Still, Pathak said he was consulting anthropologists and even psychologists to better understand the possible impacts of the incident on the islanders, who might themselves be experiencing trauma. By law, Pathak said, not even the police are allowed to enter a five-mile buffer zone around the island. ![]() “As of now, we don’t have any plan to confront them or land there, which would certainly create a lot of distress among them,” Andaman police director general Dependra Pathak told National Geographic by phone from his home in Port Blair. On the second boat excursion, police saw five or six tribesmen with bows and arrows keeping watch along the beach. In the aftermath of Chau’s disappearance, authorities mounted three exploratory trips-one by air and two by boat-taking a pair of the fishermen with them to scout for the location of the body. What he probably didn’t realise was that this event would set in motion a series of developments would lead to actually harming the tribe.”įearing that international pressure could result in an attempt to recover Chau’s body, with unforeseen and possibly devastating consequences, she added: “This is an inflection point in the history of the Sentinelese.” “He wanted to be a Christian martyr, and he is. “He knew he was very likely to get killed,” said Madhusree Mukerjee, a senior editor at Scientific American from Kolkata and author of The Land of Naked People, a book about her experiences among the indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands. India has charged seven people-including the fishermen and a local engineer and missionary identified as 'Alexander' who allegedly helped Chau plan his trip-with 'culpable homicide' and violating laws that strictly proscribe visits to the island. From the clothing and the body’s silhouette, they deduced that it was Chau. From the distance, they later reported under police questioning, they saw the Sentinelese dragging a body and burying it on the beach. ![]() On November 17, the fishermen skirted the shore. He instructed the fishermen not to wait for him this time and to deliver his notes to a friend back in Port Blair, the administrative capital of the Andaman Islands. Setting his fears aside, he resolved to go back that night. “What makes them become this defensive and hostile?” he wrote. In his journal, Chau wondered if North Sentinel Island might be “Satan’s last stronghold,” and he expressed frustration that he hadn’t been greeted with open arms. He paddled back to the fishermen whom he’d paid about £270 to bring him there and await his return. As he saw two other tribesmen readying arrows in their bows, Chau beat a hasty retreat in his kayak. That initial approach was rebuffed when an arrow pierced a waterproof copy of the Bible Chau held aloft in his quest to evangelise the tribe. Efforts to recover the bodies were abandoned after archers launched projectiles at a helicopter as it attempted to land.Ĭhau’s own death was made especially poignant by notes he scrawled in a journal after his first attempt to come ashore, on November 15. That fierce reputation was reinforced in 2006, when two fishermen were killed by the tribe after their craft drifted ashore while they slept. Even today, the iconic images of warriors prancing with bows and arrows along the island’s white-sand beaches taken on that expedition by National Geographic photographer Raghubir Singh remain a testament to tribe’s defiance of the outside world. The director of a National Geographic documentary about the Andamans was wounded by a spear flung at him as he filmed the Sentinelese from a boat in 1974. ![]() Previous attempts at contact have been met with showers of spears and arrows. Believed to number no more than a hundred, they’re the sole inhabitants of the densely forested island. The Sentinelese are deft archers who have developed a fearsome reputation as staunch defenders of their homeland. Like uncontacted and isolated tribes elsewhere in the world, most notably in the Amazon rain forest, the Sentinelese are considered to be at high risk for contagious diseases borne by outsiders, against which they have little or no immunological defense. No one knows for sure how long the Sentinelese-the last demographically intact, essentially uncontacted tribe of the Andamans-have lived there, but some studies indicate the tribe may have migrated from Africa tens of thousands of years ago. North Sentinel is part of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a sprawling archipelago administered by India that stretches between India’s southern tip and the west coast of Myanmar. The coral-fringed island, which is about the size of Croydon and strictly off-limits to outsiders, harbours one of the planet’s most isolated hunter-gatherer societies, known as the Sentinelese.
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