Wolfe, Reese "Sew-Sew Woman"

Ironic tale of how a money-grubbing American ship master is bested at his own game by a lowly “sew-sew” woman (a bumboat girl who sews for mariners). The tale is set in December 1941 in Hawaii and Batavia (modern-day Jakarta on the island of Java) and opens in Honolulu just as Captain Blanton, the skinflint master of the tramp freighter BANDA MAIDEN, has taken part in the ransacking of waterfront Japanese beer joints in the wake of the Dec. 7th attack on Pearl Harbor. His haul includes a goodly sum of crudely counterfeited American greenbacks that Japanese espionage agents had planted in the various saloons. Blanton knows that they’re phony but nonetheless tries to pass them off as authentic a couple of weeks later when the BANDA MAIDEN reaches safety in the port in Batavia. (“The Japs seemed a long, long way from Java in those early weeks,” notes the story’s narrator, Chief Engineer Hallett). Dutch officials give Blanton the benefit of the doubt regarding his knowledge of the currency’s authenticity but when he interferes with the budding romance between his half-caste 2nd Engineer and a local half-caste “sew-sew” girl, the woman frames him good, and only by paying her off with real Yankee dollars is he able to clear the BANDA MAIDEN out of Batavia. Though Captain Blanton doesn’t know it at the time the freighter sails sans his 2nd Engineer, who’s done a reverse “pierhead jump” to join his fiancée dockside. Together, the maiden and the Engineer plan to use the dollars extracted from Blanton to flee south ahead of the advancing Japanese to the safety of Australia.