"Long time you no stop eye belong me." Van Horn joked him in understandable terms about the latest wives he had added to his harem and what price he had paid for them in pigs.
"My word," he concluded, "you rich fella too much together." "Me like 'm come on board gammon along you," Ishikola meekly suggested.
"My word, night he stop," the captain objected, then added, as a concession against the known rule that visitors were not permitted aboard after nightfall: "You come on board, boy stop 'm along boat." Van Horn gallantly helped the old man to clamber to the rail, straddle the barbed wire, and gain the deck.

Ishikola was a dirty old savage.

One of his tambos (tambo being beche-de-mer and Melanesian for "taboo") was that water unavoidable must never touch his skin.

He who lived by the salt sea, in a land of tropic downpour, religiously shunned contact with water.

He never went swimming or wading, and always fled to shelter from a shower.