Maritime operations occur in a rapidly changing and extremely dangerous environment. To improve handling of cargo while at sea, this thesis develops a method for combining active-heave compensation and anti-pendulum control for a combined world-frame compensation system. State estimation algorithms are applied using low-cost inertial sensors attached to the deck of the ship and to the body of the load. The control system is validated with physical experiments on a test-scale motion platform, as well as hardware-in-the-loop test-scale simulations. The results show potential for 49.2-99.5% reduction in settling time, 41.1-98.4% reduction in distance travelled, and 34.6-84.0% reduction in root-mean-squared error for energy dissipation tests; as well as potential improvements in set-point tracking performance compared to uncompensated cases when base excitation is applied.