In July and August 1914, Frederick Lewis travelled through eastern Uva and southern Panama Pattu in what is now Sri Lanka. Among his observations of settlements, ruins and woodland, he recorded a disturbing tradition about small, upright beings called Nittawo. An informant said his grandfather had helped drive them from their shelters. Other people, questioned elsewhere, supplied similar accounts. Lewis had encountered a shared story; whether that story preserved an actual population was a different question.
Map location: Approximate area: Siyambalanduwa reference for Lewis’s eastern-Uva interview route. The Lenama tradition lies farther east; this is not a legendary settlement, cave or creature sighting, and does not represent every interview location. Geographical coordinate source.
Nittaewo, Nittaweo and Nittawo are spellings associated with this tradition. This case centres on Lewis’s own inquiry and its appearance in two early journal papers. They preserve the names of an informant, the circumstances of follow-up questioning and an explicit disagreement within Lewis’s own presentation: his first account withheld an opinion, while his 1915 treatment argued for taking the testimony seriously. Neither reported that he had seen one of the alleged beings.
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An inquiry within a journey
Lewis’s “Notes on an Exploration in Eastern Uva, and Southern Panama Pattu”, in the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society’s journal, places the journey in 1914. It describes a large tract south of the Heda Oya, extending towards the Kumbukkan River and the island’s southeastern country. The Nittawo passages occur near the end, on printed pages 288–290, among discussions of local inhabitants and archaeological remains. They are not a report of a captured specimen or an excavated skeleton.
Lewis said he first heard the name from Mr Codrington of the Ceylon Civil Service. A headman near Siyambala Anduwa subsequently recalled his father speaking of dangerous, short people in the Lenama country near Mandagala. That man could add little. The important point in the sequence is that Lewis already knew the subject before his more detailed questioning: he was pursuing a tradition he had heard, rather than independently encountering an unfamiliar animal.
Dissan Hamy’s inherited account
The principal named informant was Dissan Hamy. Asked about Nittawo, he attributed his knowledge to his grandfather’s generation. He described beings roughly three feet tall, walking upright without tails, with hairy legs, short arms and powerful hands. They supposedly travelled in groups, sheltered in caves, hollow trees or rock crevices, and hunted small animals. Lewis’s first paper gives groups of ten or twenty or more; the later paper enlarges that range to ten to forty. These are descriptions transmitted through an interview, not measurements taken from bodies.
The account also supplied behaviour that made the beings seem both human and threatening. Females were said to be shorter than males. Their speech was likened to birdsong, although some Vedda people supposedly understood it. They were represented as unarmed and afraid of dogs, bows and buffalo. Long, strong fingernails became a conspicuous feature of the description. Lewis recorded allegations that they attacked people as well as animals; those allegations belong to the story he collected, not to independently investigated offences.
Dissan Hamy said his grandfather had participated in driving out a group. The tradition culminated in people being burned out of shelters or caves. No named victim, contemporary death record or precisely identified burial site accompanied the account. It is therefore inappropriate to turn this passage into a verified massacre with a fixed date, or to use it as a factual accusation against a living Indigenous community. The source establishes that Lewis recorded the allegation and its stated family connection.
What the follow-up questioning tested
About ten days later, according to the first paper, Lewis questioned an elderly inhabitant of Waradeniyawa, to the west of the Lenama country. Dissan Hamy was absent. The man pointed eastwards and related a similar history, again placing it in his grandfather’s time. Lewis then obtained another account from the Korala of Buttala Weddi Rata, who placed the beings in Deyane Kelle and spoke of approximately four generations earlier.
Lewis considered the agreement striking because the people had been questioned at separate places without knowing what the others had just told him. That procedure reduced the possibility of one interviewee simply copying the preceding interview during Lewis’s visit. It did not demonstrate that their stories had developed independently over previous decades. A regional oral tradition could circulate between settlements and generations. Nor did a grandfather’s reported participation make the grandson an eyewitness.
On printed page 290, Lewis explicitly declined to express an opinion beyond noting the agreement. His report offered no recovered remains, artefacts securely associated with Nittawo, or observation of a living individual. The interviews were the evidence. Their historical value lies partly in the detail with which he recorded who was speaking and how he followed the story, while their biological implications remain unestablished.
A stronger interpretation in 1915
Lewis returned to the subject in “Notes on Animal and Plant Life in the Vedda Country”, published in the October 1915 part of Spolia Zeylanica, volume X. Printed pages 128–129 again describe Dissan Hamy, the questioning at Waradeniyawa and a further headman’s account. This is another presentation of the same inquiry, not an additional set of independent sightings. The paper’s later reference to his Royal Asiatic Society presentation on 19 September 1914 helps connect the two treatments.
Here Lewis was more affirmative. He explained his initial scepticism and argued that agreement between separately questioned people gave him no sound reason to disbelieve them. Yet the same passage acknowledged the absence of tangible evidence. His confidence was an assessment of testimony, not the announcement of a physical discovery. Reading only the 1915 conclusion, or only the earlier refusal to judge, loses that distinction between the documents.
The dating also remains approximate. The accounts refer variously to a grandfather’s lifetime and three or four generations. Those expressions do not supply a securely dated last encounter or extinction year. Converting them into an exact eighteenth-century event would add a precision the original testimony does not contain. Lewis’s papers also use colonial classifications and assumptions about human communities; those assumptions are not adopted here as scientific findings.
The later legend and the remaining question
Sri Lanka Tourism’s modern account presents Nittaewo as an enduring mystery and traces earlier reporting to Hugh Nevill in 1886. It also surveys later attempts to connect the tradition with prehistoric human relatives. This shows the story’s continued public circulation. A proposed resemblance to an ancient hominin, however, does not identify the beings described to Lewis. Nevill’s original February 1886 article has not been independently collated for this case, and its details are not treated as a separate verified witness account.
The strongest conclusion available from the two Lewis papers is specific: in 1914, he collected a detailed regional tradition and deliberately checked it with additional informants. The unresolved question concerns what that tradition represents. The papers preserve testimony about a remembered other population, but do not establish its anatomy, species or historical destruction. The alleged caves are not precisely located in the sources examined, so this case carries no incident pin. Its landscape photograph supplies regional context rather than purported evidence of the beings.
Sources and related reading
The first Lewis report was checked against the original scanned journal, especially printed pages 276 and 288–290. For the second, the geographical introduction and discussion through page 130 were read, with the critical conclusion checked on the scanned page; the full natural-history article extends beyond those sections. The Noolaham catalogue identifies the October 1915 part within its bound-volume record labelled 1919. The later tourism overview is used for the modern retelling, not as proof of an extinct population.
For another case in which an expedition’s documented work needs to be distinguished from claims about an unknown creature, see the Nepal yeti expedition of 1960–61. Browse related subjects through Other Mysteries and the worldwide Case Files.