His name is Milia Losane, and his nose is so upturned that his nostrils vent horizontally. He holds a pointed walking stick that he's hoping to sell. "We used it to spear the people," he says, laughing incongruously again. Two grandsons cling to his legs. He explains: "They want to see dim-dim. Because dim-dim give them lollies and water. They never see a big boat. When they see you, they say, 'Oh, Grand, good people are coming!' "

"You're very hospitable," I vouch, ambassadorially.

"Thank you for coming," he replies. "We can see the boat, and lots of dim-dim."

After the visitors return to their own island, Paul from South Dakota discovers that his pack has been rifled, his camera jimmied open, his six-thousand-dollar hearing aids taken.

That evening at sunset, as the Orion carries us away from the Louisiades, I linger at the portside rail, watching flying fish zipper the fabric of the sea while the sky resolves into brushstrokes of butterscotch and clouds of battleship gray begin marshaling over the horizon.

Good people coming, indeed.

Here come the dim-dims!

In anthropological circles, residents of the Trobriand Islands are famous for groundbreaking studies of their reverence for yams and their uninhibited sexual mores (especially during the yam festival). The Islands of Love, they've been called, and when we anchor off Kitava, an out island of this out-island chain, we are welcomed exuberantly by fishermen in dugouts encircling our bow, grinning orangely. Now a grander canoe decorated with carvings and shells appears, propelled by nine bareback oarsmen. This is one of the ceremonial kula canoes which still, to this day, are used to carry out ancient exchanges of shell jewelry with distant islands—necklaces moving clockwise and armbands counterclockwise in a two-hundred-mile-wide circle: a kula ring of trust and social status that Westerners have a hard time understanding.

On Kitava's beach, still wearing our dorky life vests, we are greeted by bare-breasted teenage girls who drape flower necklaces over our sun-hatted heads. Then we are treated to round after round of enthusiastic dancing by skimpily costumed children in all stages of development (except that nobody on the island looks fat). Kitava's entire population must be here, the adults laughing as six-year-old boys pump their pelvises erotically, then fall down exhausted. (I notice, too: The men don't go bald.)

An islander named Abraham Cameron leads us on a walk up a rutted path toward their village. We take a detour to see the grave of his grandfather—an Australian colonial administrator who jumped ship in 1911, started a coconut plantation, and renamed himself King Cameron. The grave is atop a cliff, alone, with a knockout view of the beach and its mint-green waters and our faithful ship tethered to the sea. The tombstone honors Cyril Barneveldt Cameron, born in Tasmania in 1887, died on Kitava in 1966. Abraham says his grandfather—alone among Kitavan men—had three wives. That's why some islanders, like him, are lighter-skinned. Since the king died forty years ago, no other dim-dims have shown up to claim the position.