Marina Chapman, who says she was abducted and abandoned in a Colombian rainforest as a child, has revealed what she ate to survive years alone before being raised by a troop of capuchin monkeys. In a new interview, she described drinking water from puddles and eating seeds and scraps left behind by the monkeys.
Abducted and left in the jungle
Ms Chapman said she was just four years old when she was taken from her village by trafficking gangs and abandoned deep within the rainforest. She spent the following five years being raised by monkeys. Now in her mid-70s, she remembers waking up in the rainforest and discovering a group of capuchin monkeys staring at her.
At first, the animals kept their distance, but they gradually became more comfortable around her. She said the monkeys eventually began climbing onto her shoulders and playing with her hair, providing companionship during what was otherwise an incredibly lonely period of her childhood.
Comfort from the monkeys
She told OMG Stories Up Close in a new interview: “That was a great comfort for me because I was feeling very isolated after so many months or days. I felt very solitary and for this animal to climb over my shoulders and stay there playing with my hair. That was really comforting for me when I was waiting for people to come for me. Nobody turned up.”
Ms Chapman explained what she ate to survive. She said she survived by drinking plenty of water and eating seeds and scraps left behind by the monkeys. In one of the most memorable sections of her autobiography, she also describes how she got terrible food poisoning from tamarind and believed she was going to die.
A life-changing encounter
Recalling the moment, she told OMG Stories Up Close: "I was just looking at this old monkey and I was really crying out and I was feeling very desperate. So he just walked towards me and he grabbed me forcefully and he pulled me into the water straight. It was a puddle of water, it wasn't very deep. He put me there and he held me and I was just trying to push back.
"I drank so much water and I was quite sick after until I looked at his face. He was staring at me. I realised something about his eyes, he didn't want to kill me. I just thought there was something special about when I looked at his eyes. I felt he was a good monkey. He didn't want to kill. But I felt better in my stomach after a while."
Feeling part of the troop
She gradually befriended the black and white capuchin primate monkeys. When asked about whether they felt like family to her, she said: “I felt like I was part of them because of the hands. They behave like a human.
“I was shocked when I found a piece of mirror. It was a shock of my life because I didn’t realise about my face. It was the first time I saw my face. For me, I just thought, I am not like a monkey. I felt like I was related to them. I was beginning to feel a little bit confused. I don’t think I speak any language. I think I forgot my own language because I began to recognise the noises.”
Rescue and later life
After several years spent in the rainforest, hunters rescued her but by this point she had no human language. According to Ms Chapman, she was later sold to a brothel, then lived on the streets, before becoming a slave of a mafia family. A neighbour, Maruja, rescued her, Ms Chapman said. Maruja's daughter, Maria, adopted Ms Chapman when she was about 14 years old, and Maruja sent her to Bogota to live with one of her daughters.
Her extraordinary story later attracted the attention of National Geographic, which created the documentary Woman Raised by Monkeys. The programme premiered on December 12, 2013. Ms Chapman also shared her life story in her autobiography, The Girl With No Name, which was published by Mainstream Publishing in 2013.
This family had connections to Bradford through the textile industry. The family sent their children to Bradford in 1977 and sent Ms Chapman to be a nanny, where she has now been living for several decades and has a family of her own.
