“I’d give my right arm to know what they’re
thinking.”
If
a flying saucer landed in your front yard, would you greet it with a
shotgun? If a Jeep crammed with soldiers barreled down
your street, would you blast it?
What if doing so would be the only way to prevent your
relatives from being kidnapped? What if doing nothing meant death? After all, if you fired the first shot, maybe you'd have a chance.
The
Sentinelese people are violent. At least that is how outsiders see them. They
are a Stone Age hunter-gatherer tribe who live on utterly remote North Sentinel
Island, one of 572 islands in the archipelago of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal between India and Myanmar (Burma).
The
Sentinelese, whose island belongs to India, have lived in
solitude for as long as 60,000 years. Experts on ancient human
migration believe that they are a remnant of the great movement of people
who ventured from Africa to Asia and the New
World.
No
natural harbor
No one knows how many Sentinelese
there are. Estimates range from 50 to 500. Their
23-square-mile island is heavily forested with mangrove trees.
Its narrow white beaches may be
alluring, but the island is not an easy place to get to or to leave. Though
there are other populated islands within a reasonable distance, North Sentinel
Island has no natural harbor. Worse, it is encircled by treacherous submerged reefs that make landing there nearly impossible and leaving arduous.
Perhaps
the Sentinelese are lucky. Native tribes on other islands, such as the Onge once numbered as many as 8,000. Their populations have been severely reduced by
disease and contact with outsiders. Today there are fewer than 100 Onge.
No
one can speak the language of the Sentinelese. Even an Onge who was
brought to North Sentinel Island could not understand what the Sentinelese were
saying.
Sentinelese
homes are lean-tos. They have raised floors and no walls. Three to four families
live in one structure. The Sentinelese typically keep a small fire burning near
the corner of each home, possibly to ward off snakes and insects.
They
use harpoons and to catch fish and sea turtles, and they hunt monitor lizards
and wild pigs with longbows. Shrews, bats, and rats also live on the island,
though whether the Sentinelese eat these is unknown. The islanders’ diet includes coconuts, wild honey, and nuts. They husk coconuts with their
teeth. (Translation: They tear off the outer shell with their teeth. This is
actually not so difficult.)
It
is believed they have no chief or any sort of leader.
They
do not farm.
Their
music has only two notes.
They
only know the numbers one and two. Anything above that is ‘many.’
They
weave baskets, use adzes (small ax-like cutting tools), and know how to make
outrigger canoes, though these vessels lack the wherewithal for trips outside
the shallows near the island. Their arrowheads are made of metal scavenged from shipwrecks.
Ancient
Persian and Arab voyagers who first contacted them thought they were cannibals.
This is apparently not true, but the Sentinelese wear
jawbones of deceased relatives as necklaces.
Contact
with the Sentinelese has been limited. This is due not only to the remoteness
of their island but also to the difficulties of going ashore. Plus,
the Sentinelese have a well-known reputation for wanting to be left alone. They
are not shy about firing barrages of arrows and javelins at outsiders.
Consider
why this might be. In 1880, the British kidnapped six islanders. It was British
policy to do this when they met new tribes. After abducting some of a tribe's
members, they would be returned bearing with lavish gifts to show that the
British wanted to be their friends.
However,
in the case of the abducted Sentinelese, several died before returning. One
might surmise that among the islanders this terrible tale has been passed from
generation to generation. Present-day Sentinelese would naturally fear the same
evil fate might befall them or their loved ones.
That said, however, when the
British ship Nineveh ran aground
on the island’s reef in 1867, naked Sentinelese attacked the 86 survivors who
had made it ashore. They waited three days before going after them with iron-tipped
spears.
In 1974, a National Geographic film
crew hoped to film a documentary on the island. It retreated and left after
the Sentinelese attacked and struck the director in the thigh with an arrow.
Three years later the freighter Primrose wrecked on the island’s reefs. Its
captain radioed for help. When he saw armed islanders building canoes on the
beach, he frantically radioed again, asking that firearms be air-lifted to him
and his crew.
A person on Reddit purporting to be
the son of Primrose's captain,
recounts what he says his father told him when he was 12:
“Their weapons were
primitive; arrows and spears. Certainly not the most intimidating weapons by
today’s standards. But put these primitive weapons in the hands of 30-40
primitive people that have exclusively hunted with them for centuries against a
group of 20 civilized men armed with nothing but a flare gun and you wind up
with a fairly uneven fight.
“They tried to board our ship, but the
surrounding coral reef preventing them from getting on board. They got close
enough for me to see the anger...pure hatred on the faces of the warriors.”
“I watch[ed] as my father [told] the
story, his body visibly shaking and his voice trembling as he recall[ed] the
moment in his life that brought him the closest to his own demise.
“Once they were within range they unleashed
their weaponry on the ship. Most of us were below deck and we heard the pings
of a volley of arrows hitting the side. The few men on deck weren’t afforded
the luxury of a steel barrier. They had been trying to communicate and ease
tension with the Sentinelese.
“They threw them some food, made
friendly gestures. It did nothing to ease their hostility towards us.” He grew
silent for a moment, reliving the next moments before he finally spoke. “Two of
our guys...two were hit. One was struck in the leg. The other...they got him in
the head.”
Volleys of arrows
A Sikorsky helicopter sent
by the Indonesian company P.T. Airfast Services rescued the crew. Its daring
pilot Bob Fore made multiple landings on the freighter's deck. There were only
two feet of extra space to spare between the tips of his spinning rotors and
the ship's superstructure.
More recently, in 2006,
islanders killed two fisherman who went the island to illegally hunt crabs. When the Indian
government dispatched a helicopter to retrieve their bodies, Sentinelese emerged
from the underbrush and loosed volleys of arrows at the great metal bird.
Not every Sentinelese interaction
with the outside world has been violent. Between the late 1960s and early
1990s, the Indian government sent the islanders “contact missions” whose
members were anthropologists.
“I’d give my right arm to know what
they’re thinking, but we just haven’t learned enough about them yet,” said Trilokinath
Pandit, the Director of Tribal Welfare with Anthropological Survey of India.
The islanders were wary of the
outsiders and baffled by them. “Clothing doesn’t make much sense to them,” said
Pandit. “They’re curious about what we were trying to hide underneath.”
Female anthropologist Dr.
Madhumala Chattopadhyay had many experiences with the Sentinelese. “Never ever
in my six years of doing research alone with the tribes of Andamans did any man
ever misbehave with me,” she said. “The tribes might be primitive in their
technological achievements but socially they are far ahead of us.”
Her encounters suddenly ended when the
Indian government imposed a three-mile protective zone around the island. Too
much harm had been done to tribes in the islands. Today the Sentinelese are left in peace as they have been for 60,000 years.
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