Ch. 8: The Limitations of Pambe Serang

(1891)

If you consider the circumstances of the case, it was the only thing
that he could do. But Pambe Serang has been hanged by the neck till he
is dead, and Nurkeed is dead also.

Three years ago, when the Elsass-Lothringen steamer Saarbruck was
coaling at Aden and the weather was very hot indeed, Nurkeed, the big
fat Zanzibar stoker who fed the second right furnace thirty feet down in
the hold, got leave to go ashore. He departed a 'Seedee boy,' as they
call the stokers; he returned the full-blooded Sultan of Zanzibar--His
Highness Sayyid Burgash, with a bottle in each hand. Then he sat on the
fore-hatch grating, eating salt fish and onions, and singing the songs
of a far country. The food belonged to Pambe, the Serang or head man of
the lascar sailors. He had just cooked it for himself, turned to borrow
some salt, and when he came back Nurkeed's dirty black fingers were
spading into the rice.

A serang is a person of importance, far above a stoker, though the
stoker draws better pay. He sets the chorus of 'Hya! Hulla! Hee-ah!
Heh!' when the captain's gig is pulled up to the davits; he heaves the
lead too; and sometimes, when all the ship is lazy, he puts on his
whitest muslin and a big red sash, and plays with the passengers'
children on the quarter-deck. Then the passengers give him money, and he
saves it all up for an orgie at Bombay or Calcutta, or Pulu Penang. 'Ho!
you fat black barrel, you're eating my food!' said Pambe, in the Other
Lingua Franca that begins where the Levant tongue stops, and runs from
Port Said eastward till east is west, and the sealing-brigs of the
Kurile Islands gossip with the strayed Hakodate junks.

'Son of Eblis, monkey-face, dried shark's liver, pigman, I am the Sultan
Sayyid Burgash, and the commander of all this ship. Take away your
garbage;' and Nurkeed thrust the empty pewter rice-plate into Pambe's
hand.

Pambe beat it into a basin over Nurkeed's woolly head. Nurkeed drew HIS
sheath-knife and stabbed Pambe in the leg. Pambe drew his sheath-knife;
but Nurkeed dropped down into the darkness of the hold and spat through
the grating at Pambe, who was staining the clean fore-deck with his
blood.

Only the white moon saw these things; for the officers were looking
after the coaling, and the passengers were tossing in their close
cabins. 'All right,' said Pambe--and went forward to tie up his leg--'we
will settle the account later on.'

He was a Malay born in India: married once in Burma, where his wife had
a cigar-shop on the Shwe Dagon road; once in Singapore, to a Chinese
girl; and once in Madras, to a Mahomedan woman who sold fowls. The
English sailor cannot, owing to postal and telegraph facilities, marry
as profusely as he