In 1920 while I was in Panama an old and experienced American prospector, Shea by name, came to me with a strange story. He had just returned from a trip to southeastern Darien. With another American he had ascended the Sambu River which enters the sea on the southern shore of San Miguel Bay. The country here was, and still is, wholly unknown. Even the mountain range back from the coast did not appear on the maps. Shea and his companion worked their way with great difficulty to the headwaters of the Sambu and there they became separated. The other American has not been heard from since.
When Shea lost his companion, he lost his canoe and most of his equipment. So instead of attempting to return down the Sambu, he decided to force his way to the Pacific across the Andean Range to the west. He reached the divide in a state of exhaustion and by a stroke of luck stumbled on an old Indian dugout abandoned on the bank of a small river running into Pinas Bay. It was nearly dark, so he camped for the night at a considerable altitude not far from the divide.
All that night he heard the footsteps of a large animal in the jungle above his camp. And when dawn came, he heard a curious chattering sound. He looked up and saw standing on top of the bank an animal which appeared to his unscientific mind to be a cross between a negro and a gigantic ape. It was six feet tall, walked erect, weighed possibly three hundred pounds and was covered with long black hair. It was glaring down at him and chattering its teeth in rage.
Shea whipped out his revolver and shot it through the head. It tumbled down the bank and lay still beside his canoe. When Shea recovered from his fright he measured the animal crudely. It was heavily built like a gorilla, but the big toes on the feet were parallel with the other toes, as in a human being, not opposed like thumbs, as in all other monkeys and great apes.
Unfortunately Shea was too exhausted to bring any part of the animal back to civilization. He barely managed to get down to Pinas Bay on the Pacific and attract the attention of a coaster which took him to Panama more dead than alive. I saw him many times after that in the hospital where he eventually died of chronic malaria. Almost his last words were a solemn oath that the story of the 'man-beast' was true.
Of course, my first reaction to this story was extreme skepticism. But I found to my surprise that many trustworthy men who had penetrated into the little-known parts of tropical America did not share my disbelief. The 'man-beast' is reported to have been seen in many locations. A Spanish gold-hunting expedition in the seventeenth century reported that it had shot fourteen of them not far from this same Pinas Bay. The Indians from Equador to Nicaragua assert that the creatures inhabit isolated jungle-covered mountains, as do the gorillas in Africa. Nothing will persuade an Indian to spend the night on such a peak.
When I returned to Washington and mentioned the matter to Dr. Hough of the Smithsonian, I did not get the pitying smile I was expecting. On the contrary he said he had been getting reports of this sort for twenty years and was inclined to believe there was something in them. Dr. Anthony of the New York Museum of Natural History has a story to tell of encountering a large unknown animal near the summit of Mt. Tacarcuna on the Columbian border. A Frenchman claims to have shot one in Equador.
[Source: White Indians of Darien by Richard Oglesby Marsh. Pub. Putnam's,1934]
