![]() That zoo, a natural entrapment of hunter-gatherers, is written about as an existence of finite contingency, a curiosity that must surely meet its demographic, if not cultural reckoning. The Indian government has banned travel to the island on penalty, a situation that has had the unintended effect of turning the surviving individuals in question into residents of an open air, inaccessible zoo. In 2000, historian Adam Goodheart got the bug and ventured to North Sentinel, observing, from a safe distance along the shoreline, figures “facing us, and one of them was holding something long and thin – a spear? A bow? Impossible to tell.” The title of his contribution to The American Scholar was predictably inelegant and suggestive: “The Last Island of the Savages.” As late as 1975, the efforts by a documentary maker for National Geographic attempting to cover North Sentinel resulted in an arrow in the leg. He did, at least, have the grim sense to observe in 1899 that, “We cannot be said to have done anything more than increase their general terror of, and hostility to, all comers.”Įfforts to engage the islanders, propelled by insatiable curiosity, have never stopped. ![]() The orphaned children were returned to their abode. Essentially incarcerating a select few, adults and offspring, Portman witnessed the adults ail and die. ![]() ![]() Colonialism, fuelled by the penal experiments pioneered by such vessels as the East Indian Company steamer Pluto, put pay to the culture of the Great Andamanese people, their people perishing to measles and syphilis.Ī British naval officer, Maurice Vidal Portman, gave the world a highly conventional demonstration about how a new civilisation treats another: You kidnap their members, and observe them in captivity. The dangers were just as grave to the tribes ringed by the Andaman Sea. Efforts by an Indian Coast Guard helicopter to recover the bodies was foiled by Sentinelese armed with bows and arrows. In 2006, two apparently intoxicated Indian fishermen, Sunder Raj and Pandit Tiwari, were less fortunate in their poaching ventures, meeting their gruesome end after straying into the island’s proximity. All crew members’ lives not guaranteed.” The crew, armed with piping, axes and a flare gun – kept up a week long vigil till the arrival of both a tugboat and helicopter, courtesy of the Indian Navy. “Wild men, estimate more than 50, carrying various homemade weapons are making two or three wooden boats,” came the wired distress call from the captain, sent to the Regent Shipping Company’s offices in Hong Kong. In 1867, the passengers and crew of the wrecked Indian merchantman, the Nineveh, managed to survive attacks launched by, in the description of the captain’s report, “perfectly naked” men “with short hair and red painted noses… making sounds like pa on ough”.Ī more recent display was at hand in August 1981, when the crew of the Panamanian-registered freighter, the Primrose, ran aground on a reef near North Sentinel after enduring heavy weather. Watson describing a villainous Andaman Islander sporting “murderous darts” and a “face was enough to give a man a sleepless night.” He had “features so deeply marked with all bestiality and cruelty.” Never to be outdone, Sherlock Holmes, plucking a volume from his shelf, finds it describing a people, after Polo’s fashion, as “naturally hideous having large misshapen heads, small, fierce eyes, and distorted features.”Ĭontact with the shy locals has proven fatal, though not always. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four adds to the exotica of terror, with his Dr. An inventive man, was the cheeky Dalmatian. I assure you that, as regards their heads, they all look like big mastiffs”. Marco Polo wrote, around 1296, of “a very large and wealthy island called Angaman” populated by men with “heads like dogs, and teeth and eyes also like dogs. Encounters have been recorded, though these are unflattering for modern audiences reared on sanitised words. Then would come the introduction of terminal disease, the mod cons, and ultimate extinction.įor the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island, part of India’s Andaman and Nicobar islands, isolation is both conservation and vulnerability. But to do so would lead to the natural consequences that come with contact and invasion: the foisting of an alien divinity upon others, most probably a monotheistic Sky God, whose grammatically challenged invocations are found in a holy text. Share on WhatsApp Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Telegram Share on Reddit Share on EmailĬuriosity for the undiscovered last tribe, that tantalising moment when eyes are cast upon the previously unseen, remains the anthropological Holy Grail.
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