took place is incorrect in several respects. Victory went to
Hongi, not, as Rutherford says, to the people of Kaipara and their
allies, although they were victorious in the first skirmish. The battle
is known as Te Ika-a-rangi-nui, that is the Great Fish of the Sky or the
Milky Way, and it took place in February, 1825. As Rutherford states,
Hongi was present, and wore the famous coat of mail armour which had
been given to him by His Majesty King George IV. when he was in England
in 1820. The strife was caused not by an attempt to steal Hongi's
armour, as Rutherford suggests, but by a thirst for revenge for the
death of a chief of the Nga-Puhi tribe, to which Hongi belonged. The
chief Whare-umu, evidently identical with "Ewarree-hum" in Rutherford's
narrative, did not belong to the party that Rutherford was connected
with; he was related to the man whose murder was avenged, and seems to
have been Hongi's first lieutenant. Some authorities, notably Bishop
Williams, of Waiapu,[B] and Mr. Percy Smith,[C] believe that Rutherford
was not present at the battle, and that he obtained all his information
from others. Bishop Williams, who knows the Poverty Bay district as well
as anyone, has come to the conclusion that Rutherford must have spent
his years in New Zealand in the Bay of Islands district; and Mr Percy
Smith, in a letter to me, says that he has always entertained the idea
that Rutherford was one of the men taken when the schooner "Brothers"
was attacked at Kennedy Bay in 1815. Bishop Williams sets up the theory
that Rutherford was a deserter from a vessel which visited New Zealand,
that he induced the Maoris to tattoo him in order that he might escape
detection after he had returned to civilization, and that he concocted
the story of the capture of the "Agnes" to account for his reappearance
amongst Europeans. The weakness of this theory is that he evidently did
not object to publicity, and that the tattooing would make him a
conspicuous man who could not avoid public attention. If Bishop Williams
is right in assuming that Rutherford wished to escape detection, he
took the very best course to defeat his object.

Whatever Rutherford's object may have been, and whether he deceived the
author and publisher of "The New Zealanders," or merely erred through
ignorance and lack of observation, there is no doubt that he spent some
years with the Maoris in the northern part of New Zealand. His tattooed
face is sufficient evidence