Orang Pendek

Orang pendek means "short person" in Indonesian: a ground-dwelling, bipedal primate, roughly 80 to 150 cm tall, covered in dark hair with a mane down its back, reported from the mountain forests of Kerinci Seblat in west-central Sumatra. Dutch naturalists began publishing accounts of it in 1917 and 1918, and the file has been open ever since. It is also the only cryptid with a serious, long-running field programme behind it: from 1989 the writer Debbie Martyr and the photographer Jeremy Holden spent some fifteen years looking for it with Fauna & Flora International, using interviews and camera traps. They never photographed it. What they did produce was published tapir and tiger science, and Martyr went on to lead the Kerinci tiger protection programme in the same park. Sceptics have had a concrete answer since 1924, when the zoologist K. W. Dammerman matched a footprint cast to the Malayan sun bear and traced the legend's backward-facing feet to the bear's inturned tracks. The man usually credited with launching the story, the colonial official L. C. Westenenk, ended up agreeing with him.

Two Dutch naturalists put the orang pendek into print within a year of each other, and neither of them was hunting a monster. The first was Edward Jacobson, a settler with a serious interest in natural history. In 1917 he published a note in De Tropische Natuur — the monthly of the Netherlands Indies natural history society, printed at Weltevreden — describing what two men he employed as specimen collectors had told him. Camped at the foot of Boekit Kaba near the Soban Ajam plantation on 10 July 1916, they had watched a black animal about twenty yards off, turning over a rotten stump for larvae; when it realised it had been seen it ran away along the ground, on two legs. Jacobson's argument was zoological rather than sensational: an orang-utan would have escaped through the branches. He had already, on 21 August 1915, been shown footprints on a stream bank near the Danau Bento swamp by his guide Mat Getoep — about five inches long, like a small human foot but broader and shorter. The second was L. C. Westenenk, and here the record needs correcting. English-language accounts, this site's own included, have called him the Dutch colonial governor of Sumatra's West Coast. He was not. When "Orang Pandak (Boschmenschen) of Soematra" appeared in volume 7 of De Tropische Natuur in 1918, Westenenk was Resident of Benkoelen — precisely the district where orang pendek is the local term. The Algemeen Handelsblad of 28 May 1915 announced that appointment and described him as, until then, "assistant-resident at the disposal of the Governor of Sumatra's West Coast". He served under that governor; he was not him. He did become a governor — of Sumatra's East Coast, at Medan — but only from February 1921, three years after the article. Westenenk's piece, which Bernard Heuvelmans translated at length in 1958, is worth reading for what it does not do. He had spent years being entertained by Minangkabau forest stories: the orang boenian or cave spirits, the river-babies, and the si bigau, gnomes whose toes point backwards and who herd wild pigs. He filed the little wild men alongside them, creatures you kept sweet by leaving a handful of tobacco outside your camp. What changed his mind was paperwork. Around 1910 a young overseer from Padang, staking a leasehold boundary in the Barisan mountains near Loeboek Salasik, saw a hairy, short-legged thing cross his path fifteen yards away, stare at his party and walk off unhurried; his coolies fled, he did not, and he wrote the incident down. "His little note is in my possession," Westenenk says. To it he added the account of Mr Oostingh, manager of the Dataran coffee estate, lost in the forest between the Aier Kembang and Aier Roeso late in 1917, who took a squatting figure for a man until it stood up, and who insisted it was neither an orang-utan — he had just seen one at Amsterdam Zoo — nor a siamang, because its hair was short. The most detailed sighting on file belongs to a timber prospector named van Herwaarden, and it is dated: October 1923, on Poeloe Rimau in Palembang. He climbed a tree towards a hairy animal, described its face, ears, teeth and hands over several paragraphs, raised his gun twice and twice could not fire — "I suddenly felt that I was going to commit murder." He published in De Tropische Natuur in 1924. Six years earlier he had dismissed the whole business precisely because Malay traders told him the creature had one eye in its forehead, climbed like a gecko, turned into a tiger and walked with its heels forwards. Alongside the sightings ran a small archive of feet. Jacobson's 1915 tracing; a drawing from Lambermon of the Kaba Wetan coffee estate, found on the slopes of Boekit Kaba in 1918; prints brought in by the Indonesian surveyors Mohamad Saleh and Raden Kasanredjo; the collection assembled from 1920 by Captain R. Maier of the topographical service at Benkoelen, who published it in De Tropische Natuur in 1923. In 1924 an actual cast reached the Zoological Museum at Buitenzorg from the Aer Teman estate near Moeara Bliti, lifted with molten paraffin wax by the administrator P. van Kan, whose coolies had started carrying spears to work. The museum's curator, K. W. Dammerman, examined it and said sun bear. Then the modern chapter, which is the part usually left out. In July 1989 a British travel writer named Debbie Martyr was camped on Mount Kerinci when her guide Jamruddin mentioned, in passing, that the creature was still seen east of Gunung Tujuh — and that he had seen it twice. She stayed. In September 1990, four months into the work, she had her own sighting: "an animal that didn't look like anything in any of the books I had read", small, gracile, immensely strong, moving bipedally. With the photographer Jeremy Holden she began a search that ran for some fifteen years under Fauna & Flora International, built on interviews and camera traps. The cameras never produced an orang pendek. They produced something else. In 2003 Holden, Achmad Yanuar and Martyr published three years of photo-trapping in Oryx, showing the Asian tapir to be widespread across Kerinci Seblat in every forest type from montane cloud forest to lowland fragments, and — against the textbooks — often paired. In the same issue Martyr and Holden appear as co-authors with Matthew Linkie on the paper that mapped tigers across the park and measured what the Tiger Protection and Conservation Units were confiscating. Martyr stayed on that side of the work. By 2010 Fauna & Flora International was quoting her on its own website as "FFI Team Leader of Kerinci Tiger Project", reporting that tiger encounter records park-wide had stabilised since 2007 and were rising. Her name has since appeared on tiger and conservation papers in Journal of Applied Ecology, PLOS ONE and Nature Communications. The search for an animal nobody has photographed turned into the protection of one everybody can. A word about the name, because it is routinely got wrong. Orang pendek is plain Malay/Indonesian for "short person", and it is a trade-language label, not the name the people of the mountains use. Heuvelmans, following the Dutch sources, noted that orang pendek was the local term only in the north of Benkoelen and the south of Palembang; elsewhere the animal was sedapa, atoe rimbo, sedabo, ijaoe or goegoeh, and in the Rokan district in 1932 the inhabitants had never heard of pendek at all and called what they saw orang letjo, "gibbering man". Calling all of this "Malay folklore" flattens it. Kerinci, where the modern reports come from, has its own language — Glottolog lists Kerinci as a distinct spoken language, ISO 639-3 kvr, classified as threatened — and the Kerinci-language form of the name is widely given online as uhang pandak. We have kept that last point out of the body of this file: we could not confirm it in any published source we were able to read, and a name is exactly the kind of detail that should not be asserted on the strength of repetition.

There is nothing to visit that has an orang pendek in it, and no responsible operator will tell you otherwise. What exists is the forest, and the forest is worth the trip on its own terms. Kerinci Seblat National Park lies along the Bukit Barisan range in west-central Sumatra, spanning parts of Jambi, West Sumatra, Bengkulu and South Sumatra. Since 2004 it has been one of the three national parks — with Gunung Leuser and Bukit Barisan Selatan — that make up the UNESCO World Heritage property Tropical Rainforest Heritage of Sumatra, 2,595,124 hectares in total, inscribed under natural criteria (vii), (ix) and (x). Inside the Kerinci block are Gunung Kerinci, at 3,805 m the highest volcano in Indonesia, and Lake Gunung Tujuh, the highest lake in Southeast Asia. UNESCO's own summary lists the Sumatran tiger, rhino, elephant and Malayan sun bear among the key mammals; it does not place the Sumatran orang-utan here. Two things a visitor should know before booking. First, the property has been on the List of World Heritage in Danger continuously since 2011 — this is a working conservation emergency, not a theme park, and encroachment, poaching and road-building are the reasons. Second, this is genuine tiger habitat: Fauna & Flora International put around 150 Sumatran tigers in and around the park, the largest known population of the subspecies, patrolled by Tiger Protection and Conservation Units. Go with the park authority's knowledge and with local guides, on marked routes. The usual approach is by air to Padang and overland to the Kerinci valley, with Kersik Tuo the standard base for Gunung Kerinci and Sungai Penuh the main town. Access to the park requires a permit from the Indonesian park authority (Balai Besar Taman Nasional Kerinci Seblat), and Gunung Kerinci is an active volcano whose status can close the summit route at short notice. We have deliberately not printed permit fees, office hours or trail conditions here: we could not verify current figures from the park authority's own publications while preparing this file, and stale numbers on a page like this do more harm than none at all. Check with the park office and the volcano observatory before you travel.