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those who engage for other purposes. They may take a lot of looking after to have things quite satisfactory, not merely to keep them up to the mark, as it were, but because it is necessary at all times that workers should know they are being well looked after, that their good and bad qualities are equally well known. Ordinary respect and civility is the rule, rather than the exception. It is very rare, indeed, that one has a case for disrating, except it be an incompetent fireman, who reverts to coal trimming for a change, as they are engaged on different rates of pay, depending on length of sea service. The pukka Lascar graduates in this manner from a first entry or boy, until he attains the rating of a topman, the equivalent of the A.B. The rates of pay are stated in a column on his continuous discharge, so it is a very easy matter when engaging to make the necessary selection of the various grades allowed by the shipowner for a crew. Serangs, tindels, topmen, storekeepers, firemen, coal trimmers, cooks, and servants have wages fixed as though a law of the Medes and of the Persians ruled it, for it has not varied in any degree for many years. The same scale of pay obtained long before there were only 335 of them employed in the merchant service! No boatswain of an ordinary British merchant vessel has such complete control over the crew he has to work and manage to the same extent as a serang—the boatswain’s equivalent—has over his Lascars. No leading fireman or engine-room petty officer of an ordinary British steamer can compete with the engine-room serang in keeping control of the black squad. Thus the officer or engineer of the Lascar-manned steamer scores immensely over his less fortunate confrère in other vessels, with fewer workers, where they have to be continually bossing everybody from the first to the end of the watch, and end of the voyage. This circumstance is due to the serang providing the men required for a crew. The principal officer of the department concerned generally engages the serang in the first instance—there are always lots of applicants for the place—the serang then selects the people required for the department, and musters them for inspection and approval, or otherwise. When the final selection is made they are shipped in the usual manner, and ordered to join at a certain time to commence the voyage.
It is said of the serangs that they have too much power over the men, and that they, in fact, squeeze them for Dustoorie. They may, or they may not, but the fact remains that each man as he is paid off receives his pay in full from the hands of the Shipping Master himself at the Shipping Office, or
