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‘Monkey see, monkey do.”
The phrase echoed in the 4-year-old girl’s mind as she watched the agile capuchin monkeys swing in the canopy above her in the dense Colombian jungle.
She was hungry. It had been days since she was abandoned by her kidnappers. To pass the time, she watched the monkeys, taking note of the fruits they liked and the ones they avoided, while the animals ignored the strange new creature below.
They liked tamarinds, so she picked one up off the ground. But when she bit into it, she realized it was a poisonous impostor.
As she began to heave, a larger monkey, one she believed to be the leader, approached her, squeezed her arm, and pushed her in the direction of a stream. He then shoved her head into the water.
“Was he going to try to take advantage of my weakened state and try to drown me?” the child despaired.
Instead, the monkey yanked her face to his own and stared in her eyes. “In that instant, I trusted him,” Marina Chapman recalls. “He now felt like my protector and friend.”
She drank the swampy water, which helped her vomit up the fruit. The monkey saved her life. She was officially one of them.
It’s a story too amazing to be believed — a British woman who claims she survived the treacherous Colombian jungle as a child for five years with the help of a band of 22-inch-tall primates.
Yet in Chapman’s new memoir, “The Girl With No Name” (Pegasus), she claims it’s true: She was raised by monkeys.
Now a housewife in her 60s, Chapman says her daughter, a composer, persuaded her to tell the story of a real-life “Jungle Book.”
Many of the early details remain murky. Chapman can’t remember her birth name (she later chose “Marina,” and Chapman is her married name), her birthday or the town in which she was born.
But she does recall the day she was kidnapped.
Chapman was playing in her family’s vegetable garden when a man grabbed her and smothered her face with a rag she would later assume was dipped in chloroform. Such kidnappings were common in the era of La Violencia, a precursor to the civil war that continues in Colombia to this day.
She believes the kidnapping was interrupted somehow, which is how she awoke from her drugged state alone in the jungle.
She cried out for her mother as she walked deeper and deeper into the dark tropical forest. By the second night, hungry and tired, she came upon a group of small, brown monkeys, ranging in size from large parrots to lap dogs. They surrounded her.
“Motionless and afraid again, I tried to count them. Now I was nearly 5, I could count up to 10, and it seemed there were lots more than that,” she writes in the book. “But as I watched them, and they watched me, I felt my fear ebb a little. They looked like a family.”
The largest of the bunch approached her. She instinctively curled up in a ball, making herself appear as small and unthreatening as possible. The monkey reached out and gave her a quick shove, knocking her to the ground before returning to the safety of the group. One by one, the other monkeys pushed and grabbed at her, seeming to test her reaction. They chattered on, as if “goading” her and “laughing.”
Once certain the little girl was no threat, the monkeys returned to their business — scaling trees, jumping from branch to branch, eating and playing. They ignored Chapman, who was transfixed, even soothed.
She noticed the older monkeys seemed to disciplining the younger, more rambunctious ones. “That was just what the grown-ups in my world would do, and somehow this sense of order and family made me feel better,” she writes.
She mimicked how the monkeys foraged for food, enabling her to eat for the first time in two days. They ate lizards (which she did not try), bananas (which she loved) and bugs (which she tried but hated). Whatever they avoided, she avoided.
One monkey “taught” her how to break open nuts. She would hand him a Brazil nut and watch how he would crack it with a rock and a branch.
The sounds of the monkeys calling to one another made her feel “safer” when she set up camp for the night on the ground below. But she wanted to join in. She started by learning their warning screeches and then more subtle calls and responses, like whoops for joy or yelping when hurt.
“All shades of emotion seemed to exist here: humility and pride, surrender and protection, jealousy and celebration, anger and happiness,” she writes.
Over time, Chapman shed all evidence of her past self, discarding her clothes and human habits.
“I was growing a new, muscular body, strong in ways a child’s body normally isn’t. I had harder heels and palms, and an appetite for strange jungle foods. I was also beginning to move around like a monkey, and one of the reasons, perhaps, that I wasn’t aware of how I was growing was that I almost always walked on all fours now,” she writes.
She felt a true connection when she finally was able to climb all the way up, 100 or more feet, to the jungle canopy.
She had favorite monkeys. Each had its own unique personality. There was Rudy, who was hyperactive and playful; Romeo, a gentle and kind peacemaker; and Mia, her “closest” friend who would often climb on Chapman’s shoulders and shower her with licks, a “sign of true love.”
They groomed one another, she writes. And her monkey friends “like nothing better than to laugh.” Primate parents even teach their kids “discipline and respect.”
Anthropomorphizing to the extreme? Yes. But Chapman’s story has some scientific basis. Capuchin monkeys are known to be clever, easy to train and highly social. One recent study even showed they have a sophisticated sense of social fairness.
In parts of the world, capuchins are kept as pets, and they can aid disabled people, much like Seeing Eye dogs.
And Chapman’s story is not without precedence, experts say. There are about 100 documented cases of feral children raised by animals.
Among them is John Ssebunya, who fled into the Ugandan jungle as a toddler after watching his father kill his mother. There, he lived with a group of vervet monkeys for two years. He has since assimilated back into human culture, and sings with a child choir called The Pearls of Africa.
“There are lots of stories of such things, but I don’t think there is a single completely proven case,” said Michael Newton, author of “Savage Boys and Wild Girls: A History of Feral Children.”
“However, there is nothing intrinsically improbable about a feral child happening. There are other cases of interspecies nurturing, so why not?”
In fact, humans were far less nurturing toward Chapman than monkeys were.
One day in the jungle, after being there for an indeterminate amount of time, though likely after more than a year there, Chapman spied a dark-haired woman running through the trees. Following her, she came upon a remote village filled with people. The scene enchanted her, and she returned daily to gawk at the spectacle. Eventually, she decided to show herself.
But the reaction was not what she anticipated. An angry man shooed her away, threatening her life by drawing a finger across his throat with a symbolic finger swipe to the throat, ushering her back into the jungle, where she would remain for several more years.
This would not be her last run-in with hostile humans. On several occasions, she encountered hunters carrying machetes and guns, ripping through the area trying to capture monkeys. She was filled with a “murderous rage” when she saw one hunter separate a monkey mother from her child, she writes.
From this moment on, she “ceased to even see humans as my own species.” The older she grew “the more I felt the love of my monkey family and learned to cherish them all as individuals.”
That is, until the fateful day she saw a female hunter flanked by a man with a machete. It was then she felt the urge to reveal herself, and before she knew it, she was linking hands with this strange woman. It was the first human touch she felt in five years.
Sadly, her transition to the human world was not a happy one.
The hunters sold her to a brothel in Cucata, a city in northeast Colombia, in exchange for cash and a bright green parrot.
“I would never trust a human again,” she writes.
Her assimilation was fraught from the beginning: She could not speak any language and insisted on walking on all fours. Doorknobs confused her. Simply Learning to eat and sit patiently at a table was nearly impossible. The toilets she was forced to use seemed like a cruel joke. When she didn’t comply she was beaten or burned with a lit cigar by the madam of the house.
She heard “Estupido! Estupido!” and for a brief time thought this epithet it was her name.
“I so missed the monkeys,” she writes, “missed the physical closeness of being with them. I missed their silky fur, missed their gentle touch, missed their warmth and cuddles.”
After several months of this abuse — and the impending threat of being used as a prostitute — Chapman fled the brothel and spent the next three years of her life on the streets of Cucata with hordes of other homeless kids. She began stealing and joined a street gang.
Finally, she met Maruja Eusse, who often saw her climbing trees and took her into their home, embracing her as one her own. It was under Maruja’s care that, at around age 14, she chose her own name: Luz Marina.
“I loved ‘Luz’; loved the concept of finding the light after so many years of darkness,” she writes, adding she chose “Marina” “I chose it because I just loved the sound of it. It was a name that for some reason felt connected to me.”
Maruja arranged for Chapman to be baptized as part of her family and later helped Chapman escape Cucata, sending her to her daughter’s home in Bogotá.
This is where Chapman’s book ends, but after word of the memoir and a planned documentary surfaced, the rest of the story, or how a monkey girl turned into a British housewife, has been explored by British media.
According to the Telegraph, after 10 years in Bogotá, Chapman moved in with a the Eusse family to the United Kingdom, where she worked as a nanny and a cook. The family, though Catholic, attended the Abundant Life church, a Christian Renewal congregation in Yorkshire. There, she met her future husband, John Chapman, a 28-year-old church organist and bacteriologist. In 1979, they wed. Marina Chapman did not share her jungle life with her husband until after they were married, reports say.
The next year, the couple had their first daughter, Joanna. Three years later, Vanessa, who would later urge her mother to write her book, was born.
The seemingly normal family lived in a sleepy suburban town. Neighbors had no idea they were living next door to a female version of Tarzan, but her daughters always knew their mom was unusual.
Chapman didn’t read but supplied exotic and exciting tales of the jungle from her own imagination (or experience) at for their bedtime stories. Their mom — “wild and spontaneous” — would often teach them how to scale trees and catch wild animals with their bare hands. Often, the family would sit for hours grooming one another (which was particularly useful when the sisters got a terrible case of lice, Vanessa writes in the book’s preface).
“Mum sees the value in everything — for the breath in our lungs, for a new day and for the greatest joy in her life, of being a mother, grandmother, wife and a friend,” Vanessa writes. “She has always been our own ‘monkey mummy.’ ”
scahalan@nypost.com