 rather than on the high seas. This coaster is propelled by
a steam engine (it has a smokestack), and it moves through the English
Channel with a force and motion that resemble an animal 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.”
Conclusion: Masefield juxtaposes these three ships to show that while
trade was once a romantic business of beautiful goods to beautiful people,
it has become a dirty business of processing nature in drab products for the
masses, through the years and empires trade has been transformed into
mere commercialism.