Stranded in Paradise (with apologies to John Dix)

Charles Dickens, novelist, social commentator and lecturer, also owned and edited a weekly publication called All the Year Round. I have three annual anthologies of that periodical, including the seventh volume, which is for the year 1862.
In that volume is a story of special interest to me, given that I now live in the Bay of Islands.
It is apparently a true story, written by a clergyman who in 1859 was swept out to sea in the bay and stranded on one of its islands for seven months.
He was then found by local Maori (Ngapuhi) whom, our clergyman recounts, he initially faced with some trepidation, not knowing whether they were to rescue him or eat him. They did neither, electing rather to leave him on his island prison—their boat being already overloaded with “wives, slaves and children”. They did however promise to send back a larger rescue boat on their return to the mainland. And that duly happened.
The story, whilst interesting, is of no great significance in New Zealand’s history; the country’s maritime antiquity is replete with such strandings and larger and more tragic shipwrecks. But that very anonymity is perhaps where the most intrinsic interest lays—nobody else as far as I know except me, and now you, know of the story of the marooned, lonely and despairing clergyman and “his” island. Yet the account, if true, is so full of direction and description that it may be possible for someone with a greater knowledge of the Bay of Islands than mine to be able to pinpoint and identify the island.
Such identification will add little to the sum store of our communal knowledge. But, who cares? In these days of incessancy rather than interest—Kim Dotcom, Len Brown, budget blowouts, et al—can the location of New Zealand’s very own Robinson Crusoe’s island home be any less interest?
I won’t bore you with those descriptions here, but I am happy to extract and send them to anyone interested, and particularly anyone with the interest and knowledge to identify the island.