The following is an article from
Uncle John's 24-Karat Gold Bathroom Reader.
Ever
heard of North Sentinel Island? Probably not …even thought's one of the
most unusual places on Earth. What makes it so odd? The people -they've
been there a long time, completely cut off from the rest of the world.
MAROONED
Late
on the night of August 2, 1981, a Hong Kong freighter navigating the
choppy waters of the Bay of Bengal ran aground on a submerged coral
reef. The ship, called the
Primrose, was hopelessly stuck. But
there was no danger of it sinking, so after radioing for assistance, the
captain and crew settled in for a few days' wait until help arrived.
The
following morning, as it became light, the sailors saw an island a few
hundred yards beyond the reef. It was uninhabited, as far as anyone
could tell: There were no buildings, roads, or other signs of
civilization there -just a pristine, sandy beach and behind it, dense
jungle. The beach must have seemed like an ideal spot to wait for a
rescue, but the captain ordered the crew to remain aboard the
Primrose.
It was monsoon season, and he may have concerned about lowering the men
into the rough sea in tiny lifeboats. Or perhaps he'd figured out just
which tiny island lay beyond the reef: It was North Sentinel -the deadliest of the 200 islands in the Andaman Island chain.
SOME WELCOME
A few days later, a lookout aboard the
Primrose
spotted a group of dark-skinned men emerging from the jungle, making
their way toward the ship. Was it the rescue party? It seemed possible
…until the men came a little closer and the lookout could see that every
one of them was naked.
Naked …and
armed, but not with
guns. Each man carried either a spear, a bow and arrows, or some other
primitive weapon. The captain made another radio distress call, this one
much more urgent: "Wild men! Estimate more than 50, carrying various
homemade weapons, are making two or three wooden boats. Worrying they
will board us at sunset."
A WORLD APART
After a tense standoff lasting a few more days, the crew of the
Primrose
were evacuated by helicopter to safety. They were lucky to get away: It
was their misfortune to have run aground just offshore of one of the
strangest islands on Earth, and probably the very last of its kind.
Anthropologists believe the men who appeared on the beach that morning
in 1981 are members of a hunter-gatherer tribe that has lived on the
island for 65,000 years. That's 35,000 years before the last ice age,
55,000 years before the great woolly mammoths disappeared from North
America, and 62,000 years before the ancient Egyptians built the
pyramids at Giza. These people are believed to be the direct descendants
of the first humans out of Africa.
The outside world has known
about North Sentinel Island for centuries, but the islanders have been
almost completely cut off from the rest of the world
all that
time, and they fiercely maintain their isolation to this day. No one
knows what language they speak or what they call themselves -they have
never allowed anyone to get close enough to find out. The outside world
calls them the "Sentineli" or the "Sentinelese," after the island. It's
estimated the the 28-square-mile island (slightly larger than Manhattan)
is capable of supporting as many as 400 hunter-gatherers, but no one
knows how many people live there.
HOME ALONE
North
Sentinel Island is amazingly well suited to both support and isolate a
tribe like the Sentinelese. It's too small to interest settlers or
colonial powers, especially when there are bigger, better islands within
a few hours' sailing time. And unlike many of those islands, North
Sentinel has no natural harbors, so there's no good place for a ship to
take shelter from a storm. Furthermore, the island is surrounded by a
ring of submerged coral reefs that prevent large ships from approaching.
This was especially true during the age of sail, when ships had no way
of quickly maneuvering out of harm's way once they realized that the
reefs were there. Narrow openings in these reefs allow small boats to
slip through and land on the beach, but these are passable only in good
weather and calm seas, which occur as infrequently as two months out of
the year. For the remaining ten months, the island cannot be safely
approached from the sea.
SELF-SUFFICIENCY
At
the same time that they keep strangers out, the coral reefs help keep
the Sentinelese in, because the reefs create several shallow lagoons
that are teeming with sea life. The food provided by these lagoons is so
plentiful that the Sentinelese have never needed to fish in the deep
sea waters beyond the coral reefs. They propel their dugout canoes
through the shallow lagoons by poling along the bottom, but they cannot
navigate in water deeper than the length of the poles. They've never
invented oars, without which they cannot leave the island.
The
Andaman Islands, North Sentinel included, sit at the crossroads of
ancient trade routes between Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast
Asia. Ironically, this may have further encouraged the isolationist
tendencies of the Sentinelese, because their dark skin and African
appearance would have made them the targets of any slave traders who
might have tried to land on the island over the centuries. Periodic
contact with such outsiders would have only intensified the tribe's
hostility toward the outside world and their desire to be left alone.
WHO ARE YOU WEARING?
One
more thing that has protected the Sentinelese from outsiders: the
age-old belief that all Andaman Island tribes were cannibals. There is
no evidence that any of them were, except that some tribes wore the
bones of their ancestors as jewelry (including the skulls), which they
wore strapped to their backs. It would have been easy to mistake such
people for cannibals. Who'd stick around long enough to find out that
they weren't?
By the time the Greek astronomer Ptolemy wrote of
an "Island of Cannibals" somewhere in the Bay of Bengal in the second
century AD, sailors were already giving the Andamans a wide berth. Marco
Polo didn't help matters in the 1290s when he described the Andamanese
as "a brutish and savage race… [who] kill and eat every foreigner whom
they can lay their hands upon." Claims like these certainly did help to
keep strangers away. And considering how fiercely the Sentinelese and
other Andaman tribes defended their islands, it's probably a lucky thing
they did.
STRANGERS BEARING GIFTS
The
first real threat to the natives of North Sentinel Island appeared in
1858, when the British established a penal colony at Port Blair on
nearby South Andaman Island, and set out trying to pacify the local
tribes -the Great Andamese, the Onge, the Jarawa, and eventually the
Sentinelese. One technique the British used was to kidnap a member of an
unfriendly tribe, hold him for a short period, treat him well, and then
shower him with gifts and let him return to his people. In doing so,
the British hoped to demonstrate their friendliness. If the first
attempt didn't work, they'd repeat the process with as many tribesmen as
it took to turn an unfriendly tribe into a friendly one.
In
1880 a large, heavily-armed party led by 20-year-old Maurice Vidal
Portman, the British colonial administrator, landed on North Sentinel
and made what is believed to be the first exploration of the island by
outsiders. Several days passed before they made contact with any
Sentinelese, because tribe members disappeared into the jungle whenever
strangers approached.
Finally, after several days on the island,
the party stumbled across an elderly couple who were too old to run
away, and several small children. Portman brought the two adults and
four of the children back to Port Blair. But the man and the woman soon
started to get sick and then died, probably from exposure to Western
diseases like smallpox, measles, and influenza, to which they would have
had little or no resistance. So Portman returned the four children to
North Sentinel Island and released them with gifts for the rest of the
tribe. The children disappeared into the jungle and were never seen
again.
INDIA'S TURN
After this
experience, the British left the Sentinelese more or less alone, and
focused their pacification efforts on the other tribes. When India won
its independence from Great Britain in 1947, the Andaman Islands were
handed over to India, but the Indians ignored the Sentinelese, too, for
about 20 years.
Then in 1967, the Indian government launched its
own large-scale expedition to North Sentinel Island, complete with
plenty of armed policemen and naval officers for protection. The visit
was less aggressive than the British had been 87 years earlier (no
kidnapping), and it was more scientific (an anthropologist named T.N.
Pandit was a member of the party). But they never made contact with a
single Sentinelese soul -once again, the tribe members vanished deeper
into the jungle whenever the outsiders approached.
RE-GIFTING
That
began a decades-long policy of "contact visits" by the Indian
government to North Sentinel Island. From time to time during the short
calm-weather season, an Indian naval vessel would anchor outside the
coral reefs and dispatch small boats through the openings in the reefs
to approach the beaches.
Approach the beaches, but not land.
The boats had to be sure not to come within an arrow's flight of the
beach or risk being attacked by the Sentinelese.
These
strangers, like the British before them, came bearing gifts -usually
bananas and coconuts, which do not grow on the islands, and sometimes
other gifts, including bead necklaces, rubber balls, plastic buckets,
and pots and pans. Once the visitors approached as closely as they felt
was safe, they would toss the items overboard to wash upon the beach.
Or, if the party were large enough to frighten the Sentinelese into
retreating into the jungle, it might even land on the beach, but only
long enough to drop off the gifts and beat it out of there
before the Sentinelese attacked. When a
National Geographic
film crew lingered too long during one such visit in 1975, a
Sentinelese warrior with a bow and arrow shot the director in the thigh,
and then stood there on the beach laughing at his accomplishment.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
It
wasn't until the early 1990s, after more than 20 years of such visits,
that the Sentinelese finally relaxed their guard -just a bit- and
allowed the boats to come closer. Sometimes unarmed tribesmen stood on
the beach while the people on the boats tossed the coconuts overboard. A
few times, they even
waded out in the water
to collect the coconuts in person. Even so, they did not allow the
visitors to stay long. After just a few minutes, the Sentinelese would
signal with menacing gestures or "warning shots" -arrows fired with no
arrowheads attached- that the visit was over.
LEAVE 'EM ALONE
That
was about as close as the Sentinelese ever came to opening up to the
outside world. In the mid-1990s, the Indian government decided that its
policy of forcing contact with the Sentinelese made no sense, and it
ended the visits in 1996.
The
visits made no sense to India, but they were actually dangerous for the
Sentinelese. With so little resistance to Western diseases, the
islanders risked not just the death of individuals with each contact
with outsiders, but the extinction of the entire tribe. That was the
experience with other Andaman Island tribes: When the British
established their penal colony on South Andaman Island in 1858, the
native population of the Andaman Islands was nearly 7,000 people. But
the British arrival was followed by a succession of epidemics, including
pneumonia, measles, mumps, and the Russian flu, which decimated the
tribes. After more than 150 years of exposure to Western diseases, their
numbers have dropped to fewer than 300 people, and continue to decline.
Some tribes have gone completely extinct. The Sentinelese, by refusing
contact with the outside world, are the only tribe that has avoided this
fate.
WAVE GOODBYE
The Sentinelese even
survived the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the deadliest in recorded
history, with few or no casualties. Thought the tsunami killed more than
230,000 people in surrounding countries, it appears that the
Sentinelese were able to sense the coming of the tsunami and escape to
higher ground before it arrived. When an Indian Navy helicopter arrived
three days after to check on their well-being and drop food parcels on
the beach, a Sentinelese warrior came out of the jungle and warned the
helicopter off with a bow and arrow, a clear sign that the Sentinelese
did not want help from outsiders.
KEEP OUT
Today
the Indian government enforces a three-mile exclusion zone around North
Sentinel Island with regular sea and air patrols. Heavy fines and jail
time await anyone caught trespassing in the zone. And if that isn't
enough of a deterrent, the Sentinelese continue to defend their island
as fiercely as ever. In 2006 two poachers who'd spent the day fishing
illegally inside the exclusion zone dropped anchor near the island and
went to sleep, apparently after a night of heavy drinking. Sometime
during the night the anchor came loose and the boat drifted onto the
coral reefs. The Sentinelese killed both men and buried their bodies on
the beach. At last report the bodies are still there; when an Indian
Navy helicopter tried to recover them from the beach, the Sentinelese
fought it off with bows and arrows.
EYE IN THE SKY
Today
anyone with a laptop and internet access can use Google Earth to spy on
places that are not meant to be seen by outsiders. You can look at
satellite photos of Area 51, the secret military air base in the Navada
desert. You can look at Mount Weather, a secret facility in Virginia
that is rumored to be the place that members of Congress are evacuated
in times of national emergency. You can even peer down on secret
watersides on the outskirts of Pyongyang, North Korea, that are the
playground of that country's Communist Party elite.
But when you look down on North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal, all you can make out is the wreck of the Primrose,
still stuck on the reef where it ran aground in 1981. You can't see the
Sentinelese, their dwellings, or anything else that might shed light
on how many people there are on the island, or how they live their
lives. The dense jungle canopy that covers every inch of the island
except the beaches conceals everything: Even when viewed from outer
space, the Sentinelese remain free from prying eyes.