North Sentinel Island: Land of the last known isolated tribe

The North Sentinel Island                    ©go2india.in

The North Sentinel Island is a small island located in the Bay of Bengal, off the coast of India. It is one of the Andaman islands that boasts of a deep green canopy of trees, stretches of sandy beaches, coral reef barriers with a population estimated to be between 50 and 400 individuals.

The Sentinelese poised for an attack

The indigenous people of the island, called the Sentinelese are known to be very hostile to outsiders as they almost always attack visitors. They have overtime rejected any contact with people and are among the last settlement to remain virtually untouched by modern civilization.
Sometimes in 1967, the Indian Government explored the island but the Sentinelese concealed themselves to avoid detection. Having survived the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami in 2004, which took the lives of over 200,000 people, the Indian government again sent helicopters to observe them but they were shot at with arrows made from wrecked ships and stones were thrown with an apparent intent of repelling them. However, they seem to have adapted to the island’s current conditions since their fishing grounds were disturbed by the natural disaster.

Indian anthropologist Trilokinath Pandit's visits in the late 1980s and early 1990s proved more exciting. He left gifts of coconuts, knives, cloth, mirrors, and once a live pig. The native hunter-gatherers killed the pig and buried it in the sand, but only insulted Pandit's group. "They would turn their backs to us and sit on their haunches as if to defecate," he told the Independent.
Another recorded encounter with the Sentinels was back in 2006 when two fishermen drifted too close to the island and were killed. A helicopter sent to recover their bodies was halted by tribesmen's arrows, the Telegraph reported at the time; the air generated by the copter's rotors revealed their bodies in shallow graves. Several ships have been attacked by Sentinelese people, including a ship called the Nineveh, which was stranded near the island in 1868 and the cargo ship Primrose, whose crew members narrowly escaped after being stranded in 1981. India has since established a 3-mile exclusion zone around the island to protect both outsiders and the natives from disease.