Friday, October 3, 2014

TARZANA OF THE APES

It is an amazing – some might say unbelievable – tale: how a Yorkshire housewife spent five years as a young child being raised by monkeys in the Colombian jungle. 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.

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. Here, she recalls the moment her young life was torn apart, and the ‘human’ kindness of the apes who saved her . . .
Wild child: Marina Chapman at home in Bolton Abbey, North Yorkshire, in 2009, climbing onto a tree-trunk hole, similar to those in which she would find a bed during her time in the jungle
Wild child: Marina Chapman at home in Bolton Abbey, North Yorkshire, in 2009, climbing onto a tree-trunk hole, similar to those in which she would find a bed during her time in the jungle
Playing on the vegetable patch at the end of our garden at my home in Colombia, I was in my own  special place, my little world where I loved to spend my days. It was 1954, or at least I now think it was. Lost in my activity, I was oblivious to others and everything happened so quickly that fateful day.

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