Basil May's diction is clear through most of the song, but it's very muddy on this phrase, which is obviously corrupted. I've only heard it on vinyl, at 78RPM (in the 60s you could buy an LOC 78RPM single of this, c/w Pete Steele's "Pretty Polly," and I did), but the best I could make of what he's saying is "Captain on a ship that was called Kon Carr." It could as easily be "Kong Kong Karr," as Ruth Crawford Seeger transcribed it from the same recording in "Our Singing Country." The "k" and "r" sounds come through pretty clearly but the words they're part of aren't so easy to understand.

The "come from far" version probably traces back to the NLCR Songbook, which gives the phrase in that form -- an obvious attempt to have it make a little more sense.

I'm with the "do it however you want" group, if ya don't mind being asked, "Is a Hong Kong Car anything like a Toyota?" (That's when I changed to "come from [a]far.")