J. van Herwaarden's orang pendek (sedapa) encounter at Poeloe Rimau

J. van Herwaarden was a Dutch settler in the Palembang residency of the Dutch East Indies. According to Bernard Heuvelmans, he first heard of the sedapa in 1916, while prospecting for valuable timber. Three local Koeboes told him it "walked upright and stood between 4 feet 11 inches and 5 feet 3 inches high," with "a hairy body, long hair on its head, and unusually long canine teeth." Later he heard that a Malay had found the bodies of two dead sedapas, "a mother and child," near Pangkalan Balai. They were too decomposed to bring back.

October 1923. Van Herwaarden was hunting wild pig at Poeloe Rimau, a forest area surrounded by rivers. It was late afternoon, near dusk. The pigs never appeared. He waited.

Then he "spotted a slight movement in a small tree that stood alone." He walked around it. There was "a dark and hairy creature on a branch, the front of its body pressed tightly against the tree." His conclusion was simple. "It must be a sedapa."

He called to it, but it would not budge. He tried kicking the trunk, "without the least result." So he put down his gun and climbed. "I had hardly climbed 3 or 4 feet into the tree when the body above me began to move." It leaned over the side and trembled all over its body.

"This specimen was of the female sex and about 5 feet high." The very dark hair on its head fell to just below the shoulder blades, perhaps almost to the waist. Its eyes were "of the darkest colour, very lively, and like human eyes." The nose was broad with fairly large nostrils, and the mouth was strikingly wide when open. The canines were "more developed than a man's," and its ear was "exactly like a little human ear."

He raised his gun. The creature gave a plaintive "hu-hu," and he says similar calls answered from the forest. It ran out along a bough that bent heavily and dropped a good 10 feet to the ground, then ran on, whistling. When he saw it again it was almost 30 yards away, and he did not shoot. "I suddenly felt that I was going to commit murder."

He published the story as "Een ontmoeting met een aapmensch," An encounter with an ape-man, in De Tropische Natuur in July 1924. That December, K. W. Dammerman of the Buitenzorg Zoological Museum published "De orang pandak van Sumatra" in the same journal. On 9 November 1924 the Nevada State Journal ran "Reported Find of Missing Link Will Be Probed." Heuvelmans later called it "by far the most exact description of the orang pendek's appearance." Ivan T. Sanderson gave the English text in Abominable Snowmen in 1961.

No one has accused van Herwaarden of a hoax, but one museum curator rejected the account as "too exact." He brought back no photograph, no track and no hair. Some writers point to known apes such as the siamang, and Dale Drinnon compared the features to Negrito populations. Others link the orang pendek to Homo floresiensis, a speculative idea. Other early evidence fared poorly, as a 1924 track cast was identified as a sun bear's and a 1932 carcass proved to be a shaved langur.

The hunt never stopped. From the 1990s Debbie Martyr and Jeremy Holden searched Kerinci Seblat, and expeditions by the Centre for Fortean Zoology brought back a cast and hair samples. A 2014 study attributed that hair to tapir. Brian Dunning took up the creature on Skeptoid in 2007. Yet this account is still widely called the most detailed Western eyewitness description of the orang pendek. One man, one tree, one shot he chose not to take.