IT IS an amazing - some might say unbelievable -
tale: how a housewife from Yorkshire, England, spent five years as a young
child being raised by monkeys in the Colombian jungle.
Jonathan Petre
Mail on Sunday
March 31, 20139:49PM
Yet experts have found no evidence that Marina
Chapman’s story is a fantasy - and now she has told it for the first time, in
riveting detail.
In a new book, exclusively serialised by The Mail on Sunday from
today, Mrs Chapman reveals how a colony of capuchins taught
her how to survive after she was abandoned in the rainforest by kidnappers who
botched her abduction.
She copied the monkeys' eating habits and
high-pitched cries and even learned to climb trees, though she slept in a
hollowed-out tree trunk at night. And on one occasion a monkey she called
Grandpa because of his sprinkles of white fur cured a crippling stomach pain by
leading her to the river and encouraging her to drink until she vomited.
Mrs Chapman's story - which has echoes of the
Tarzan tales - began in the Fifties when she was drugged and abducted from her
Colombian home at the age of four.
In her memoirs, The Girl With No Name, Mrs
Chapman recalls the moment she awoke to find herself in the forest.
"At a distance of several paces were
monkeys staring at me. After a short time, one of the monkeys left the circle
and approached me. Afraid, I shrank back into a ball, trying to make myself as
tiny as possible," she says.
"He reached out a wrinkly brown hand and, with
one firm push, rolled me over on to my side. I quivered on the soil, tensed for
the second blow that was surely coming.
"But it didn't - the monkey had lost interest.
He had now returned to the circle, squatted back on his hind legs and resumed
watching me, along with all the others. Then they all seemed to want to inspect
me."
She said the way they enjoyed each other's company
‘made them feel like a family’ – and although there were nights when she cried
for hours out of loneliness, she also felt happy to be with the monkeys and
realised 'I was gradually turning into one of them'.
She said she was later rescued by hunters and sold
into prostitution before ending up in England Bradford .
She thinks she is in her 50s but cannot be sure of
her birthdate.
Her claims were met with incredulity when they
surfaced last year, but they have withstood scrutiny, and now National
Geographic is planning a documentary about her. Mrs Chapman’s daughter Vanessa,
28, describes her mother as "wild and spontaneous", adding 'She was
sometimes criticised for her style of parenting, but her only example was from
a troop of monkeys."
Experts say monkeys are known to accept young
humans into their fold. In 1991, a six-year-old Ugandan boy, John Ssebunya, was
found in a tree having spent three years in the wild, cared for in part by
vervet monkeys; and a two-year-old boy known as Bello
was found living with chimpanzees in Nigeria
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