Seafaring and the port

Two entries near the end of this list belong together: le cargo and le manifeste de cargaison. « Cargo » in English is the goods — what is loaded, carried and insured. French le cargo is never the goods. It is the vessel: a freighter, a merchant ship built for boxes rather than passengers, so le cargo attend son tour describes a hull lying off the port and not a consignment. The route explains the mismatch. Latin carricare, to load a wagon, gave Spanish cargo, a load; English borrowed that in the sixteenth century and kept it for the load; English then built the compound « cargo boat », and French took the compound in the nineteenth century and clipped the second half off. What survived in French is therefore the half that meant « boat ». For the load itself French uses the word it had all along from the same Latin verb, la cargaison, and in a charter le fret. Read trois cargos as three cargoes and the sentence loses its ships.