TE KOOTI'S JONAH.

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1699, 15 March 1913, Page 15

TE KOOTI'S JONAH.

—: « —: AN OLD INCIDENT KEVIVED. When Te was making his famous voyage from the Chatham Islands to Poverty Bay in a • captured schooner, in 18G1), an incident occurred which had a curious.blending of comedy and tragedy. Te Kooti was a fervid Bible student, the stirring narratives of the Old Testament in .particular appealing to his vivid imagination. As a prisoner in the Chathams he was wont to gather his fellow prisoners round him and sermonise them, drawing analogies between their plight arid - the captivity of the Children . of Israel. When the opportunity to escape came, arid ■ the little schooner Rifleman was seized while the officers were ashore, Te Kooti interpreted their deliverance as an act of Divine intervention. 1 A day or two after the schooner left tho Chathams, with) Te Kooti'and his baud of two hundred fanatical adherents on board, a storm arose. The wind blew-with hurricane force, and.the mountainous waves threatened to swamp the little vessel. In the midst of the tempest Te Kooti s Bible knowledge again bccam,e evident. dressed his warriors, and told ■ them that they had a'"Jonah". amongst them, and if the ■ rest would escape he must be cast into, the s>ea. He'selected a warrior whom he considered tho cause of their 111-tol-tune, '.and ,had the hapless'fellow (who, it may well be surmised, did not make such a" willing sacrifice as Jonah of old) thrown overboard. Unfortunately for. this modern ' "Jonah" he was ' not carried ashore, by fi whale, but the absence of this deta.il in the reenactment of the story, and the failure of the sea to immediately cease, its raging, did not lessen the .faith which the band of'warriors had in their eccentric leader. Tlia wonderful influence which Te 'Kooti wielded over them was mado evident in a moro terrible manner when he afterwards led them through a campaign of rapine,' murder, and war, which, sent a thrill of horror through tho whole of New Zealund. • To Kooti.was perhaps the. most-relentless foe tho Europeans had to reckon with in those troublous years when ho was bent luwn the deeds of treachery and violence which have left such a deep stain upon his memory and upon the history of Poverty Bay.