Cargoes (Criticism)

Criticism

Jhan Hochman

Jhan Hochman’s articles appear in Democracy and Nature, Genre, ISLE, and Mosaic. He is the author of Green Cultural Studies: Nature in Film, Novel, and Theory (1998), and he holds a Ph.D in English and an M.A. in Cinema Studies. In the following essay, Hochman describes and interprets the meaning of the cargo from the three ships in Masefield’s poem.

“Cargoes” would appear to be saying little more than this: whereas the products of empire were once glorious, they are no longer. But why say it? This will be the question I will try to answer. In order to do so, I will have to force these three cargoes to speak — to tell where they came from, how they were got, who got them, and what they were used for. Only then might we understand what these cargoes represent.

The first ship rows right from the Bible’s Old Testament, Kings I. In that book, there is no mention of Nineveh, an ancient town on the Tigris River in ancient Assyria whose ruins are in what is now present-day Iraq. Nineveh was likely selected for its general historical relevance and, most important, for its contribution to the poem’s metrics. Just as there is no mention of Nineveh, the word “quin-quireme” is also absent in Kings I, but quinquireme is the name of an ancient ship with five banks of oars, which could have been similar to the kind used by Solomon, King of Israel, in the tenth century B.C. Solomon sent a fleet of ships, perhaps quinquiremes, to get gold from Ophir. No one quite knows where Ophir was located, but it is thought to have been in what is now southern Saudi Arabia. The ships from Ophir brought back a bit more than gold. For one thing, they carried Ophirian al-mug wood, now called sandalwood. Sandalwood was used to build not only the supports of Solomon’s extraordinarily lavish temple, but also to make lyres for his singers. Ivory was also brought back from Ophir. With it, Solomon made his throne, which he also overlaid with gold. But this was not enough: “The throne had six steps, and at the back of the throne was a calf’s head, and on each side of the seat were arm rests and two lions standing beside the arm rests, while twelve lions stood there, one on each end of a step on the six steps.” Apes and peacocks were also shipped in, but there is no mention of precisely what Solomon did with these. Two materials in the poem do not come from Ophir. Cedar came from Lebanon, not from Ophir. Solomon used a great deal of cedar to build his palace and temple. And sweet white wine seems to make no appearance at all in this section about Solomon. We might safely assume that the three “w”’s and the three consecutive accented syllables of “sweet white wine” seduced Masefield into using the words for his poem. As I briefly mentioned, much of this cargo was used for two building projects: Solomon’s temple and palace. Who built these immoderate structures? The forced labor of 183,300 men who saw their labor as a yoke, one which earned such resentment that it would later cause disruption in Israel under Solomon’s son, Rehoboam. To summarize: valuable cargo from a distant land was shipped to the Kingdom of Israel, heaped upon the backs of men under the yoke of a king who used wealth and labor to glorify himself through a god he claimed had spoken to him. But even after Solomon’s death, his deeds acted on the living: Solomon’s use of forced labor to build his temple and palace later caused trouble for his son.

In the second stanza, readers find themselves on a Spanish galleon, a sailing ship used for commerce and warfare. The ship is sailing from Central America, specifically from the Isthmus of Panama — now the locale of the Panama Canal. Generally the ship is coming from the Tropics, the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, the West Indies — the major outposts of what would become the largest empire the earth had thus seen, the Spanish Empire. This title was due to the conquests of Her-nan Cortes, conqueror of Aztec Mexico in 1521, and Francisco Pizarro, who left from the Isthmus of Darien (now the Isthmus of Panama) and conquered Incan Peru in 1532. From Mexico and Peru came fabulous wealth: gold, silver, and the precious gems mentioned in “Cargoes.” Worth noting is that, while gold was the major booty in both Ophir and the Americas, Masefield hardly mentions it in “Cargoes,” except when it is processed into moidores, or Portuguese coins. An explanation might be that gold has only one syllable and it does not sound as exotic as the rest of the booty. Here is one description of the treasure found by Cortes in Tenochtitlan, then capital of Mexico: “The Spaniards ... saw mounds of golden ornaments and jewels and stacks of gold bars.” On one occasion, it was reported that Montezuma, Tenochtitlan’s ruler, sent green stones, probably emeralds, to Cortes as a gift. And on Cortes’s first shipment of Aztec gifts back to Charles V of Spain, was “a gold necklace set with both green and red stones and pearls and hung with gold bells, a gold bracelet; a wand or scepter girdled with gold and pearls: a wood headdress decorated with gems and golden bells....” There was reputed to be even more wealth from the Incas. When Pizarro took the Incan King Atahualpa hostage, he demanded the ransom of a room’s

worth of gold and jewels, some of which were emeralds like those that studded the King’s robes. The loot from the Americas meant unbelievable wealth for Spain: “The precious metals arriving in Spain had by the end of [Charles V’s] reign increased ten-fold: from a yearly average of 200,000 pesos between 1516 and 1520, to 1,975,000 pesos between 1551 and 1555.” And what happened to the Indians of the Americas from the Spanish invasions? They were made into slaves or treated to near genocide from war and disease. The Indians also got Christianity. Charles V spent at least some of Cortes’s first shipment of booty on an expensive coronation in Germany where he would succeed his grandfather, Maximilian I. As in the Kingdom of Israel, the Empire of Spain grew rich off of the misery and decimation of lands and peoples: Israel enslaved its men at home (no mention is made of the Ophirians), and Spain enslaved and killed the native peoples of the Americas.

The last ship in Masefield’s brief history of civilization is a coaster, a ship of commerce operating along the coast of Britain. This motorized ship is dirty and is neither exotic like the quinquireme, nor stately like the galleon. The coal-driven ship is likely soiled because of its own smoke, the pollution from the ports at which it docked, and the rough weather — indicated by “mad March days” and “salt-caked” — through the English Channel. It might be said that while the coaster is dirty, the other ships are, in comparison, clean. Finally, the ship is operating within one country, not coming from distant lands like Ophir or the Americas. Not only are ship, weather, and route different, but so is the cargo. The British cargo is distinct in several ways. First it is bound not for kings, but for industrialists who will process it and sell it — directly or indirectly — to masses of people forced into cities because they had been formerly dispossessed of land and because they are needed to stoke the furnace of industry. The British cargo is also different from the cargoes of the past because, in and of itself, it is not valuable. It only becomes valuable through being processed and sold to many people. The cargo is not so much dirty, but the result of dirty processes involving the burning of coal and wood. Another difference is that the cargo is a combination of imported goods (tin from Nigeria and Malaya) and “home-grown” goods such as coal and iron. Lastly, the coaster’s cargo is mostly named by thudding words of two syllables, whereas most of the cargo of the other ships is composed of a mellifluous three syllables.

Overall, what distinguishes the coaster from the quinquireme and the galleon is that the coaster does not hide what it is: a dirty ship carrying on a dreary commerce that reflects the tawdry society that produced the ship and its “goods.” Victorian and Edwardian England (1837 to 1910) is the setting of “Cargoes,” a time when Britain produced — for internal use and for export — more coal, iron, and steel than any other country. Yet one third of its people lived a ghastly existence: “Conditions were so bad that it was believed they were producing degenerate physical types, anaemic mothers of rickety children, young men incapable of defending the Motherland and the Empire.” Among the hard hit were dockers, those who loaded and unloaded British coasters. Workers toiled twelve or more hours a day for subsistent wages. Miners worked dangerous jobs in isolated, dirty towns and tramps abounded, probably having come to the conclusion that they could no longer work so long and so hard for so little. The government did not help. It showed itself hostile to labor unionism, especially in the Taff-Vale Case of 1901. Laborers had little recourse but to accept their lot and do the best they could. One reason for such abjection was an entrenched class-consciousness that produced England’s version of a caste system. It was thought by the upper classes, said J. B. Priestly, that if the working masses were given more money and leisure time, there was no telling what they might do with it. Besides, the upper classes would say, workers had chosen these conditions since, if they wanted to, they could work harder and climb out of poverty. It was plain that England would have to wait until after the writing of “Cargoes” for improved social programs and working conditions for the working classes. Poor regard and miserable conditions for the people who helped produce the wealth of the British empire contributed to the early-twentieth-century decline of a dirty, hyperrational empire. The British empire was so rife with injustice that it deeply divided the people between those who wanted capital spent on more production that would produce more riches, supposedly for more people, and those who wanted some of the wealth immediately diverted to decent wages and working conditions. English society was also divided about its empire overseas, especially when it came to the Boer War (1899-1902), fought largely for the possession of diamond and gold mines that had been discovered in South Africa. The South-African countryside was decimated, concentration camps to house Boer women and children were invented (20,000 died), and, altogether, 5,774 British and 4,000 Boers were killed in the conflict. Notice here that while the British won this capitalist war of conquest, they lost more lives than the Boers.

Through the experience of England, the largest imperial power the world has ever seen, the desire for empire was now tainted. Before the British, empire had seemed a glorious undertaking — worth killing, enslavement, and the risking of one’s own countrymen. After all, there was money and glory to be had as well as souls to be saved. After Britain, however, the cost of directly maintaining an empire became too great, both in money and lives. The British coaster is the most ignominious ship in “Cargoes,” but it is also the most important: the British empire destroyed not only distant peoples and distant lands, as in the case of Spain, but its own people and land, as in the case of ancient Israel.

Source: Jhan Hochman, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1999.

Bruce Meyer

Bruce Meyer is the director of the creative writing program at the University of Toronto. He has taught at several Canadian universities and is the author of three collections of poetry. In the following essay, Meyer characterizes Masefield’s poem as “a political examination of human development as seen through artifacts.”

John Masefield’s “Cargoes” is a unique poem that implements meter and language to convey a gradual sense of diminution through time. The world, as the poem suggests, is a victim of progress, of a reductio ad absurdum where values are shrinking. For Masefield, a passionate observer of maritime experiences and traditions, an age is weighed and measured in the scope of human history by what its participants choose to convey over great distances. The major question that the poem raises is why Masefield is so fascinated with the manifests of these ships? Are we to perceive the cargoes as metaphors for worth, importance and values? The poem examines three different epochs — the Ancient, the Modern and the contemporary-and, by process of comparison, exposes progress and human development as a question of values. At first glance, what was once stately, opulent, and rich is bathetically shrinking, lowered and diminished so that the poem is not only a commentary on history but an indictment of progress. But the ultimate picture that the poem paints, a political examination of human development as seen through artifacts, suggests a much different reading to the poem.

Structurally, Masefield has divided the poem into three very distinct — both in terms of content and meter — sections. The first section deals with the ancient world, the second with what can be loosely termed the “modern” world (the term modern here applied to anything after the Medieval era), and the last with the contemporary world. By dividing the poem into these three period units, Masefield is very subtly hinting at a much broader literary theme: the debates between the ancients and the moderns — a line of argument that was used by such writers as Machiavelli in The Prince and Swift in The Battle of the Books to measure the changes and development in human knowledge over the centuries. In the battle of the ancients versus the moderns, the question is always who is better and who is wiser. The stanzas, each self-contained and with their only segues and connections based on the theme of “cargoes,” are meant to raise comparisons simply through the juxtaposing of periods. The addition of a third stanza about the contemporary world underscores the twentieth-century ideal to reinvent all ideas and to question all aspects of the past, whether ancient or modern. The relationship between the third stanza and the first two highlights the discrepancies between the twentieth century and all previous eras; the result is a world that is absurdly far different from anything that has gone before. The implication of this structure underlying the poem, at first glance, is that time is a bathetic, reductive process and that things are heading downhill at a very rapid and unstoppable pace.

Within the poem, the process of thematic reduction is expressed by Masefield through the use of three metrical variations. The stanzas, each one representing a journey that defines one of the three eras, literally become faster and faster sounding as time progresses and riches fade. For Masefield, who throughout his poetry echoes the themes of preservation and even repugnance at the impositions and devaluations that modern times impose on the world, “Cargoes” is both an evocation and a demonstration of his poetic thesis.

The first ancient, leisurely journey is set approximately in classical times and is undertaken on a “Quinquireme” or Roman galley “with five files of oarsmen on each side” between “Ophir” in North Africa to “Nineveh” in the Middle East. The opening line of this first journey evokes a feeling of slowness. The slowness of the opening line is achieved sonically through the use of ionic (major) feet — metrical measures in which each foot is composed of two heavy stresses followed by two light stresses. The ionic (major), as a measure, is graceful, archaic, and leisurely, with the two leading, heavy stresses echoing the solemnity of a spondee, but without the unrelieved gravity that the funereal and drumlike spondee implies. As meters go, it is almost ritualistic in the tonal connotations it carries. By establishing the ionic (major) as the initial and shaping measure of the opening stanza of “Cargoes,” Masefield is setting the reader up for the gradual rise in the tempo of the stanzas and for the surprising metrical shifts and variations that hallmark each succeeding stanza.

The second stanza, in contrast, opens with a line composed of iambic feet. The iamb is the rhythm of poetic speech and moves with an elegant pacing that is usually in equated in poetry with stateliness, eloquence, persuasion, address, and precision. The iambic foot is also the measure of the Renaissance — the meter of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets — and it is no coincidence that Masefield chooses to frame his Renaissance journey of a “Spanish galleon ... / Dipping through the Tropics” in the iambic foot. In a subtle play between meter and image, the reader is reminded that the iambic foot “dips” from measure to measure with the light stress followed succinctly by a heavy stress. The sonic movement in the second stanza is faster, but it is far from the heady and breathtaking pace set by the third and final stanza of the poem.

The third stanza opens with a line that sets a tone of mindlessness and hurriedness established

through the use of ionic (minor) meter, a reversal of the opening stanza. The ionic (minor) foot is composed of two light stresses followed by two heavy stresses. It is giddy, quick, and almost frivolous in its tone, and it conveys a character of inconsequential lightness and flimsiness. The ionic (minor) foot contains the image of the “Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,” a tramp steamer that hurriedly plows “the Channel” in the “mad March days.” The suggestion here is that speed is burning everything up, and that the world is a place not of precious preservation, but of mass consumption reliant on coal from the Tyne region in northern England. The overall impression is that of a world that is frenzied, sooty, and ugly. The meter in this final stanza supports the bathetic notion that the cargoes of the modern world are not gold or spices or jewels but are “pig-lead” (essentially ingots that are going to be melted into other metals to debase the stronger base metals into alloys for mass production), iron-ware (a kind of all-purpose pottery for rough, daily use) and “cheap tin trays.”

But more than simply a clever play with meters and sound, “Cargoes” is a very specific satire, perhaps even an invective, against Masefield’s own society. In these three portraits that examine the values and the valuables of humanity through the ages, Masefield is questioning the nature of progress as it relates to humanity and the shifting perspectives of what is deemed important. Here, the key to understanding the underlying statement of the poem, all metrical pyrotechnics aside, is in an examination of the ships that he chooses as the focus for each stanza. Each ship is a metaphor that masks a very different truth from the surface reality and the sonic implications that the poem presents on first reading. Through a powerful sense of allusion through very controlled and subtle understatement, the cargoes of the poem operate almost as miniature allegories on the nature of materialism and its relation to human beings.

The “Quinquireme,” or Roman galley, was powered by five tiers, or rows, of slaves. The ship is slow and the meter is almost ritualistic. However, the reality is that the cargo is not simply the exotic items of the manifest observed by the lines of the opening stanza. The “cargo” is also the slaves who are driving the vessel. The suggestion here is that beneath the splendor and preciousness of material goods and exotic items such as the “sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine,” there is a far darker reality where human beings are valued less than inanimate items. Politically, man, in the opening stanza, is a slave to materialism. Masefield is making a wry and subtle comment on the nature of materialism — that material beauty is often built upon ignoble principles — through an image that is at once deceiving and elliptical, yet he makes no outward statement of the issue. A reading public reared on naval terminology and history, however, would easily see through the image and establish it as an allegory on tyranny.

The “Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus” is a pleasant-enough image at first glance. The underlying truth, however, is far different. As an Englishman and a seafarer, Masefield’s unspoken reality of the galleon is that it is a target for plunder, a vessel of the Spanish Main that is laden with “diamonds, / Emeralds, amethysts, / Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.” This cargo manifest of gemstones, spices, and precious metals is essentially the stuff of plunder, perhaps goods that are themselves about to be plundered. Here the allegorical aspect is that material goods are the result of plunder and that the world operates on the “dog-eat-dog” principle of one group taking from another.

In the final stanza, Masefield is locating his action and his ship in the world of democratic consumerism. No longer are human beings pulling on the oars or plundering each other; they are the masters of their own destiny, “butting” ahead as if stepping out of line or pushing against their own limitations. There is a wonderful undertone in the final stanza of liberation, of heady excitement and unlimited potential. The use of the month of “March,” coupled with the adjective “mad,” suggests that the notion of progress, which binds up so much of the industrial world’s consciousness, is actually a “mad march” toward some indefinite, chaotic goal. The material goods are now shared by all. The cargo is no longer exotic, but it is utilitarian and of mass appeal. The liberation into this world of “cheap” consumer goods masquerading as items of either beauty or artistic worth is bought at the price of the materials that make for the fabric of wealth, power, and civilization. This shift in values and the value of valuables signals a new “mass” era that, on the surface, is “cheap” but that underneath is of consummate reward to human kind.

So, the question that emerges for the reader when confronting Masefield’s cargoes is a simple one: should we establish value in material items or in ideals? The poem is a political statement that does not make an open statement. It is an allegory in which the reader must penetrate the purpose of the poem and examine its contents and weigh the value of those contents as if looking inside a ship, peering down into the hold, and wondering why the vessel is transporting what it carries and where it is going. By leaving the poem open-ended, by not commenting upon the reason for writing about the cargoes or the destiny and use of such materials, Masefield is being more than merely descriptive. He is offering an allegory. What should be remembered about allegories is that they leave their completion in the hands of the reader, and it is the reader who captains the extended metaphor to its inevitable destination or conclusion.

Source: Bruce Meyer, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1999.

What Do I Read Next?

• David Cooperman and E. V. Walter’s Power and Civilization: Political Thought in the Twentieth Century, published in 1962, is an anthology of writings by some of the most important figures of the twentieth century — George San-tayana, Karl Kautski, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Herbert Marcuse, to name just a few. Its 600 pages are divided into the modern (1918-39) and the postmodern world, from World War II to the present day.
• David Harvey’s 1990 work, The Condition of Postmodernity, investigates the relationship of space and time to flexible modes of capitalist accumulation in the last third of the twentieth century.
• George Lukacs’s 1968 influential work, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, is a collection of writings during a period that Lukacs’s calls his “apprenticeship in Marxism.” He is especially effective at showing how the capitalist system influences all aspects of life.
• John Masefield’s long narrative poem from 1913, Dauber: a Poem is not only a completely different example of Masefield’s poetic talents, but it is drawn from his only sea voyage — an odyssey that developed into an obsession with ships and poems about ships.
• Masefield’s On the Spanish Main (1906) is a factual history — in a storytelling mode — of the looting expeditions of Drake and other sixteenth-century pirates operating in the West Indies.