Van Herwaarden's Sedapa in the Tree, Poeloe Rimau, Sumatra (1923)

In the forests of southern Sumatra, people spoke of the orang pendek. The name means "short person". In the Palembang region it was also called the sedapa. J. van Herwaarden was a Dutchman in what was then the Dutch East Indies. Sources call him a settler, a colonist, an explorer. By one account, he first heard the local stories in 1916, while prospecting for valuable timber in the state of Palembang.

October 1923. Van Herwaarden was hunting wild pig on Poeloe Rimau. A slight movement in a lone tree drew his attention. He looked closer. A dark and hairy creature was clinging to a branch.

He watched it for some time. Its very dark hair fell to just below the shoulder-blades, or even almost to the waist. The front of its body was hairy too, the colour a little lighter than on the back. Its arms were rather long. Its legs seemed short. It stood about five feet tall, and he took it to be female.

Then the face. "There was nothing repulsive or ugly about its face, nor was it at all apelike." The forehead was high. The eyebrows were very bushy. The eyes were "of the darkest colour, very lively, and like human eyes." Its mouth twitched nervously, and its canines showed clearly from time to time. More developed than a man's, he thought.

He raised his gun. In the translated account, he heard a plaintive "hu-hu", at once answered by similar echoes in the forest nearby. He laid down his gun and climbed the tree. He had almost reached the foot of the bough when the sedapa ran very fast out along the branch. The branch bent heavily. The creature hung on to the end. Then it dropped a good 10 feet to the ground.

Van Herwaarden dashed back down and raised his gun again. He could not fire. Watching the flowing hair of the fleeing animal, he felt he would be a murderer if he killed so human-like a creature.

July 1924. His first-person account appeared in De Tropische Natuur as "Een ontmoeting met een aapmensch". An encounter with an ape-man. By November 1924 the story had reached American readers through the Nevada State Journal. Later that year, K. W. Dammerman of the Buitenzorg Museum published "De orang pandak van Sumatra" in the same journal. He is said to have identified supposed orang pendek footprints as those of a sun bear.

One museum curator, possibly Dammerman, rejected van Herwaarden's account. The writer was "almost too exact in his description of the animal", the curator wrote, and the story might have come from imagination or from the local tales. Bernard Heuvelmans disputed this.

L. C. Westenenk proposed that the orang pendek were very old, large gibbons. Heuvelmans took the idea seriously and cautiously suggested an undiscovered gibbon species. Others point to the orangutan. Yet van Herwaarden insisted the face was not at all apelike, and the hair was very dark. No hoax has been alleged against van Herwaarden himself.

Heuvelmans carried the story into English in On the Track of Unknown Animals. Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark cited it in their encyclopedia. In 2021, Joep Vissers and Debbie Argue published the first full English translation in The Relict Hominoid Inquiry. Later searchers kept looking, among them Debbie Martyr in Kerinci. Nothing has settled the question. Van Herwaarden's description is still regarded as the most detailed eyewitness account of the orang pendek.