LOCATION Andaman Islands, Bay of Bengal
NEAREST POPULATION HUB Port Blair, Great Andaman
SECRECY OVERVIEW Access restricted: a remote island whose people reject contact with the outside world.
North Sentinel Island, which covers only 72 square kilometers (28 sq miles), has an indigenous population of somewhere between 50 and 400 Sentinelese, a dark-skinned and short-statured people and one of the last groups on earth to have resisted contact with the modern world. Jealously protective of their isolation, any attempt by outsiders to land on the island is likely to result in a hail of arrows.
North Sentinel lies to the west of the southern tip of South Andaman Island and is one of 572 islands in an 800-kilometer (500-mile) arc. Here, the Sentinelese live as hunter-gatherers and do not seem to have developed any forms of agriculture. Their diet includes fruits, nuts, tubers, fish, wild pigs, honey and the eggs of seagulls and turtles. Their language is significantly different to any of the other tongues spoken in the island group, leading academics to conclude that they have avoided contact even with relatively near neighbors for several millennia. The island lacks any natural harbors and is surrounded by uncharted coral reefs that have largely kept out visitors as well as keeping in the Sentinelese, whose own rudimentary boats are suited only to calm lagoons.
In 1880, Maurice Portman, an administrator in the British Raj, led the first known expedition to North Sentinel. After a few days of exploration, Portman and his team captured six natives (two adults and four children), whom they took back to Port Blair, the administrative capital of the Andamans. However, the enterprise ended in disaster when the adults died from illness. The orphaned children were dispatched home loaded with presents—scant compensation for their loss.
Tentative attempts from the 1960s to make contact with the Sentinelese met with limited success. Incidents such as the one in 1974 when a visiting documentary crew was attacked and the director suffered an arrow to the thigh were not uncommon. After many years of regular landings and gift offerings, the first recorded friendly contact was made in 1991.
However, similar schemes with other native peoples of the islands (including the Great Andamanese and the Jarawa) had ended disastrously when those populations were decimated by exposure to common but unfamiliar diseases. Under pressure from groups arguing that the Sentinelese should not be forced into contact, the government gave up on its contact program in 1996.
1 UNWELCOME VISIT A tribesman greets an approaching helicopter with traditional Sentinelese hospitality in 2004. The aircraft, belonging to the Indian Coast Guard, flew over the island to gauge conditions following the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami. North Sentinel emerged in miraculously good health.