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without) a boat family in Kau Sai did not affect the allocation of status in the boat's crew, particularly the status of master; it would be equally incorrect to regard familial status as an inflexible determinant. Most boats' masters were also the senior males in their families, but they were not always so; most eldest sons could expect to step into master's status when their fathers died, but not all did so and some did so a good deal earlier; with the progress of mechanisation, it was also usually the eldest sons who were the first to be sent to acquire qualifications as coxswains and engineers, but some younger ones went as well, or instead (indeed, in some other villages, some fishermen selected daughters for this task). As for the division of labour between the sexes, as far as fishing operations and matters connected with them were concerned, there was remarkably little difference, and what there was was usually unconnected with familial status. Only in two respects was family status as such unequivocally crucial: no non-family member was boat's master, and all non-family members received a money wage.
In addition, hired workers received full board and lodging with the families on the boats. This meant that they were inevitably drawn into the domestic as well as the productive sphere of work. Hired men could quite often be seen helping with such apparently domestic tasks as water carrying or wood cutting. In one respect, however, they were set ostentatiously outside the family's domestic life: they always washed their own clothes. In view of some of the local notions of pollution discussed below, it is perhaps possible to see a symbolic as well as a practical meaning in this particular exclusion.
We have already seen that the different types of fishing operation practised from Kau Sai required different numbers of workers. In 1953, the average number of persons living on board each Kau Sai purse-seiner was 9 (the range being from 7 to 15); on a small long-liner, the average was 7 (and range 3 to 12). Excluding children of 9 years and under, the average numbers of able-bodied members were 6 and 5 respectively (ranges 4 to 11 and 2 to 9). It has to be remembered, however, that at that time purse-seining operations required the use of two boats: the average purse-seiner operating crew was, therefore, somewhere