![]() Irritated and impatient, the Tytlers-like many British functionaries who ended up in that squalid and inhospitable post, which was essentially one large prison camp-bore up as best they could, hating the place. His wife, despite her fortitude in the retreat from Delhi, now languished in their official residence, plagued by a relentless succession of ailments. Tytler had accepted the Andaman appointment grudgingly, certain that something better would come his way soon. (In appreciation of his wife’s sangfroid, the colonel later named the highest point in the hills above Port Blair in her honor: Mount Harriet.) The redoubtable Harriet gave birth in the back of a bullock cart a few days later, amid the din of nearby shellfire. They had seen wagons laden with corpses of slain officers heard the screams of suspected spies impaled on red-hot pokers fled the city by night as their house and all their possessions, together with the rest of the army cantonment, went up in flames. More recently, Tytler and his young wife, Harriet Tytler-she eight months pregnant, with two small children at her side-had narrowly escaped Delhi in 1857, when the sepoys, or Indian infantrymen, mutinied. Colonel Robert Christopher Tytler was a hard-eyed, blunt-spoken martinet whose lifelong career in the Bengal Army-he had enlisted as a teenager-accustomed him to far worse horrors than this.Īs a young lieutenant, he had first seen combat in the Afghan War, helping to avenge the notorious massacre near Kabul in 1842, when Afghan tribesmen slaughtered an entire British garrison after promising them safe passage back to friendly lines. The colony’s superintendent at the time was not a man to brook any such insubordination. The soldiers loosed a volley or two of musket fire at the mass of agitated native inhabitants and made a hasty retreat to their longboat. Dispatched to an Andamanese camp “to establish friendly relations” with the locals, according to an 1899 history written by British officer Maurice Vidal Portman, the men said the inhabitants had suddenly turned hostile, seized a sailor named James Pratt, pinned him to the ground and shot him to death with their arrows as the other brigadesmen watched in horror. 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.
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