During the First World War, the station was used as an internment camp whose most famous prisoner was Count Felix von Luckner and his crew of the commerce raider "SMS Seeadler". Captured in September 1917, in December Luckner used a Christmas play as a ruse to organise an escape. He got provisions and seized the island's launch, a scow. Then sailing to the Kermadec Islands he was recaptured (and escaped again), though not before becoming something of an odd type of hero in the eyes of many New Zealanders, for the fact that his numerous and daring wartime escapades had killed only a single person.