Drama of Long Ago Cleared Up

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 705, 3 July 1929, Page 16

Drama of Long Ago Cleared Up

LIFE WITH MAORIS LOST GIRL FOUND _ Truth, always stranger than fiction, has furnished a remarkable story of the dramatic chance recognition of a woman who disappeared as a little girl 55 years ago. Caroline was a daughter of William Perret, who, immediately following the Maori wars, took up a block of land in Lepperton in the early 70’s. The construction of the railway passing through Lepperton, on which Mr. Perrett was engaged, involved the removal of remains of Maoris killed during the wars. The bodies were moved in face of reported warnings to Mr. Perrett by the natives against the desecration of the graves. It was on a summer morning in 1874 that Caroline, then eight years old, was spirited away, while her father was at work. Her parents were firmly convinced the Maoris had kidnapped the child for the insult offered their dead. The bush and creeks were searched for a fortnight without result. This drama of long ago has an unexpected epilogue at Taneatua, where the missing girl, now a fullgrown woman and the wife of a prosperous Maori, has been discovered.

Noticing a white woman strikingly like her mother, with Maoris, Mrs. F. J. Haywood spoke to the pakeha wahine. In perfect English the woman replied that she had been with the Maoris all her life. She could not remember how she came among them or where she came from. The white woman’s identity as the lost Caroline Perrett was practically established to Mrs. Haywood’s satisfaction when she displayed a scar on her neck, inflicted by a burn years ago. The woman dimly recollected being taken by Maoris across the sea in an open canoe and landing at some Whangarei gumfields. There she grew to womanhood and married a Maori chief, to whom she had two children. On the death of her husband she married again, and has lived for the last thirty years in the Taneatua district. She has three surviving children of the second marriage.