In early 1863, a small party of British Royal Navy brigadesmen returned to their base at Port Blair, the colonial capital on the largest island in the archipelago, with a shocking report. The Last Island: Discovery, Defiance and the Most Elusive Tribe on EarthĪs the web of modernity draws ever closer, North Sentinel Island represents the last chapter in the Age of Discovery-the final holdout in a completely connected world. The British arrived in the Andamans bent upon dominion but determined that their conduct would be above reproach. Indeed, the first British superintendent of the Andamans, when dispatched to the archipelago, endeavored to demonstrate that his intentions were “of the most friendly character.” Instead, within just a few years, the Andaman Islands became an imperial heart of darkness worthy of a Joseph Conrad novel. Though the colonizers never occupied North Sentinel Island, they encountered similar tribes scattered through the rest of the archipelago.

It reveals that the Sentinelese are not so much undiscovered as they are in hiding-probably because they are aware of the fates that befell neighboring tribes.įor nearly a century, the Andamans, now a territory of India, were part of the British Empire, settled in 1858 as a penal colony: a place of permanent exile for political dissidents and other prisoners of the Raj. Yet the long-buried history of the Andaman archipelago, which includes several hundred islands in addition to North Sentinel, lifts the curtain on the mystery. John Allen Chau, the Christian missionary killed by the Sentinelese in November 2018 News headlines and online posts continue to refer to North Sentinel as one of the most isolated places in the world, perhaps the last true terra incognita on Earth. When the story hit international networks and social media, many people hailed the islanders as heroes for standing their ground against the forces of modernity and religious aggression.

The Sentinelese, as they are called by outsiders-no one knows how they refer to themselves, nor even what language they speak-responded to Chau’s overtures by killing him on the beach with their bows and arrows. Their transformation into a global sensation happened after a young American evangelical missionary named John Allen Chau landed on North Sentinel Island, a scrap of land inhabited by a tribe of hunter-gatherers still living in total isolation. The Andaman Islands, a remote tropical archipelago in the Indian Ocean, drifted on the margins of the world’s consciousness until 2018, when the fact of their existence suddenly went viral.

Map north sentinel island