STRANGE STORY

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIII, 3 July 1929, Page 6

STRANGE STORY

EARLY TARANAKI GIRL ABDUCTED BY MAORIS (By Telegraph—Special to "The Mail") NEW PLYMOUTH, This Day. A strange story of the early history of Taranaki has come to light with the discovery, after more than 50 years, of a white woman who mysteriously disappeared from Lepperton as a young girl in 1874. Caroline Perrett has now been discovered as the wife of a prosperous native farmer in Taneatua. It was believed at the time that the girl was stolen by Maoris to avenge an affront by her father. Perrett with his wife took up a block of land in Lepperton after the Maori wars. Like most of the early pioneers he had to leave his wife and family on. the holding while lie sought employment elsewhere. During the. construction of the railway from New Plymouth to Inglewood through the Lepperton district it was necessary to remove the bodies of Maoris killed in the war and buried in the line of the railway track. Perrett accomplished this task, in spite of warnings from Maoris that harm would befall him if the graves were desecrated. One morning in the late summer of 1874, while Perrett was away on more railway construction work, his daughter Caroline disappeared from the Lepperton homestead in such a manner as to suggest that the Maoris had avenged the father's affront. Some 150 searchers failed to trace the stolen girl. Recently Caroline's .niece, familiar with the story of her lost aunt, saw a white woman with Maoris. at Taneatua and was struck by the family likeness.' She identified Caroline by fireburn marks on the neck. Her sister visited Taneatua, confirming this and learning that the Maoris had taken Caroline in an open canoe across the sea to the gumfields n,ear Whangarei', where she married a Maori chief and had two children. On his death she remarried and had been living for 40 years at Taneatua, where her nusband is a prosperous Maori farmer. Of several children by him three are alive. Caroline remembers little of her early life at Lepperton, but was particularly anxious to secure her birth certificate so as to prove her identity. The certificate was procured by her s'ister from the registrar at New Plymouth last week. It shows she was born on 10th September, 1866. '