Sea & Water Freight

The bulk of world trade is carried across the seas by cargo ships. Commodities are transported by bulk marine freight in specialized ships, termed container vessels, or containerization. These ships often carry diverse cargo such as grain, cement, and coal. Television sets, garden tools and apparel travel internationally, across the seas from factory to market, aboard fleets of giant containerships.

Containerships reconfigured port facilities around the world to move inbound and outbound containers efficiently. The tradition of manufacturing shifted away from North America to an increasing globalization of the marketplace, creating a need for safe transport routes at sea, as well as large tracks of land portside to house goods before they were loaded onto ships by longshoremen. Transportation and logistics providers successfully created seamless links between international seaports, highways, railways and domestic inland water transport routes to move cargo to the market place. Inland waterways in the United States stretched from New England south to the Florida Keys. During the Twentieth century, strategic waterways included the vast Mississippi River barge line, as well as completion of barge canals and harbor portsides on the Ohio River, the Columbia River and the St. Lawrence Seaway.