Everything We Know About The Isolated Sentinelese People Of North Sentinel Island

Everything We Know About The Isolated Sentinelese People Of North Sentinel Island

In this undated photo released by the Anthropological Survey of India, Sentinelese tribe men row their canoe in Indias Andaman and Nicobar archipelago. Government officials and anthropologists believe that ancient knowledge of the movement of wind, sea and birds may have saved the five indigenous tribes on the Indian archipelago of Andaman and Nicobar islands from the tsunami that hit the Asian coastline Dec. 26, 2004. (AP Photo/Anthropological Survey of India, HO)

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The death of an American tourist who illegally visited the isolated North Sentinel Island had drawn the world's attention to the small island's reclusive inhabitants. They're one of the few mostly "uncontacted" groups left in the world, and they owe that isolation partly to geography -- North Sentinel is a small island, off the main shipping routes, surrounded by a shallow reef with no natural harbors -- partly to protective laws enforced by the Indian government, and partly to their own fierce defense of their home and their privacy. But they're not entirely uncontacted; over the last 200 years, outsiders have visited the island several times, and it often ended badly for both sides.

Who Are The Sentinelese?

According to a 2011 census effort, and based on anthropologists' estimates of how many people the island could support, there are probably somewhere between 80 and 150 people on North Sentinel Island, although it could be as many as 500 or as few as 15. The Sentinelese people are related to other indigenous groups in the Andaman Islands, a chain of islands in India's Bay of Bengal, but they've been isolated for long enough that other Andaman groups, like the Onge and the Jarawa, can't understand their language.

Based on a single visit to a Sentinelese village in 1967, we know that they live in lean-to huts with slanted roofs; Pandit described a group of huts, built facing one another, with a carefully-tended fire outside each one. We know that they build small, narrow outrigger canoes, which they maneuver with long poles in the relatively shallow, calm waters inside the reef. From those canoes, the Sentinelese fish and harvest crabs. They're hunter-gatherers, and if their lifestyle is anything like that of related Andamanese peoples, they probably live on fruits and tubers that grow wild on the island, eggs from seagulls or turtles, and small game like wild pigs or birds. They carry bows and arrows, as well as spears and knives, and unwelcome visitors have learned to respect their skill with all of the above. Many of those tools and weapons are tipped with iron, which the Sentinelese probably find washed ashore and work to suit their needs.

The Sentinelese weave mesh baskets, and they use wooden adzes tipped with iron. Salvage crews anchored near the island in the mid-1990s described bonfires on the beach at night and the sounds of people singing. But so far, none of the Sentinelese language is known to outsiders; anthropologists usually make a point to refer to people by the name they use for themselves, but no one outside North Sentinel Island actually knows what the Sentinelese call themselves, let alone how to greet them or ask what their view of the world and their role in it really looks like.

What we know for sure is that they don't care much for company, and they've expressed that clearly even without a common language.

FILE -In this Nov. 14, 2005 file photo, clouds hang over the North Sentinel Island, in India's southeastern Andaman and Nicobar Islands. A rights group that works to protect tribal people has urged Indian authorities to abandon efforts to recover the body of an American man who was thought to be killed by inhabitants of an island where outsiders are effectively forbidden by Indian law. (AP Photo/Gautam Singh, File)

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Why Don't The Sentinelese Like Visitors?

One night in 1771, an East India Company vessel sailed past Sentinel Island and saw lights gleaming on the shore. But the ship was on a hydrographic survey mission and had no reason to stop, so the Sentinelese remained undisturbed for nearly a century, until an Indian merchant ship called the Nineveh ran aground on the reef. 86 passengers and 20 crew managed to swim and splash their way to the beach. They huddled there for three days before the Sentinelese evidently decided the intruders had overstayed their welcome -- a point they made with bows and iron-tipped arrows. Western history only records the Nineveh's side of the encounter, but it's interesting to speculate on what might have been happening in Sentinelese villages behind the scenes. Was there debate about how to handle these newcomers? Did the shipwreck victims cross a boundary or violate a law unknown to them, prompting the Sentinelese to respond, or did it just take them three days to decide what to do?

The Nineveh's passengers and crew responded with sticks and stones, and the two sides formed an uneasy detente until a Royal Navy vessel arrived to rescue the shipwreck survivors. While they were in the neighborhood, the British decided to declare Sentinel Island part of Britain's colonial holdings, a decision which really mattered only to the British until 1880. That's when a young Royal Navy officer named Maurice Vidal Portman took charge of the Andaman and Nicobar colony. Portman fancied himself an anthropologist, and in 1880 he landed on North Sentinel Island with a large party of naval officers, convicts from the penal colony on Great Andaman Island, and Andamanese trackers.

They found only hastily-abandoned villages; the people seem to have seen the intruders coming and fled to hiding places further inland. But one elderly couple and four children must have lagged behind, and Portman and his search party captured them and carried them off to Port Blair, the colonial capital on South Andaman Island. Soon, all six of the kidnapped Sentinelese became desperately sick, and the elderly couple died in Port Blair. Portman somehow decided it was a good idea to drop off the four sick childen on the beach of North Sentinel along with a small pile of gifts. We have no way to know whether the children spread their illness to the rest of their people, or what its impact might have been.

But the experience definitely didn't leave the Sentinelese with warm fuzzy feelings toward foreign visitors. In 1896, an escaped convict tried to flee the Great Andaman Island Penal Colony on a makeshift raft. In an excellent illustration of the concept of "out of the frying pan and into the fire," he washed ashore on North Sentinel Island. A colonial search party found his remains a few days later, full of arrow wounds, with his throat cut. The British wisely decided to leave the Sentinelese in peace, at least for the next century or so.

Is It Possible To Make Friends?

A hundred years after the wreck of the Nineveh, a team of anthropologists led by Trinok Nath Pandit, working under the auspices of the Indian government, landed on North Sentinel Island. Like Portman, they found only hastily-abandoned huts. The people had fled so quickly that they left the fires still lit outside their homes. Pandit and his team left gifts: bolts of cloth, candy, and plastic buckets. But naval officers and Indian police accompanying Pandit also stole from Sentinelese, taking bows, arrows, baskets, other items from their unguarded homes despite the anthropologists' protests -- still not a great showing for the outside world.

Meanwhile, North Sentinel Island had been in a state of legal limbo since India gained its independence in 1947. In 1970, India claimed the isolated little island, and a survey dropped a stone tablet on the beach to say so. There's no record of the Sentinelese response.

Pandit and his colleagues kept trying to make contact, mostly by pulling a dinghy onto the beach, dropping off coconuts and other gifts, and beating a hasty retreat. The Sentinelese didn't care much for live pigs, which they speared and then buried in the sand, or plastic toys, which got much the same treatment. But they seemed pleased with metal pots and pans, and they quickly grew very fond of coconuts, which don't grow on the island. Pandit and his colleagues delivered them by the bagful, usually with bows and arrows trained on them until they departed. 25 years passed that way, with no direct contact, but Pandit thought the visitors were building up some trust.

The visits were sporadic until 1981. A National Geographic film crew tagged along in 1974, and the director caught an arrow in the thigh for his trouble. The exiled King Leopold III of Belgium passed close to the island on a boat tour in 1975, and the Sentinelese warned him off with arrows. For some reason, the king was absolutely delighted by the whole thing.

In 1981, a cargo ship called the Primrose and her crew of 28 ran aground on the reef, in an eerie echo of the Ninevah. But this time the sailors were rescued by helicopter, and later visitors to the island say that the Sentinelese seemed to have salvaged metal from the ship for their tools and weapons. For artisans used to working with scraps of metal that washed ashore, a whole ship must have been an incredible find. That same year, Pandit and his team stepped up their efforts, dropping by the island every month or two.

And a decade later, a year before Pandit's retirement, that regularity and persistence paid off. One day in early 1991, a group of islanders came to the beach to collect their gifts with no weapons, just woven baskets and the adzes they used to cut open coconuts (although later encounters proved how well those adzes could be used in self-defense). They ventured closer to the outsiders than ever before. Later that day, when the anthropologists returned, they found two dozen Sentinelese people standing on the beach, and an interesting scene played out. A man raised his bow to aim at the visitors, and a woman pushed the bow down. The man responded by dropping the bow and arrow and burying them in the sand. It's still not clear whether this was a negotiation in progress or a ritual display, but as soon as the weapons were disposed of, the people rushed out to the visitors' boats to collect their coconuts.

But Sentinelese hospitality had its limits. On another visit, a few weeks later, a Sentinelese man signalled to Pandit that it was time for the guests to leave -- by drawing his knife and making a cutting gesture.

"If we tried to venture into their territory without respecting their wishes or got too close for comfort, they would turn their backs on us and sit down on their haunches, as it to defecate. That was meant to be an insult. If we didn’t pay heed and stop, they would shoot arrows as a last resort," Pandit told Indian Express.

The tenuous friendship between the islanders and the anthropologists never moved beyond coconut handouts; the Sentinelese never offered gifts in return and never invited the visitors to stay or to venture inland, and neither side ever learned how to actually speak with the other. And the Sentinelese didn't always welcome the visitors; sometimes the anthropologists were still greeted by armed men on the beach. The Indian government suspended the anthropologists' visits in 1996.

When Indian Coast Guard helicopters flew over the island after the 2004 tsunami, they found the Sentinelese in good shape and not at all pleased to see them -- and not at all hesitant to attack the helicopter with bows and arrows. A couple of years later, in 2006, an Indian crab harvesting boat drifted ashore, and the Sentinelese killed both fishermen and buried their remains.

What Happens Now?

Given that history, it's not remotely surprising that the Sentinelese people saw American tourist John Allen Chau as a trespasser when he stepped onto their island earlier this month and stood on the beach singing hymns. They chased him away twice, but when he ventured ashore a third time, they're believed to have killed him. Now it appears they've buried his remains, as they did with the two Indian fishermen in 2006. The Indian government has now called off the search for Chau's body, citing danger to both search personnel and the Sentinelese people.

The incident has sparked discussion about protections for relatively uncontacted groups like the Sentinelese. Pandit has advocated leaving them be. According to the now-retired anthropologist, the Sentinelese have made it clear that they don't want contact and are doing just fine on their own. Indian officials continue to visit the island for periodic censuses (the last one was in 2011).

MMW