“Lord, is this island Satan’s last stronghold where none have heard or even had the chance to hear your name?” recorded John Allen Chau in a diary of his last days. Chau, a 26-year-old American missionary, wanted to “declare Jesus” to one of the world’s last uncontacted tribes – the Sentinelese, who inhabit the restricted North Sentinel island in the eastern Indian Ocean. The Sentinelese resist external contact and are known to express their will with arrows. On 17 November, they shot Chau dead, as he approached them with a Bible and some gifts. Now his body may not even be able to be retrieved, for fear of spreading disease to the island.
Once, the entire Andamans were perceived as a “Satan’s stronghold”, an abode of a ferocious race that The Travels of Marco Polo caricatures as – “idolaters”, “no better than wild beasts”, who have “heads like dogs, and teeth and eyes likewise”, “ a most cruel generation”, who would eat everybody they could catch. These islands remained a terra incognita until the British colonised them in the late 18th century. A “civilised” race came in close contact with the “savages” – the Great Andamanese, the Onge, the Jarawa, the Sentinelese and the Jangil (extinct by the 1920s). The tribes exhibited an implacable hostility towards strangers, but the charge of cannibalism against them was unfounded. It was merely a misinterpretation of the ritual that some indigenous people practised – cutting and burning the dead to avoid their return as evil spirits.
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