Darwa. Darwa was created by Charles A. Logue (Belle Boyd, Hooded Terror, Quentin Locke), and appeared in the film A Scream in the Night (1919). Darwa is a Jungle Hero. Professor Silvio is a Mad Scientist who kidnaps the infant daughter of Senator Newcastle in order to prove that Darwin’s theories were correct. Fifteen years later the girl, Darwa, is a native of the Amazon jungles, and the only human she has ever known is Lotec, an East Indian. Newcastle discovers that his daughter is in the Amazon and sets up a trip to rescue her, but the night before the trip Newcastle disappears. Newcastle’s friend Robert Hunter leads the trip in his place. He finds Darwa in the jungle, swinging through the trees, but Professor Silvo imprisons Darwa in a cage next to a vicious ape. Darwa escapes, Newcastle escapes from imprisonment (Silvio kidnaped him), and Darwa and Hunter marry.
So, you see, there were female Tarzan characters long before Sheena and the Sheena clones of the 1930s and 1940s. Darwa, though, was tied in to Darwinian evolutionary theories, and consequently A Scream in the Night proved to be quite controversial with viewers and critics, especially in the American South, who didn’t believe in them. (This was 1919, after all, six years before the Scopes Monkey Trial).