When the fishermen returned to pick him up from his trip ashore the following day, they saw several Sentinelese men dragging his body away to bury it. wondering if it will be the last sunset I see.” He wrote in his journal, “Watching the sunset and it’s beautiful - crying a bit. He knew that night that he might not survive a third visit to the island. It hit the waterproof bible he carried under his arm, and once again, he retreated. This time, a teenage member of the tribe loosed an arrow at him. He made a second trip the following day, this time bearing gifts, including a football and a fish. He returned swiftly to the fishermen waiting off shore. The women of the tribe spoke anxiously among themselves, and when the men appeared, they were armed and antagonistic. When his guides would go no farther, he swam to shore and found the Sentinelese. In the fall of 2018, he traveled to the Andaman Islands and convinced two fishermen to help him evade patrol boats and make his way into the forbidden waters. Though he knew that the Sentinelese had violently rejected past attempts at contact, he felt compelled to make an effort to bring Christianity to the people. He was drawn to the isolated shores by missionary zeal. But he had never been anywhere as dangerous as North Sentinel Island. Twenty-six-year-old American John Allen Chau was always adventurous - and it wasn’t unusual for his adventures to land him in trouble. John Allen Chau’s Last AdventureĪn anthropologist comments on John Allen Chau’s dangerous trip to North Sentinel Island. Since 2006, after the efforts to retrieve the unfortunate mud crabbers’ bodies were warded off, only one more attempt at contact has been made. Eventually, the researchers settled for leaving gifts on the shore and backing off.Ĭontact attempts in 1974, 1981, 1990, 2004, and 2006 by a variety of groups, including National Geographic, a Naval sailing ship, and the Indian government, were all met with a relentless curtain of arrows. ![]() The tribe was unwilling to cooperate and retreated into the jungle every time Indian anthropologists attempted to interact. He intended to bring them back to Britain and treat them well, study their customs, then shower them with gifts and return them home.īut on arrival at Port Blair, the capital of the Andaman Islands, the elderly couple fell ill, as their immune systems were especially vulnerable to the diseases of the outside world.įearing that the children would die as well, Portman and his men returned them to North Sentinel island.įor almost 100 years, Sentinelese isolation continued, until 1967, when the Indian government attempted to contact the tribe once more. One of the earliest recorded attempts at contact took place in 1880, when, in accordance with British imperial policy for uncontacted tribes, 20-year-old Maurice Portman kidnapped an elderly couple and four children from North Sentinel Island. ![]() The reclusive Sentinelese tribe has naturally drawn interest over the centuries. Wikimedia Commons A depiction of an early trip to the Andaman Islands. The Fraught History Of Contact With North Sentinel Island The Sentinelese arrows that made their way into researchers’ hands - usually via the sides of unlucky helicopters that attempted to land on the remote island - reveal that the tribe crafts different arrowheads for different purposes, such as hunting, fishing, and defense. Though the Sentinelese seem to have no forging processes of their own, researchers have seen them making use of metal objects that have washed up on their shores from shipwrecks or passing carriers. Their homes, from what observers have been able to see from afar, consist of shelter-type huts made of palm leaves and larger communal dwellings with partitioned family quarters. The island contains no natural harbors, is surrounded by sharp coral reefs, and is covered almost entirely in a dense forest, making any journey to the island a difficult one.Įxperts aren’t even sure how the Sentinelese tribe survived all of those years, especially the ones after the 2004 tsunami that devastated the coastline of the entire Bay of Bengal. Even calculating a rough estimate of their population size has proved difficult experts guess the tribe has anywhere between 50 and 500 members.Īs if the earth knew that the Sentinelese wanted to be left alone, North Sentinel Island seems to have been designed with seclusion in mind. Wikimedia Commons North Sentinel Island is surrounded by sharp coral and located out of the way of the other islands in the chain.Īs is to be expected from a tribe that has spent roughly 60,000 years avoiding outsiders, not much is known about the Sentinelese.
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