“Cargoes” is perhaps the most well-respected of John Masefield’s shorter poems and, like a great many of his poems and prose works, pertains to ships. Masefield began a love-hate relationship with ships and the sea when he took his first and only overseas voyage as a teenager. This trip left indelible marks—some of them scars—on his character and work. “Cargoes” was included in Masefield’s second volume of verse, Ballads, published in 1903. At this time, the British Empire was still the most powerful in the world, vesting in ships and the cargo they could carry. Turn-of-the-century England, then, was an ideal time and place to reflect back on the history of shipping, cargoes, and, most important, on power and empire.
In “Cargoes,” one ship sails through each of three stanzas. The first ship rows around the lands of the Old Testament, the second sails across the Atlantic Ocean sometime between the fifteenth and eighteenth century, and the third motors through the English Channel, probably at the turn of the twentieth century, the time the poem was written. The poem is thus a concise history of ships, shipping, consumption, and empire. For Masefield, much has changed, apparently for the worse. Once, Masefield’s story goes, ships had exotic names and sailed through idyllic climes to and from faraway destinations with strange and marvelous cargoes. But by the turn of the century, dirty, polluting ships motored their way through the bad weather of the confining English Channel. The cargo these ships carry is not only produced in the same country it is shipped to, but it is cheap and plentiful—a cargo destined for the masses instead of the kings and queens of yesterday. These three snapshots of three ships might be quick, but they are also somewhat complex. In contemplating “Cargoes,” we might understand that what Masefield has given us is not only the lushness of poetry, but also the austerity of photography.