Guild Wars 2

This comes about due to a discussion I was having with a guildmate some time ago while regarding the three heavy cargo ships docked at the Rata Sum port. The smaller vessels also docked all have masts and sails, showing how each is propelled.
But the really big ones have no masts. No oar holes. Only an odd platform atop the roof of each.
Would that platform be for a ship’s elementalist to employ their talents perhaps to moving such a massive vessel?
That was what we concluded, but I don’t know lorewise how plausible that might be. Going entirely on ingame models, and the detail ANet has put into them.

You need not resort to fancy magic explanations. IRL, cargo ships might no appear to have means of propulsion. Possibilities:

1. The means is covered up. Oar ports might be closed and too difficult to see. Masts were often taken down and put up again when the ship was ready to move.

2. The ship is not self-propelled. In ancient times and later, cargo and troop ships were sometimes pulled by galleys. You can see the same today. River barges often have no propulsion, but there are special tug ships that push and/or pull groups of barges.

3. The ship is a one-way drifter. River rafts often made one trip and were broken up for timber at the end. If there is a regular, predictable current, this same principle could be applied to a hulled ship. It could be cheap construction that would never last for more than a month at sea… which would be fine if the current carried it where it needed to go in a week.

The large ships were featured in Edge of Destiny and, iirc, described to have oars. So we just don’t see them (either an oversight by ArenaNet, or it’d be #1 of what JohnLShannonhouse said).

I’d say they are either rowed, or perhaps they are river/coastal barges that are designed to be towed by other ships or by animal teams on land, and thus have no means of self-propulsion.