EXCHANGING FOODS

Taranaki Daily News, 22 December 1931, Page 5

EXCHANGING FOODS

CARE OF NATIVE CREWS. PROBLEMS FOR SKIPPERS. The difficulties of dealing with the problem of the many different castes in India, and of treating the natives in an equitable way are not peculiar to those statesmen who were present at the Round Table Conference. The skippers of those vessels which have Lascar crews know all about these problems, and what they do not know about the practical side of food for the different castes, and living quarters and pay, and the thousand other things which wop up is scarcely worth the knowing. One of the problems which arise is that of shipping back home again those natives whose time for which they, have contracted to serve in a crew is finished. That was what faced the skipper of the Glenbank, says the Auckland Star, His crew had signed on for two years, and that period had practically elapsed when the vessel arrived in Auckland. His vessel is going back on the phosphate run, so she could not take the crew home. It so happened, or perhaps it was so arranged, that another vessel, of the same line, the Weirbank, had just completed discharge of a sugar cargo at Chelsea and was going to Australia to load sugar for Europe. So the difficulty was met by the exchange of the crews of the Glenbank and the Weirbank. That all sounds very simple, but that was not all of the difficulty. The matter of food arose. What the crew of the Weirbank looked upon as perfectly rrood food, the Glenbank’s crew would not touch. Lascars will eat only ballam rice; Malayans, on the other hand, will touch only white rice, and each would rather starve than eat the other kind. And so not only did the crews have to be exchanged, but also the respective foods which each would eat. The captain of the Weirbank produced a formidable list of foodstuffs which he was transhipping. It included "dhall,” a kind of pea, "ghee,” a native butter, "tamarind,” a kind of beetroot, and curry, besides livestock. The natives, have a partiality for fresh meat, again a matter of religion. Though the natives are unable to read, to speak or to write English, they always know exactly how much pay is owing to them. They never keep any written record, but when they are going to be paid off they always check up the amount due to them by some method of their own. They must have good memories. They sign for their money by impressing the mark of their thumb on the paper. That is the accepted sign among them, and they will never, dispute it. Where one is accustomed to see an illegible succession of pothooks and odd pen strokes, which pass for a signature among us better educated folk, it is strange to see one thumbprint after another. Yet on looking closely one finds that they are all different, so that the method, if bizarre, is accurate and reliable. But it seems incongruous that a large page of neatly-written accounts, kept°in the most modern way, should be capped by a column of dirty black smudges. However, it satisfies the natives, who are the ones to be pleased. The way in which the crews are chosen is strange. The captain does not. pick the men himself. jHo goes to a village and tells the serang—the word is not slang,'though often so used—of his requirements. It is the duty of" that man. to supply the labour, and each man chosen pays the serang for finding him a job. The serang goes aboard with, his picked men, and they are his responsibility. It is to him that orders are given, and he sees that the natives carry them out. It is also he who acts as a buffer between the wrath of the officers for mistakes, and the men, though doubtless he passes the wrath on, as subordinates have a habit of doing. The system, altogether, is a complicated one, but the natives work in a climate which would be impossible for * white man,