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in Kau Sai and elsewhere where a boat was known as well as on board, everyone knew who was master.“
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47
The local term in most common use was Si t'au (lit: business head, affairs head). Widely used colloquially, perhaps rather more in reference than address, for the head of any kind of group or business concern, including the head of a household, it is a term the referent for which must by definition be unambiguous. Only rarely and, as we shall see, during the transition periods which occurred sometimes while active control was being more or less gradually relinquished by a member of one generation into the hands of his successor of the next, might there perhaps be some doubt among outsiders as to who really was the si t'au at any given moment. It is possible, as I shall argue later, that the very nature of living on board a sea-going boat puts a premium upon the clear-cut allocation of authority to one person.
The reader should note that the account of boats' masters in this and the two next chapters relates to their managerial role alone. Questions of the "ownership" of boats and gear are reserved for consideration in the later chapters on family structure as such. Partly for this reason, and partly also because of the existence of transition situations of the kind just mentioned and examined in detail below, it would be unwise to assume that the man listed as “owner” on the license issued annually by Hong Kong's Department of Marine was in fact the boat's master in the sense used here. Usually he was; but often there appears to have been a reluctance to change the name on the license book even long after a change in actual management had taken place. Often, too, there have been genuine errors, or carelessness, and sometimes, as we shall see, more subtle reasons for not wishing to register changes of "ownership". For our immediate purpose it is enough to observe that the boats' masters of this account are so called not because they were listed as "owners" on their boats' licences, but because they were referred to as si t'au and performed as such.
One further caveat must be entered: in respect of local fishing craft and certain other categories of vessel the Marine Department uses the word “master” in a quite specific sense to refer to