The situation on the purse-seiners was both more complex and more difficult to summarise. At first sight purse-seine masters appear to have been generally rather younger than liner masters. In 1953 a rather larger proportion of them were under 40 years of age; or, put another way, nearly three-quarters of the eligible males in their thirties on purse-seiners were masters as compared with only one-third on the small liners. In 1970, on the other hand, the balance seems to have been redressed: only one purse-seine master then was under 40. However, in both 1953 and 1970 there were more retired ex-masters on purse-seiners than on small liners in Kau Sai, though proportionately to the absolute numbers the difference was probably not meaningful in these terms (i.e. small long-liner ex-masters 1953: 1, 1970: 3; purse-seiner ex-masters 1953: 6, 1970: 4).
This impression of the relative youth of the purse-seine masters is a little misleading, since 10 of the 19 purse-seine masters who were under 40 in 1953 were merely in charge of the second junks of their pairs. The practical authority of these men is not to be compared with that of a small long-liner master running his own business. If we include only those purse-seine masters who were leaders of their firms (i.e. pairs) in 1953 we still find that as many as half the masters of firms in 1953 were under 40, that is very nearly half the eligible men of their age group. The shift in emphasis in 1970 when only 1 in 12 of the masters was under 40 (and the majority — 7 over 50) is partly explicable simply in terms of the natural cycle of maturation. In other words, most of the thirty-year-old masters of 1953 were the same men who were 50-year-old masters in 1970: in a few years they, too, will be retiring and another generation will be taking over. The difference between this cycle and that on the small liners is a function of the difference between the developmental cycles of extended and nuclear families on these boats which is explored further in Chapter 9.
As for the familial status of masters on the purse-seiners, it followed a pattern very similar to the long-liners'. If we take each of the 37 purse-seine junks of 1953 singly, then on the 15 which housed nuclear families father was invariably master; on 11 out of the 14 with three-generation extended families senior father