Why Uncontacted Tribes Want to Stay Uncontacted (2024)

About 10,000 people on Earth still live as members of what some anthropologists call “uncontacted tribes”: groups of hunter-gatherers in almost total seclusion from the outside world, many of them deep in the Amazon Basin. But no human community is more isolated than the inhabitants of tiny North Sentinel Island in the Andaman archipelago, far off the coast of India in the Bay of Bengal. The Sentinelese, as they are known to outsiders—no one has gotten close enough to learn what they call themselves, or even what language they speak—still hunt with bows, arrows, and spears. They also use these weapons to kill anyone who ventures onto their shore, including a persistent 26-year-old American Christian missionary, John Chau, in 2018.

News of Chau’s demise on that remote beach swept across the international press and social media, surprising readers with the fact that such a terra incognita could exist in the 21st century. Since then, the Sentinelese, who likely number from 50 to 200, have become symbols of resistance to the seemingly inexorable forces of modernization and globalization. A new National Geographic documentary, The Mission, which premieres in theaters today and will be streaming online later this year, promises to draw new attention to Chau’s obsessive life and the tribe that lethally rejected his evangelism. (I was a consultant to the filmmakers.) Meanwhile, the Hollywood director Justin Lin, best known for the Fast & Furious franchise, is set to start shooting a dramatization of the story.

Read: The unknown Indian–the incredible story of an uncontacted tribe member

I first traveled to the Andaman Islands as a young journalist in 1998, drawn there by tales of the uncontacted tribe. As Chau would do two decades later, I paid some non-Indigenous fishermen to take me illegally, under cover of darkness, to the waters off North Sentinel. Unlike him, I did not attempt to land. Still, the sight of several islanders coming down to the beach was like peering into another millennium.

But it wasn’t until more recently, when I began researching a book about the strange story of North Sentinel, that I truly began to grasp how and why they have isolated themselves so completely. Much of the real story has remained buried in the archives of the 19th-century British empire. It reveals that the islanders are neither uncontacted nor undiscovered; they are in hiding, having managed to slip through the net of a terrible history.

At the center of this story—long forgotten by almost everyone outside North Sentinel—is another intruder on the island’s shores: a man even younger, stranger, and more persistent than Chau. In little-known photographs and a previously undiscovered private diary, I found new clues to why the Sentinelese today might defend their shores with such tenacity.

Maurice Vidal Portman was an unlikely imperial adventurer. The grandson of one of the richest aristocrats in England, he was pulled out of school under mysterious circ*mstances in his teens and sent to India. A few years after entering the colonial service, he was dispatched to the most inhospitable post in the empire: the Andaman Islands. Two decades before Portman’s arrival in 1879, officials in British India had begun using the largest island in the chain as a penal colony for political dissidents and other incorrigible criminals.

The archipelago had already been home to at least a dozen Indigenous tribes scattered across multiple islands—including North Sentinel. Geneticists believe that these small, dark-skinned people, who bear little physical or cultural resemblance to other Asians, may have separated from the rest of the human species as early as 60,000 years ago. By the time Portman got to the Andamans, these natives were fast dying out because of disease, warfare, and cultural genocide brought by the British, who herded them into prisonlike “homes” and set them to forced labor.

Read: The modern dignity of an uncontacted tribe

None of the penal colony’s sun-browned, barrel-chested senior officers could have expected much of Portman in those early days. He was almost a caricature of the chinless aristocrat: a weedy, moody, slightly stooped young man with artistic tendencies. (He had brought his cherished violin with him to the islands.) At 18, he was given a job that few could have wanted: officer in charge of the Andamanese, with orders to explore the remote reaches of the archipelago and attempt to “befriend” those tribes that still resisted British dominion. That India’s colonial overlords placed an untested teenager in this position suggests something about where the Indigenous tribes’ welfare ranked on their list of priorities.

Portman took to his job with surprising enthusiasm. He usually traveled in a small government steamer unaccompanied by any other British personnel but instead with a retinue of convict servants and what he called “junglies”—that is, “tame” Andamanese from tribes that had made a truce with their colonizers. Any of these companions, he must have known, could have ended his life at any moment with a hard shove from the boat’s deck. He landed, often alone, on unknown shores where he envisioned unfamiliar tribes lurking in the forests. Several times, if his official and personal diaries are to be believed, he faced native arrows with bravery that bordered on nonchalance.

Despite his youth and his stunted education, Portman investigated his surroundings with a scientist’s eye. Exploring beaches, reefs, and bluffs, he carefully cataloged species of animals and types of minerals that he encountered and began filling notebooks with observations of the natives’ culture, music, crafts, huts, food, tattoos. He also set about learning the native tongues, which he found pleasantly lilting and which, to most of the colonizers, were absolutely unintelligible. Before long, he was sending articles to scholarly journals back in the mother country. Victorian science was interested in the Andamanese: Many early scholars of evolution cast them in sharply racist terms. Alfred Russel Wallace counted them among “prehistoric races” with brains “very little above those of many animals.”

Eventually, Portman taught himself photography, trundling his cumbersome equipment with him on his expeditions. In the late 1880s, he contacted the British Museum and the imperial authorities with a plan: If the natives of the Andaman Islands were indeed fated to extinction, as he and others believed, he would use 19th-century technology to preserve them for posterity. This project would require thousands of images, at a time when a single successful photograph, even under optimal circ*mstances, might require hours to produce—a gargantuan labor. But the officer in charge of the Andamanese undertook it.

Portman’s fragile glass-plate negatives survive today in ancient, damp, stained wooden boxes in the British Museum. Only a few of the images have ever been published. Some of his photographs are, on a purely aesthetic level, extraordinarily beautiful. Yet a sense of doom pervades them.

this Victorian adventurer’s darker side emerges even in his scholarly publications, including the phrasebook of Andamanese languages that Portman compiled for other Britons’ use. The sentences that he chose to translate inadvertently reveal a great deal about his own high-handed interactions with the beleaguered natives whom he met in the far reaches of the island chain:

Even more revealing was Portman’s private journal, two volumes of which I discovered in 2019 in the British Library, where it had been miscataloged, its author unidentified. The handwriting matches his, and the text makes reference to his family. Here were accounts of the same voyages he described in his scholarly publications and official reports—but as a kind of shadow text revealing, in a far more intimate way, how callously he treated the Indigenous people in his charge.

He seems to have regarded many of the Indigenous Andamanese with genuine fondness, bestowing English names on his favorites. But whenever he decided that the natives had misbehaved, he responded with violence, which his journals describe with eerie dispassion:

Portman’s erotic life also revealed itself the moment I opened the second volume of his diaries. There on the faded-orange endpapers was a series of pencil sketches of penises, some of them carefully delineated, others in faintest outline. All of them were strangely disembodied, detached from any other human form. Examining the entries, I also began noticing the way he ended many of his days:

His journals typically describe apparently sexual encounters as “talk” or “conversation”—which was not uncommon in Victorian times, when illicit sex was known as “criminal conversation.” On one occasion, he writes in the journal: “Lay and talked with Muggra, who declares I taught him, which is against evidence. They all will luckily admit nothing about others and are I hope to be depended on.”

Same-sex liaisons among unmarried people apparently carried less stigma among Indigenous Andamanese than in 19th-century England. What’s disturbing, beyond the possibility that Portman was having “Bill,” “Owen,” and perhaps other sexual partners beaten, is that Portman carried on liaisons with Indigenous people while knowing that he was infected with a wasting illness—probably syphilis. That illness resulted in his taking repeated prolonged sick leaves, and eventually caused him to leave the archipelago for good in 1900, cutting short his planned 50-volume set of photographs.

British colonial records are rife with accounts of Andamanese women being sexually exploited by male colonizers. Whether the Sentinelese ever learned that Portman had exposed Andamanese men to disease is lost to history, but the reclusive islanders could see all too well that a heedless colonial adventurer like him threatened their existence.

Portman’s diaries and scholarly writings reveal that he tried to make contact with the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island multiple times, repeatedly landing there on his expeditions. On one such trip, just a year after his arrival in the archipelago, he brought a large party of armed men with him, a decision that he would later confess had been a mistake. Sweating and swearing as they trudged through the jungle, with sabers rattling and cartridge-boxes swinging, the officers and soldiers managed to frighten off any Sentinelese. As soon as these intruders came within earshot, the natives retreated into the forest. A few times, Portman got close enough to discern what he would describe as their “peculiarly idiotic expression of countenance, and manner of behaving.” (Could it be that this was how he perceived their understandable terror?)

Finally, after nearly two weeks tromping around the little island, Portman and his men managed to capture a few stragglers: an old man, his wife, and four young children. The man drew his bow and was about to let loose the arrow when Portman’s convict orderly leaped onto the assailant’s back. The natives were taken unhurt back to the main British penal settlement.

Even Portman himself later admitted in an 1899 book that his strenuous efforts to befriend the Sentinelese had done nothing but “increase their general terror of, and hostility to, all comers.” Still, in the interest of science, he held the captives for observation. Unfortunately, the six Sentinelese did not thrive. Portman later blamed “the new style of food, and the excitement they must have been in.” This diagnosis was surely insufficient. All six grew rapidly sicker. The old man and his wife died. The ailing children were sent back to their island, laden with gifts. What alien microbes they may also have borne on that homeward journey can only be guessed.

From the July/August 2022 Issue: They bent to their knees and kissed the sand

Portman would return repeatedly to North Sentinel during his 21 years in the Andamans, but he never again caught more than a fleeting glimpse of the Indigenous people. Eventually he started bringing his camera with him, and a few images survive of the island’s interior: massive tree trunks like pale specters, with light filtering through the dense forest canopy. Several of the photographs supposedly depict native hunters in the North Sentinel forest, their small bodies silhouetted against massive buttress roots. But these are clearly posed, likely with Portman’s “friendly” Andamanese from other islands as his models.

Well more than a century later, those staged photos feel like premonitions of our own time. I found myself thinking of them recently, when I attended a National Geographic preview screening of The Mission on a rooftop terrace in Hollywood. Unable to capture their own footage of the Sentinelese, the filmmakers had hired animators to depict Chau’s fatal encounter. As I watched the sequence, I marveled that 10,000 miles away, the islanders were going about their daily lives, blessedly unaware that simulacra of them, several times larger than life, were flickering on a wall high above Sunset Boulevard—revealing them once more as unwilling participants in a global culture that, since Portman’s day, has wanted to know them far more than they want to know it.

This essay has been adapted from Adam Goodheart’s new book, The Last Island: Discovery, Defiance, and the Most Elusive Tribe on Earth.

The Last Island: A Traveler's Tale of Death, Discovery, and the Most Elusive Tribe on Earth

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Adam Goodheart