of Common Prayer was read in English but it is likely that, having learnt the language from Ruatara, Marsden preached his sermon in the Māori language. Ruatara was prevailed upon to explain those parts of the sermon the 400-strong Māori congregation did not understand. On 24 February 1815 Marsden purchased land at Rangihoua for the first Christian mission in New Zealand. The death of Ruatara on 15 March 1815 and the loss of his protection for the mission may have contributed to a lack of growth of European settlement in the area and its displacement, in the 1820s, by the Kerikeri as the senior mission in New Zealand. By the 1830s the houses of the mission at Oihi had deteriorated and the mission moved to Te Puna, further to the west in Rangihoua Bay. The mission finally closed in the 1850s. Establishment of the mission At the end of the year Kendall, Hall and King returned to start a mission to the Ngāpuhi under Ruatara's (and, later, Hongi Hika's) protection in the Bay of Islands. Hongi Hika returned with them, bringing a large number of firearms from Australia for his warriors. A mission station was founded with a base at Rangihoua Bay, later moved to Kerikeri, (where the mission house and stone store can still be seen), and ultimately a model farming village at Te Waimate. The mission would struggle on for a decade before attracting converts, in competition with Wesleyan and Catholic missions. Thomas Kendall abandoned his wife for the daughter of a Māori tohunga (priest), and also flirted with Maori traditional religion. In 1815 the Ngāpuhi chief Tītore went to Sydney and spent two years with Marsden. In 1817 Tītore and Tui (also known as Tuhi or Tupaea (1797?-1824)) sailed to England in the brig, Kangaroo. They visited Professor Samuel Lee at Cambridge University and assisted him in the preparation of a grammar and vocabulary of Māori which, following a visit to Lee by the Ngāpuhi chiefs Hongi Hika and Waikato, was published in 1820 as First Grammar and Vocabulary of the New Zealand Language. Marsden was in the Bay of Islands in May 1820 when HMS Coromandel, under the command of Captain James Downie, arrived at the Bay of Islands from England for the purpose of procuring a cargo of timber in the Firth of Thames. When Coromandel sailed for the Thames a few days later, Marsden