Adam Goodheart describes The Last Island of the Savages:
Shortly before midnight on August 2, 1981, a Panamanian-registered freighter called the Primrose, which was traveling in heavy seas between Bangladesh and Australia with a cargo of poultry feed, ran aground on a coral reef in the Bay of Bengal. As dawn broke the next morning, the captain was probably relieved to see dry land just a few hundred yards from the Primrose‘s resting place: a low-lying island, several miles across, with a narrow beach of clean white sand giving way to dense jungle. If he consulted his charts, he realized that this was North Sentinel Island, a western outlier in the Andaman archi-pelago, which belongs to India and stretches in a ragged line between Burma and Sumatra. But the sea was too rough to lower the lifeboats, and so — since the ship seemed to be in no danger of sinking — the captain decided to keep his crew on board and wait for help to arrive.A few days later, a young sailor on lookout duty in the Primrose‘s watch tower spotted several people coming down from the forest toward the h and peering out at the stranded vessel. They must be a rescue party sent by the shipping company, he thought. Then he took a closer look at them. They were small men, well-built, frizzy-haired, and black. They were naked except for narrow belts that circled their waists. And they were holding spears, bows, and arrows which they had begun waving in a manner that seemed not altogether friendly. Not long after this, a wireless operator at the Regent Shipping Company’s offices in Hong Kong received an urgent distress call from the Primrose‘s captain, asking for an immediate airdrop of firearms so that his crew could defend itself. “Wild men, estimate more than 50, carrying various home-made weapons are making two or three wooden boats,” the message read. “Worrying they will board us at sunset. All crew members’ lives not guaranteed.”
If the Primrose‘s predicament seemed a thing less of the twentieth century than of the eighteenth — an episode, perhaps, from Captain Cook’s Cook’s voyages in the Pacific — it is because the island where the ship lay grounded had somehow managed to slip through the net of history. Although its existence had been known for centuries, its inhabitants had virtually no contact with the rest of humanity. Anthropologists referred to them as “Sentinelese,” but no one knew what they called themselves — indeed, no one even knew what language they spoke. And in any case, no one within living memory had gotten close enough to ask. Whether the natives’ prelapsarian state was one of savagery or innocence, no one knew either.
The same monsoon-whipped waves that had driven the Primrose onto reef kept the tribesmen’s canoes at bay, and high winds blew their arrows off the mark. The crew kept up a twenty-four-hour guard with makeshift weapons — a flare gun, axes, some lengths of pipe — as news of the emergency slowly filtered to the outside world. (An Indian government spokesman denied reports in the Hong Kong press that the Sentinelese were “cannibals.” A Hong Kong government spokesman suggested that perhaps the Primrose‘s radio officer had “gone bananas.”) After nearly a week, the Indian Navy dispatched a tugboat and a helicopter to rescue the besieged sailors.
The natives of North Sentinel must have watched the whirring aircraft as it hovered three times above the great steel hulk, lowering a rope ladder to pluck the men safely back into modernity. Then the strange machines departed, the sea calmed, and the island remained, lush and impenetrable, still waiting for its Cook or its Columbus.
Some history:
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.” This is the first recorded mention of the island. The surveying party did not stop to investigate, however. In those days, bonfires still beckoned from hundreds of coasts, all over the world. The ship sailed on.
In 1867, toward the end of the summer monsoon season, an Indian merchantman, the Nineveh, was wrecked on the reef off North Sentinel. Eighty-six passengers and twenty crewmen got safely to the beach in the ship’s boat. 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 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 — they’d been settled as a penal colony — so a Royal Navy rescue party was dis-patched 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 main penal settlement on Great Andaman Island. He drifted across thirty miles or so of open ocean and landed on the beach of North Sentinel. A search party found his body there some days later, pierced in several places by arrows and with its throat cut. No natives were sighted. After this, the island was left alone for nearly 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 motorized 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 armor, disembarked and laid gifts on the sand: a miniature plastic automobile, some coconuts, a tethered live pig, a child’s doll, and some aluminum 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 and the doll and burying them 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 brought 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.