He trained as a sailor. He went to sea.
## The British Merchant Navy and Its Chinese Crews
The institution that employed Poon Lim, the British Merchant Navy, was in the 1930s one of the largest maritime fleets in the world, carrying the goods that sustained the British Empire and a substantial portion of global trade. It was also an institution with a specific racial and economic architecture that shaped the lives of the non-European workers within it in ways that require honest acknowledgment.
Chinese seamen formed a significant portion of the labor force on certain British shipping lines, particularly those operating in Asian waters and along routes through the Suez Canal and the Cape. Companies such as Blue Funnel, Ben Line, and Shell employed Chinese crews in numbers that, by the early years of the Second World War, ran to approximately five thousand individuals. These men were recruited through networks that often operated through community and family connections, with established relationships between specific villages in Hainan and Guangdong and specific British shipping companies providing the channels through which young men made their way from Chinese coastal provinces to British ships.
The economic terms of this employment were explicitly unequal. In the period leading up to and during the Second World War, Chinese seamen employed on British ships were paid significantly less than their European counterparts — estimates from the period suggest basic wages running approximately twenty-five to thirty percent below British rates. The disputes over war risk bonuses in 1940 and 1941, in which men demanded the additional compensation that the specific dangers of wartime sailing warranted, led to a 1942 agreement that accepted the principle of equal treatment. In practice, the wage gap persisted.