In the godowns, shipping offices, chandleries and dockyards a medley of voice did business in a multiplicity of languages and dialects. The goods they handled, shipped in from all over the world, represented as many ways of seeing and being, eating and dressing, living and dying. Yet there were disconnections as well as connections in this interface of interfaces. This chapter describes how the colonial government set apart seamen of different ethnic backgrounds by issuing different sets of regulations for seamen’s boarding houses according to whether they were lascars (Indians, Malays and others from South and Southeast Asia), Chinese or Westerners. Deepening the divides was the strong native-place and dialect-basis principle under which Chinese boarding houses were organized, indicating a certain degree of segregation among the Chinese themselves. The separateness is also shown in the different church missions, which ministered to seamen according to their ethnic origins.