History & CultureThe Big Idea
How have the Indigenous people of North Sentinel Island managed to remain so secluded for so long—and how long can it last?
ByAdam Goodheart
Published October 13, 2023
• 13 min read
In November 2018 a young American missionary swam from a fishing boat to a remote beach in the Indian Ocean and was killed by Indigenous islanders wielding bows and arrows. News of that fatal encounter on North Sentinel Island—a small patch of land in the Andaman archipelago—fascinated people around the world. Most were unaware such a place existed in our time: an island whose hunter-gatherer inhabitants still live in near-total isolation.
(Related: Death of American missionary could put this Indigenous tribe’s survival at risk.)
The self-assured evangelist, 26-year-old John Allen Chau, had aimed to convert the Native people of a place he felt might be “Satan’s last stronghold.” Yet his brief visit bestowed another, distinctly 21st-century, kind of glory: Within a few days, unbeknownst to the islanders, the fact of their existence went viral.
In the five years since Chau’s death, the Sentinelese, as the tribe’s members are called by outsiders, have developed a global cult following. Type “North Sentinel Island” into a search engine today, and you can spend weeks reading articles, listening to podcasts, and skimming through blog entries, subreddits, and social media posts. You can zoom in close on images of the island taken from satellites, helicopters, and airliners. The Sentinelese have a 4,000-word Wikipedia entry and several spoof social media accounts (“North Sentinel Island Tourism Office & Coast Guard,” “North Sentinel Island High School Marching Band”). They’re featured in hundreds of YouTube videos, with a cumulative total of more than a hundred million views.
Many of the islanders’ fans see them as romantic heroes: staunchly rejecting the interconnected world, the planet’s most committed practitioners of digital detox. A few dozen naked tribesmen with handmade bows and arrows seem somehow more powerful—more authentically human—than the billions of other Earthlings clutching smartphones.
In many ways, North Sentinel remains terra incognita. No visitor has mapped the jungle-shrouded interior of the island (roughly the size of Manhattan) or held a conversation with its residents. No one knows the size of the island’s population, which has been estimated at between 50 and 200. No one but the Sentinelese knows what language they speak, what laws might govern them, what god they might worship, or even what the tribe is called in its own language. From passing boats and aircraft, it’s possible to glimpse them spearing fish in the shallows, poling their dugout canoes across the lagoon, and aiming the bows that they use to hunt game.
According to Survival International, an organization that defends Indigenous peoples’ rights around the world, more than a hundred tribes live in seclusion in places from the Amazon rainforest to the Indian Ocean to Indonesia. The lone tribe on a small, remote island, the Sentinelese are perhaps the most isolated people in the world.
In 1975 National Geographic published dramatic photographs of Sentinelese shooting arrows at a seaborne “friendly contact” expedition of Indian anthropologists and filmmakers. Those images—which appeared under the headline “Arrows Speak Louder Than Words: The Last of the Andaman Islanders”—helped define the Sentinelese for a global audience as both hostile and anachronistic.
It is not really accurate to say that the islanders live apart from modernity: They inhabit the present day, as the rest of us do. Nor do they lack technology: A Sentinelese bow is a potent and beautifully crafted tool; they wield it with exquisite skill and craft its arrows’ heads with salvaged metal, perhaps from a nearby shipwreck. Still, much of the past 10,000 years of human history has slipped past North Sentinel, in the cargo holds of oared ships and the pressurized cabins of passenger jets. The island has almost wholly eluded all the devices and contrivances that have connected tribe to tribe, continent to continent: the written word, the steam engine, the smartphone. And no matter how much its inhabitants have gleaned about the outside world from their glancing contacts—probably quite a lot—there’s no way they can know that their home is among the last places of its kind on this planet.
There seems to be no simple explanation for how the Sentinelese, of all the human communities on Earth, have managed to remain so isolated for so long. Now and then over the past couple of centuries—first when the British extended their empire across the Andaman Islands in the 1850s and later after India took control of the archipelago—various outsiders have tried to make contact with North Sentinel locals. From 1967 to the early 2000s, Indian government anthropologists occasionally were able to approach the beach by boat, twice in 1991 even drawing close enough to hand coconuts and bananas to islanders in the surf. More often, the Sentinelese simply melt away into the jungle when intruders draw too near or respond as they did to Chau: first with gestures and exclamations that unmistakably communicate warning—and then, if that fails, with volleys of arrows.
(Related: Meet the first woman to contact the Sentinelese.)
It’s perhaps less mysterious why the tribe has so stoutly maintained its defenses. The Andaman archipelago includes hundreds of islands, some of them once home to thriving Indigenous communities that probably resembled the Sentinelese linguistically and culturally. In the 19th century the British made incursions into the islands and established a penal colony on one of the largest to house tens of thousands of prisoners from a failed 1857 rebellion in British India. Horrific consequences followed: The islanders were devastated by disease and violence, and their ancient cultures were suppressed by Europeans intent on “Christianizing” and “civilizing” them.
Although the Sentinelese lack seaworthy vessels to travel beyond their own lagoon, they were doubtless visited by neighboring islanders who might have warned them about the awful fate that awaited them at the hands of the colonizers. And on at least one occasion, North Sentinel itself experienced an invasion. In 1880 a colonial official and self-taught anthropologist, Maurice Vidal Portman, visited “with the intention of making friends with the inhabitants,” as he later cheerfully described it. More precisely, he landed with a large party of armed men and tromped back and forth for two weeks before managing to capture and kidnap four small children and an elderly couple, whom he hauled away to the main British penal colony. There the six quickly grew sick, and the old man and woman died. The ailing children were sent back to their island, laden with presents. What alien microbes they might also have borne on that homeward journey can only be guessed.
So the Sentinelese had good reason to respond as they did in 2004, when an Indian Coast Guard helicopter swooped low over the island to confirm that the inhabitants had survived the Indian Ocean tsunami. One man ran out of the jungle and shot an arrow at the helicopter. 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 the man’s features are visible, but his blurred silhouette against the stark white sand has both the timelessness of a Paleolithic cave painting and the immediacy of a stop sign.
Despite their world-renowned reticence, the Sentinelese have communicated one message loud and clear: Let us be.
When traveling to the Andaman Islands, one of the strangest things you’ll discover about the Sentinelese is just how un-isolated, geographically speaking, they actually are. Just 20 miles of ocean separate them from beaches where tourists placidly snorkel.
On my first visit to the archipelago, 25 years ago, I decided to travel, foolishly and illegally, to the coast of North Sentinel. (The surrounding waters are strictly off-limits and patrolled regularly by the Indian coast guard and navy.) I paid some local fishermen on South Andaman Island—which had a population of 200,000, nearly all originally immigrants from mainland India—to take me across the channel in their small motorboat under cover of darkness. We arrived at dawn in the waters just off North Sentinel’s reef, glimpsed three Sentinelese standing beneath the forest canopy, and watched two men poling around the lagoon in their dugout canoe. As I snapped photos and scribbled notes, my guide beckoned my attention. A waterspout and wall of black clouds were headed our way. After five white-knuckle hours, we made it back to South Andaman, but the sudden monsoon storm almost drowned us. Still, we returned from our adventure in time for lunch.
Journeying to the Andamans (but not North Sentinel) more recently, I arrived on a 200-passenger Air India jet crowded with tourists, one of 10 daily flights from the mainland. Travelers can enjoy a beach resort and spa that features 72 luxury bungalows—most with their own private swimming pool—that were purportedly inspired by Indigenous Andamanese huts.
Although the Sentinelese can’t see these huts from their own settlements, they can likely see the yellowish gray smog that hangs over Port Blair, the islands’ administrative capital. They can definitely see the passenger jets, which pass close enough that tourists press their faces and phones against the windows to capture Instagram-bound images. Certainly the Sentinelese, sharp-eyed hunter-gatherers, have observed the outside world as intently as the outside world has observed them; more so, probably, since our boats and flying machines have by now become familiar parts of their surroundings.
On other islands in the Andamans, I found once pristine beaches awash in the flotsam of nearby countries: lost flip-flops, tampon applicators, and hundreds upon hundreds of water bottles. Surely such detritus reaches North Sentinel’s shore as well. The Indian anthropologist Vishvajit Pandya, who made a few boat journeys in the 2000s to observe the Sentinelese from a safe distance, told me that he once saw some islanders using a blue plastic tarp, perhaps dropped from a passing boat, as a roof for their hut.
For the truth is that we, the other eight billion human inhabitants of this planet, are already encroaching inexorably on the Sentinelese, as relentlessly and recklessly as any imperial colonists. Climate change, overfishing, pollution, and plastic debris will continue a campaign of devastation against the plants and animals that the Sentinelese need to survive.
Yet the little island’s mystique—and its outsize digital footprint—shows no signs of abating. For now, at least, North Sentinel’s isolation serves an urgent purpose not just for the islanders but also for the rest of us. The perfect remoteness of that place, unmoored from ordinary space and time, is our own self-consoling fantasy: As long as the Sentinelese persist, we can tell ourselves that our planet itself remains, to some tiny degree, inviolate.
Slanders of the Islanders
Andaman Islanders have long been among the most misunderstood human communities on Earth: exoticized, fetishized, and demonized. Though Marco Polo hadn’t visited the islands, in the 13th century he described their residents 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.” About 600 years later, Arthur Conan Doyle featured an Indigenous Andamanese man—an “unhallowed dwarf” with “venomous, menacing eyes”—as the murderous antagonist in a Sherlock Holmes novel, The Sign of the Four.
The Andamanese continued to interest European racial theorists well into the 20th century. Baron Egon Rudolf Ernst Adolf Hans Dubslaff von Eickstedt, a monocle-wearing German anthropologist whose work on “racial hygiene and eugenics” influenced the Nazis, visited the Andaman archipelago in the 1920s. Afterward, he characterized its inhabitants as humans of a “primitive chimpanzoid type.”
Actually, the Andamanese are anything but primitive. In recent decades the islanders’ complex culture has been documented by the Indian anthropologist Vishvajit Pandya. For instance, the Andamanese create exceptionally rich body art: intricate historical texts written on the skin itself in painted designs of ocher and white clay, constantly erased and remade as the bearer’s needs and circumstances change, as well as ritual scarifications that remain indelible through a lifetime. In these patterns are written the elegies and epics of the islands.
And despite centuries-old slanders of the Andamanese as alleged practitioners of cannibalism and headhunting, it was Englishmen who sometimes returned from “punitive expeditions” in the 1920s and ’30s bearing the severed heads of islanders as trophies. Today the population of Indigenous Andamanese—including the Sentinelese—totals just a few hundred people. Before colonization, there were at least 10 times that.
Historian Adam Goodheart drew this essay from his new book, The Last Island: Discovery, Defiance, and the Most Elusive Tribe on Earth. Goodheart served as consultant for, and appears in, the National Geographic film The Mission. He heads the Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College, in Chestertown, Maryland.
This story appears in the November 2023 issue of National Geographic magazine.
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