A comprehensive presentation of the dry bulk industry with emphasis on geographical interaction. Describes 117,000 ship movements in cargo and ballast by size segment (large and small capesize, panamax, handysize) in the mid-1990s. Merges 40,000 voyage and trip fixtures and develops simple, i.e. user-friendly, freight rate functions for practically all possible routes 1993-2002. Compares by size segment, with the help of a Simulator, the daily revenue which ships collect during a calendar year once they have taken the first cargo in a particular region, ten in all. This revenue is a linear function of the ratio of demanded and available tonnage (Tonnage Balance), weighted by sailing distances from/to a discharging/loading region (Revenue Potential). The function, called Revenue Gradient, may be the first published effort ever to explain local, as contrasted to global, freight rates in general terms. There is also a level difference between Atlantic and Pacific rates, usually in the Atlantic’s favor, believed to reflect oligopolistic tendencies in the Pacific. When the function is calibrated by ship segment and year, and the share of these two variables out of the revenue range is estimated, roughly 10 pct of the range in daily revenue can be explained by the initial positioning of ships, i.e. simple geography. The simulator consequently has potential for strategic planning and can be developed into a powerful operational tool. When some dramatic event upsets the current order and a reorganization of trade flows takes place, freight rates follow. A related paper, based on the Tonnage Balance and Revenue Gradient concepts, shows how the relative rate levels can be estimated in advance. Probably another, first ever, achievement. The central theme is complemented by excursions to important but so far insufficiently illuminated problems. Among them are estimates about the share of retail (voyage and trip) and wholesale (COA and time) markets, estimates about the share of cargo legs covered by published fixtures, estimates about the actual and "optimal" workloads, whether in cargo or ballast, an attempt to find a general explanation to the ratio of fronthaul and backhaul rates (led to the related paper above), and attempts to cluster routes by their rate levels, or alternatively their cyclic patterns, possibly related to the export or import character of the loading region. Approximately 120 pages of appendices provide a wealth of tabular and oral material about the dry bulk industry. They will open many a "black box", so typical in research reports. Some information is interesting, perhaps unique, for its own sake - for example, cargo, ballast and fixture matrices by ship segment, and all the freight rate functions used, often with scatterplots. For typographical reasons, the regional mesh is usually ten macroregions which, however, rests on a finer mesh of 37 regions. Appendices: http://www.transportportal.se/ShipDocs/2013-11-14rec161994app.pdf