The Sentinelese: Why contacting this tribe will get you killed

The Sentinelese are a group of indigenous people who have inhabited the North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean for an estimated 60,000 years.

The tribe, whose population is estimated to be about 100, has remained isolated from the modern world with no knowledge or comprehension of civilization beyond their hunter-gatherer lifestyle reminiscent of the Stone Age.

Primitive to the core, little to nothing is known about this tribe, not even the language they speak or what they call themselves. They’re considered the most uncontacted people in the world.

Most of what has been documented about them has been observed from a distance in boats. Any attempt to make contact with them, deliberately or by chance, has often ended tragically.

So tragic that the Indian government sealed off the island to the outside world and established a 5km cutline around it and declared the tribe immune to prosecution for the murder of anyone stupid enough to intrude into their territory.

This was to ensure the tribe’s desire not to be contacted is respected and to protect them from exploitation, violence and diseases to which they have no immunity. The island is guarded by the Indian navy round the clock.

North Sentinel Island is a territory of the Indian government alongside Andaman Island gifted to the country by the British colonialists upon independence.

Savage aggression

In 1896, an escaped convict from Andaman Island’s Port Blair prison veered off to North Sentinel Island in a makeshift raft. A search party of prison warders found him dead days later – shot with arrows and his throat slit.

On January 26, 2006, the tribe killed two Indian fishermen whose boat drifted off to the island as they slept overnight, reportedly from heavy drinking.

Other fishermen who witnessed the incident said the tribesmen hacked the fishermen to death then hang their bodies on poles seemingly to warn other would be intruders.

The most recent tragic incident was in November 2018 when John Allen Chau, a 27-year-old American missionary journeyed to the island with the intent to convert the tribe.

He bribed local fishermen to take him closer to the island from where he kayaked onto the island by himself. Despite warning arrow shots, he continued walking.

Watching from a distance, the fishermen saw the tribesmen tie a robe around his neck and drag him in the sand. Scared, they fled but returned the following day to find his body on the seashore.

 “This tragedy should never have been allowed to happen. The Indian authorities should have been enforcing the protection of the Sentinelese and their island for the safety of both the tribe and outsiders,” Survival International director Stephen Corry said in a statement on November 21, 2018.

Survival International is a lobby group that exposes atrocities committed against indigenous tribes and fights for their survival and protection of their lands, lives and livelihoods.

More peculiar behaviours of the tribe have been documented.

Their first sighting was in 1771 when an East India Company ship observed numerous lights on the shores of North Sentinel Island but did not venture close enough to investigate.

Almost a century later in 1867, severe monsoon winds pushed an Indian merchant ship towards the island prompting an arrow attack from the islanders.

The crew of the vessel managed to fend off the attackers with crude weapons until the Royal Navy came to their rescue. The abandoned shipwreck can still be seen via Google Earth to date.

The British revisited the island in 1880 and discovered an abandoned village. They kidnapped six of the tribesmen – an elderly couple and four children. They all fell ill upon exposure to the outside world at Port Blair; the couple died.

British Royal Navy officer Maurice Vidal Portman returned the children to the island with gifts. He regretted the venture.

“This expedition was not a success. We cannot be said to have done anything more than increase their general terror of, and hostility to, all comers. It would have been better to have left the islanders alone,” Portman wrote in his journal.

In the 1970s, the Indian government tried to contact the tribe with the intention of teaching them farming and assimilating them into society. Attempts to send them gifts were rebuffed, bows and arrows at the ready.

A National Geographic crew accompanied by police and anthropologists would also be attacked in 1974 and the film director was shot in the thigh with an arrow as they shot a documentary dubbed ‘Man in Search of Man’.

It wasn’t until the 1990s when there was some breakthrough. The tribe accepted coconut gifts on one occasion but became hostile again thereafter.

It has been suggested that they could have contracted diseases during the brief encounter with outsiders or the coconuts made them sick.

In the wake of the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, concern was raised about the safety of the Sentinelese and a rescue team was dispatched to check on them.

But an aerial patrol established that the indigenous tribe survived the catastrophe.

A lone man was photographed running in an attempt to shoot an arrow at a low-flying rescue chopper.