Most of the past ten thousand years of human history has slipped past North Sentinel, in the cargo holds of oared ships and the pressurised cabins of passenger jets. The island has almost wholly eluded all the devices and contrivances that have connected tribe to tribe, island to island, continent to continent. The written word. The compass and sextant. The steam engine. The radio. The smartphone. And no matter how much its inhabitants have managed to glean about the outside world from their glancing contacts – which is probably a good deal – there is no way they can know that their little home is the last place of its kind on this planet.
North Sentinel Island is not located in one of those parts of the world that are famous for having been “discovered” – the Caribbean, say, or the South Pacific. The Andaman Islands, though rarely visited by outsiders until the 19th century, have been known to Western civilisation for much longer, albeit at the outer margins of cartographic consciousness. In European maps, their shape long remained unfixed. Turn, one by one, those old hand-tinted pages: the small archipelago rises from the sea and scatters, changes colours and disappears, regroups and reemerges, like a school of fish in a tropical lagoon.
Even as the contours of mainland Asia grow solid and precise – charted by mariners and geographers wending the fruitful shores of India and Siam – the Andamans’ outlines never quite coalesce, for the islands offered very little to tempt the passing traveller. Even the archipelago’s name is unstable – as if the outside world had discovered it, then lost it, then rediscovered it again, many times: Caracuffaya. Dandemos. The Islands of Man. The Islands of the Satyrs. The Naked Land. Angamanain.
To this day, no scholar has resolved the question of how and when the islands came to be called Andaman, nor even determined the language and culture in which this strange toponym emerged. Still, those three measured syllables, deep and rhythmic as distant drums, suit the place somehow. Then there is the oldest map-name of all, a name on late-medieval charts that derive, in turn, from those of the second-century Romano-Egyptian geographer Claudius Ptolemy. When I daydream about the islands, as I often do, this name comes into my thoughts more than all the others: Insulae Bonae Fortunae. The Latin phrase means islands of good fortune, and it also evokes a similar name from ancient times, the mythical Insulae Fortunae, or Isles of the Blessed, a paradise where Greek heroes, having passed three times through the Elysian Fields, dwelled in endless summer.
Even in long-ago days, however, the islands’ reputation was mixed at best, and that auspicious name a queer anomaly. The very oldest Ptolemaic map also bears this blunt warning in medieval Latin: The inhabitants of all these islands are cannibals. For centuries, roving mariners would mutter hasty prayers, push their tillers hard, and steer well clear when they saw the green mounds of the Andamans float onto the horizon. None wanted to risk getting close enough that a monsoon storm might drive them ashore. Indeed, many believed it was better to founder in the ocean than try their luck upon those treacherous coasts.
Recorded history is only a small circle of lamplight in a dark forest of unchronicled human experiences – especially in a place like the Andaman Islands. What we call “discovery” and “first contact” are simply those encounters that were written down, mapped, photographed, or filmed. Surely there must have been many more moments of discovery and contact between the outside world and the Andamanese – including the Sentinelese – than those few that have left their mark on any surviving Western annals. Some of these may have been far more significant to the islanders, far more consequential in determining their attitudes toward strangers, than any of the episodes that imprinted themselves on the memory of the outside world. Nevertheless, recorded history is all we have to go on.
Here are some things that are documented as having happened in the course of the last thousand years or so:
In 1296 or thereabouts, Marco Polo described Andamanese generally as “a most brutish and savage race, having heads, eyes, and teeth like those of dogs. They are very cruel, and kill and eat every foreigner whom they can lay their hands upon.” Historians believe that he based this on hearsay and did not visit the islands. One night in 1771, an East India Company hydrographic survey vessel, the Diligent, passed by North Sentinel and sighted “a multitude of lights . . . upon the shore.” During the island’s brief transit across the western horizon, the British commander paused long enough to sketch its outline and bestow that name, the one it still bears on maps, reflecting how it seemed to stand sentinel at the upper end of a broad strait. This is its first recorded mention by any outsider. The surveying party did not stop to investigate, however. In those days, bonfires still beckoned from hundreds of coasts, all over the world.
In 1867, toward the end of the summer monsoon season, an Indian merchantman, the Nineveh, was wrecked on the reef off North Sentinel. 86 passengers and 20 sailors got safely to the beach. On the morning of the third day, as these survivors sat down to a makeshift breakfast, they were suddenly attacked. “The savages were perfectly naked, with short hair and red painted noses, and were opening their mouth and making sounds like pa on ough; their arrows appeared to be tipped with iron,” the Nineveh’s captain later reported. (The Sentinelese had probably scavenged the metal from flotsam on the beach, as they apparently still do today.) He had fled at the first shower of arrows and escaped with a few crewmen in the ship’s boat, to be picked up several days later by a brig bound for Moulmein.
The Andaman Islands were now officially part of the British Empire – the archipelago’s largest island had been settled as a penal colony a decade earlier – so a Royal Navy rescue party was dispatched by steamer to the site of the wreck. It arrived to find that the Nineveh’s passengers had managed to fend off their attackers with sticks and stones, and the “savages” had not been seen since. In 1896, a Hindu convict escaped on a makeshift raft from the penal settlement on Great Andaman Island. He drifted across 20 miles or so of open ocean and landed on the beach of North Sentinel. A search party found his body there some days later, rolling in the surf, pierced in several places by arrows and with its throat cut. No natives were sighted. After this, the island was left mostly alone for the better part of a century.
In the spring of 1974, North Sentinel was visited by a film crew that was shooting a documentary titled Man in Search of Man, along with a few anthropologists, some armed policemen, and a photographer for National Geographic. In the words of one of the scientists, their plan was to “win the natives’ friendship by friendly gestures and plenty of gifts.” As the team’s motorised dinghy made its way through the reefs toward shore, some natives emerged from the woods. The anthropologists made friendly gestures. The Sentinelese responded with a hail of arrows. The dinghy proceeded to a landing spot out of arrow range, where the policemen, dressed in padded armour, disembarked and laid gifts on the sand: coconuts, a miniature plastic automobile, a tethered live pig, a child’s doll, and some aluminium cookware. Then they returned to the dinghy and waited to observe the natives’ reaction to the gifts. The natives’ reaction was to fire more arrows, one of which hit the film director in the left thigh. The man who had shot the film director was observed laughing proudly and walking toward the shade of a tree, where he sat down. Other natives were observed spearing the pig, cutting off the doll’s nose and ears, and burying both gifts in the sand. They did, however, take the cookware and the coconuts with evident delight.
In 1975, the exiled king of Belgium, on a tour of the Andamans, was escorted by local dignitaries for an overnight cruise to the waters off North Sentinel. Mindful of lessons learned the year before, they kept the royal party out of arrow range, approaching just close enough for a Sentinelese warrior to aim his bow menacingly at the king, who expressed his profound satisfaction with the adventure.
In 2004, after the Indian Ocean tsunami, the Indian Coast Guard sent a helicopter to fly over the island and investigate whether the Sentinelese had suffered any casualties. Several natives were sighted, one of whom shot arrows at the helicopter. This was taken as welcome evidence that they had survived the disaster unharmed. The Coast Guard officers returned with a striking photograph: a figure runs across the beach, legs nimble as a dancer’s, slanting his bow upward at the aerial trespassers. None of his features are visible, but the man’s blurred silhouette, his tensile black body poised against the stark white sand, has the timeless immediacy of a Paleolithic cave painting. The image went out over international wire services and was published in dozens of newspapers. The world turned its attention, if only fleetingly, to a place it had so far overlooked.
Excerpted with permission from The Last Island: A Story of the Andamans and the Most Elusive Tribe in the World, Adam Goodheart, Juggernaut.