LOST FOR TWENTY-NINE YEARS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21600, 22 March 1932, Page 6

LOST FOR TWENTY-NINE YEARS

“WHITE CHIEF" IN JUNGLE

DARKEST AFRICA ROMANCE,

The story of a real-life romance and adventure, rivalling the most ambitious fiction of the late Sir Rider Haggard, has been carried by a small buff official envelope into the humble home in Duisberg, Germany, of an aged German railway pensioner and his wife. The letter came from the British Commissioner of a Gold Coast district. It told the astonished old couple that their son, Wilhelm Knoog, whom they had not heard of since 29 years ago, when he was reported lost in a shipwreck off the Gold Coast, had just died in Africa. . Old Herr Knoog read the letter with difficulty, for his eyes are weak, and the German of the district commissioner was little better. He was, however, able to make out that when he was shipwrecked Wilhelm was cast up on shore and wandered aimlessly inland. Wilhelm worked his way through the jungle into the centre of darkest Africa. There he fell in with a negro tribe called the Mutasari. A few years ago a British expedition found him there, ruling over the negroes, and known as " The White Prince.” The “White Prince” had forgotten all his German and the little bit of sailors English he had picked up, but in the difficult African language of his tribe he told the Englishmen, through an interpreter. how, many years ago, he had married the daughter of the Mutasari chief, and on the chief’s death had succeeded him. . The Englishmen invited the German sailor to return with them to civilisation. Knoog refused, saying he was happier where he was. The final chapter of the romance tells how negro runners—obeying the last command of their “ White Prince " —conveyed the news of Wilhelm Knoog’s death to the nearest British official, so that it might be forwarded to his relatives in far-off Germany.