North Sentinel Island

Author Ben Thompson and Dr. Pat Larash discuss one of the few places left on Earth about which we still know next to nothing, the people of North Sentinel Island remain almost completely untouched by the outside world. Surrounded by unapproachable reefs, and covered in dense jungle, this tiny island in the Indian Ocean is home to a civilization that is almost completely unobservable, even with modern drones and satellites. More curiously, the people who live there have no interest in communication or interaction with the outside world -- the North Sentinelese have repeatedly responded to all attempts at communication with violence.

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Episode Transcript:

Somewhere in the Bay of Bengal, hidden between Indonesia and India, is a heavily-jungled island roughly 20% larger than Manhattan, New York. Canopy forests circle large sandy beaches. This mysterious place has no natural harbors, is completely surrounded by dangerous coral reefs. And since the dawn of mankind, this island has been almost completely untouched by the outside world. To this day, it is illegal for anyone to set foot on this would-be paradise – the Coast Guard of India maintains a 3-mile cordon around the island. It is completely forbidden to visit.

This cordon is there for YOUR protection. Because while this miniscule speck of land in the Indian Ocean may appear to be completely uninhabited, it is in fact home to one of the last civilizations on earth about which we know absolutely nothing and few who have set foot there have lived to tell the tale.

This is North Sentinel Island.

Ben: Hello and welcome back to the show. This is bad ass of the week. My name is Ben Thompson, and I am here with my co-host, Dr. Pat LaRoche. So I've got in Brazil for basically to escape the Seattle winter away from the rain. And I'm down here in the sun where it also rains pretty heavily, occasionally for an hour or two every day. But we went out on my father in law's boat and he was talking to me about an island that I've heard of before, the island of Dodge. It's 106 acres, which is point one, seven square miles, which is not large. It's about the size of a lake, a big lake resort hotel.

Pat [00:01:54] Okay.

Ben [00:01:54] Yeah, Like a ranch or something. Yeah, it's not huge. It's an island off the coast of Sao Paulo. It's a temperate rainforest, and it has more snakes per square meter of land than anywhere else in the world. It's colloquially known as Snake Island.

Pat [00:02:12] Now, this is not to be confused with Snake Island, Ukraine, which has its own badass story. But that's a matter for another time.

Ben [00:02:19] Right. Yeah, that's. That's the Russian warship. Go fuck yourself, Island, right?

Pat [00:02:22] Exactly.

Ben [00:02:23] Exactly. It's a different bad Snake Island. Yeah. And at one point, there were thought to be 400,000 snakes living there. I think the number is, like, actually way smaller than that. But, like, that's how packed full of snakes this island is. And among these snakes is is a species of snake called the golden lance head pit viper. And it exists only on this island. And they are extremely venomous. It's huge. There's not a lot of data on them because it's illegal to go to this island. Only like Brazilian Navy personnel are allowed there and only to, like, repair the lighthouse. And only because they don't really want to be responsible for people crashing into this island when they're trying to pull into the harbor at Sao Paulo. So we don't have a ton of data on the snake bites of the golden lance head pit viper. But we do know that their cousins, the non golden lance head pit viper, are responsible for more fatal snake bites than any other snake in North or South America. So the idea is that like basically if you get bit by them, you'll be dead within like a couple of hours if you don't get treatment. And because they only live on this island, there is no treatment except for if you can get helicopter lifted or take a boat back to Sao Paulo, which would take a couple of hours and you'll be dead. But yeah.

Pat [00:03:40] Yeah, that's still seems a little it's a little hard schedule.

Ben [00:03:43] Yeah, exactly. Yeah. They think that it's like an evolutionary thing. So the the theory on Snake Island, Brazil, is that it used to be attached to the mainland. And then one of these ice ages, like, made it into an island. And some of these pit vipers got stuck out on that island and became, you know, kind of evolved Pokemon, evolved into Golden and said, Pit vipers. Mm hmm. And they think it has to be so potent because they have to kill birds. The only thing they can eat is birds. Oh, so they have to, like, bite the bird and have it die before it flies away.

Pat [00:04:19] Okay. Yeah, Because the island is so small, there aren't that many possible prey animals that live there.

Ben [00:04:24] Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I like this of all the, like, bad as islands. This is a pretty solid. Pretty solid.

Pat [00:04:30] Definitely.

Ben [00:04:31] Definitely. I will also say that, like, the Ice Age thing is probably the explanation for these things. But there's an amazing theory out there that these snakes were introduced by pirates because there's buried treasure all over the island. And so the pirates put these super deadly snakes on the islands to keep people from searching for the treasure. And then because there's no predators, they bred out of control and now they are on the island. And this this Brazilian pirate treasure will never be found, which I love. But it seems improbable.

Pat [00:05:02] Improbable and also seems like it backfired.

Ben [00:05:04] People did used to live on the island. Is my. Really? Yeah, like, just like ten. The lighthouse story goes that they were all killed by by snakes. The lighthouse keeper being the last one when just mountains of snakes piled in through his window while he was sleeping and killed him and his whole family and everybody. Oh, no. It's probably legend, but it might not be okay. Oh, you know, there's lots of stories of people trying to land on that island and then being killed by snakes. Wow. Pretty weird and cool. And it's a fun story that I like. And we didn't we did not attempt to sail near it when we were on my father in law's little sailboat. Good for you. I didn't see it. And I don't want to see it. And I don't want to go there. And I don't.

Pat [00:05:46] Know.

Ben [00:05:47] No, Don't want to encounter a golden viper in the wild.

Pat [00:05:51] No, no, that would suck.

Ben [00:05:53] Well, since we're on the subject, it got me thinking. Let's talk about another weird, forbidden island that's illegal to visit. It's one that I wrote about on the website a while back and that I've been really excited to talk about on the show here. It is called North Sentinel Island. It is possibly one of the most awesome badass. Forbidden places on earth. We're going to talk about it right after this break. Welcome back. We are going to talk about North Central Island. And there's a reef that surrounds the entire island that makes it really hard for any kind of like deep water boats to approach. So you can take a big boat to the outside of the reef. But if you want to approach the main island from any direction, you kind of need a canoe. And that isolated the island, which is such a fascinating thing to talk about and kind of affected its development the way that it did. So there are people that live on North Central Island and there are people about which we know nothing. They're probably like among the last civilizations on Earth, about which we know very, very little, almost nothing. The only thing we really know about these people is that they try to kill anyone who lands on their island. They are very protective of the island and very defensive of it and very aggressive to outsiders. Most of the photographs you see of the people that live here are like pointing arrows at the camera that's taking the photo.

Pat [00:07:28] Yeah. And it's a camera that's on like a helicopter or some sort of aircraft, Right.

Ben [00:07:32] A drone or a helicopter or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. So we are in the Bay of Bengal, so we're off the coast of India, and technically it's one of the Andaman Islands. Technically, it's like under like Indian jurisdiction. But the people that live there are very dark skinned. They appear almost African in appearance. We don't know anything about their background because we have no DNA from these people. We've never taken any. And one of the other interesting things about the area is that it is extremely heavily forested. So we can't see through the canopy cover. So we don't know how many people live there. We don't know where they sleep. Really. We we have ideas about their shelters and what they eat and things like that. But realistically, we know very, very little about these people from the water. We've seen them collect coconuts and they spear hunt for fish and other wildlife. They have canoes, they wear jewelry. But we really don't know very much about these people at all. We can't communicate with them because we can't speak their language. And not only is their language not decipherable, it has no resemblance to any other language that we know of, which is really interesting or.

Pat [00:08:51] No resemblance that we can discern to any other language. If we had a chance to get to know the language better, we might find out more about it and realize that, oh, maybe it actually it's somehow related to this language family or that language family. But yeah, if you look up the North Central Ways language on, say, Wikipedia, it will say that it is undescribed. And that means that it's undescribed by linguists. And that's kind of a big deal because most languages of the world, linguists have been able to learn enough about to at least describe like what family do they belong to, or at least make a conjecture as to what family they belong to. Some sort of introduction to the language, even if it's incomplete, even if it's imperfect, even if it's distorted somehow. But to say that a language is undescribed means that even professional linguists don't have enough to go on.

Ben [00:09:43] Okay, so we'll start with Ptolemy. And Ptolemy is writing in the second century A.D. and he talks about, among other things, a, quote, island of cannibals in the Bay of Bengal that's in the general vicinity of North Central Island. And cannibalism is a thing that comes up a lot whenever, quote, civilized people are talking about people that they don't understand or tribes they don't understand. But he does write about an island in the Bay of Bengal in which anyone who tries to land on this island is met with violence by people who kill them. And Ptolemy takes it a step further to say that they cut up and mutilate and eat the dead bodies, which maybe is true, maybe it's not.

Pat [00:10:27] And you have to remember, Ptolemy is living in Alexandria, in Egypt. So geographically he's pretty far away. He's not giving a firsthand account of anything.

Ben [00:10:39] Yeah, he was like he was a pretty high ranking aristocrat living it up in his palace in Alexandria, writing down stories that he's heard. And and that is the thing that is going to continue to come up as we talk about North Central Island. Yes. And it's a thing that, like I confess, I think is cool, but also it's something worth keeping in mind if you're going to approach it from a historical standpoint or a anthropological standpoint, which is that like North Central Island gets a lot of that Tarzan kind of treatment of the like Pulp Dime novel adventure story treatment of like, you know, the last uncharted place on Earth, you know, all adventure and and danger and cannibals and all of this stuff. A lot of that is attributed to North Sentinel Island, not. All earned and deserved. And we don't hear about anything in this general vicinity again for about a thousand years. In 1296, Marco Polo, our good friend of the podcast, Marco Polo. He's sailing through the Indian Ocean and he hears from one of the sailors on his boat that he about an island of like head hunting cannibals. You can't be reasoned with the military. You no matter what, if you try to land on their island, might be North Sentinel. Might not be. We're not sure. Yeah.

Pat [00:11:54] And did Marco Polo actually go there?

Ben [00:11:56] He did not. No. He's recounting a story that he heard. This would not be admissible in court as this hearsay.

Pat [00:12:02] Okay, If that's the story that you're hearing. You might understand why he did not actually go there. Okay. Maybe it wasn't actually a convenient place to stop, but also maybe he had a disincentive to go there. Maybe he liked his head attached to his shoulders.

Ben [00:12:15] Yeah. You know, island of murders, head hunting, cannibals. And I need to stop there. Yeah, I got to take your word for it. These two descriptions of islands in this general vicinity weren't particularly appealing to many adventurers, and nor Sentinel went mostly untouched for the next 500 years or so. And then the next one is 1771. The British East India Company. They survey the islands. They dub it North Sentinel Islands. We call it that today because we have no idea what the native inhabitants of this island call it. And history has shown that, you know, if you're going to, once it's written on the map as North Sentinel by the British East India Company in 1771, to really care what you call your island, this is what it's called now. And they didn't dock there. They just named it and went.

Pat [00:13:02] On.

Ben [00:13:03] Sailed away without ever setting foot on the islands, which. Yeah, why not? Yeah, that's a very British East India company thing to do. Nobody else really comes near the island again for another hundred years or so. So now we're in 1867 and nobody's really set foot on this island before.

Pat [00:13:20] I mean, no one from the outside world, except, of course, the people we call Central is have been like setting foot on the island for generations because they live there.

Ben [00:13:27] That is fair. And that is a good point and it is well taken. It was not a venture to buy people from outside the island. Yeah, for now, we're going on 1867. There was a ship, an Indian ship called the Nineveh, and it shipwrecked on the beach of north central Island after a storm and then out of the forest almost immediately upon the shipwreck are warriors with bows and spears. And they come out and they attack the shipwreck. Good. They don't ask any questions. They don't try to communicate. They come out of the jungle and they attack several people. On the night of our killed. They kill a few of their attackers and they eventually are able to drive off the Sentinel. These they have swords and guns, which are two things that traditionally win against our spear and the Longbow. Yeah, but they are able to kind of fight off the attack and escape the small boats on the Nova. They take them out past the reef, they get picked up, everything works out for them.

Pat [00:14:27] They spread the word, Hey, it's a small island. Don't go there. People there don't like us.

Ben [00:14:32] So we'll jump forward a little bit now and we'll go to 1896. The British kind of come in and they colonize the Andaman Islands. They want to kind of set up some some trading posts here. They want to do the colonialism thing. And they managed to do that pretty successfully. And what do they do with the Andaman Islands? They, of course, set them up as a penal colony in the same style as as Australia. And one of these convicts manages to escape his prison colony.

Pat [00:15:01] Sounds kind of badass.

Ben [00:15:02] He builds a canoe and he sails pretty awesome. It's like the Alcatraz thing, right? Yeah. Build the canoe. He sails north. He's trying to get to India, but, you know, he doesn't have a compass, doesn't really know where he is, even. Yeah, he lands on North Central Island. Who turns out? Which is probably worse than being in the penal colony. What happened to him? Well, they cut his throat, they stabbed him, and they. They. They shot him full of arrows, and. And he died. And they buried him on the beach.

Pat [00:15:28] Okay. That's what they do. Yeah.

Ben [00:15:29] Is what happens to outsiders who try to land on this island. Yeah. And they've been very consistent about this for the last 3000 years of history. So the next story about these people comes from 1974.

Pat [00:15:44] Well, that's within living memory, right?

Ben [00:15:47] This is the craziest thing about North Central Island or for me, like one of the most interesting things is that like we talk about this kind of Indiana Jones time period thought when you think about the people that live on this island. But this is not that like of all of the stuff we know about them. Most of it comes from the last like 40 to 50 years. Yeah, Yeah. So in 1974, National Geographic decides they're going to go to the island and meet these people because for whatever reason, probably involving some violence and killing and cutting people up and burying their bodies and. Rumors of cannibalism or whatever else. Nobody is really bothered to try to land on North Central Island and communicate with these people in any real way. So National Geographic in 1974, they get a TV crew together and they're going to go and explore it.

Pat [00:16:40] How does that go?

Ben [00:16:42] Well, how do you think it go?

Pat [00:16:45] Well, okay, it could go either of two ways.

Ben [00:16:47] I'll just tell you what happens. So they show up with speedboats. So they take the big boat out there to take little speedboats over the reef. They go onto the beach and they leave a baby doll, some coconuts and a life jacket. And they go back to the they they walk away. They wait a minute. It doesn't take long before the sentinels show up. They come out of the woods. They're armed. They are ready for combat. They look at all this stuff on the beach. They look at this National Geographic crew. They look at these speedboats, which like this is going to be a recurring thing with the center leaves, which is just like a lot of indigenous tribes, kind of were historically very scared of any kind of technology. But it doesn't seem to even faze the sensibilities at all. They can look at a speedboat and just be like, Well, this is an enemy. I got to fight this thing, you know?

Pat [00:17:43] Okay. Yeah.

Ben [00:17:43] Which is what they do. They shoot arrows at the National Geographic Food. They hit the director in the knee, Puts an end to his adventure days. Whoops. National Geographic jumps back on other speedboats. They speed away. And then the Sentinel warriors on the beach smash everything on the beach, including the life pig destroyed, all smashed into pieces and buried on the beach. And they wait for the National Geographic crew. They stand on the beach with their weapons and wait for the National Geographic crew to leave.

Pat [00:18:08] Saying, Don't come back. Get off our lawn.

Ben [00:18:10] Yeah, they're there. They're yelling and shaking their spears at them and waving their dicks at them. Which is a thing, apparently.

Pat [00:18:17] Yeah. Yeah. In some cultures.

Ben [00:18:18] That's a they don't wear a lot of clothes like. Yeah, some say loincloth. Some say nothing at all. And so some dick waving, which probably is threatening, probably is meant to be threatening. I mean, that kind of speaks for itself, I feel like. Yeah. And actually graphic leaves and they don't they don't try to come back yet.

Pat [00:18:34] They took the hint.

Ben [00:18:34] Yeah, I get the hint like that. We're not we're not being subtle about this. We really don't want your shitty coconuts. Yeah. Yeah. So we have another encounter with the North Sentinel. Is in 1981. Yeah. Yeah. Again. Okay, We're up to 1981, and we've had maybe, like, a half dozen encounters with the north central leaders. And this one was an accident. It was a freighter coming from Hong Kong called the Primrose. They are in a storm, and they end up running aground on one of the reefs a couple hundred yards off the coast of North Central. For a day. Nothing happens. They're sending out distress signals. They're like, Hey, you know. Yeah.

Pat [00:19:11] So just to be clear, the primrose, they're on a reef, so they're not like literally on the beach. There's a little bit of distance, there's a little bit of water between them and the island.

Ben [00:19:21] Right. It's kind of what we've been talking about. Just a little bit of ship up. Yeah. Which is why North Sentinel kind of was left alone for a while. You can't get a big draft ship over that reef, so you need a small boat to approach the shore. And yeah, they're fine with that. So this big ship hits the reef and it's stuck. Yeah. Off the coast. And after about a day, it doesn't take the Sentinel these long to organize a war party. So these guys come out of forest and they got weapons and they are looking at this 1981, this modern freighter ship. And they're like, We've got to get these guys here. The Primrose are looking out at this group of I don't want to say like Stone Age Tech, but I want to say like they're carrying like wooden spears and what bow and arrows and, you know, kind of tribal indigenous population. And his guys, they start putting on war paint. More of them start coming out of the woods and the primrose leg. They're ready when we got a problem. Yeah. And then the Sentinel, you start cutting down trees and they start building canoes, smooth and the primroses like, yeah, we got a big problem.

Pat [00:20:29] And the thing is, this is a big freighter, right? This is, I mean, the primrose. It's this big boat. It's huge. It's not the sort of vessel that you would think would be vulnerable, Right?

Ben [00:20:41] It's doesn't have a big crew.

Pat [00:20:43] Okay.

Ben [00:20:43] Yeah, but I don't feel like the Sentinel would have known that, right? Yeah. Giant modern.

Pat [00:20:49] Hunk.

Ben [00:20:49] Can take, like, a freighter ship. Like we've seen what this looks like. And. And imagine that, like, alien battlecruiser, like crash landed in your backyard, and you were like, Well, I got a sword. Right? Look, I'll go see what I could do to this thing. Yeah, And I mean, I love it. I love that these people are so defensive of their homeland, Right? Like, it's amazing. And the crew of the primrose sends a distress signal. And the distress signal says, quote, Wildman estimate more than 50 carrying various homemade weapons are making two or three wooden boats worrying they will board us at sunset. Crew members lives not guaranteed. Whoa. I just. I love. So for the next two days, the of please attack the Primrose. And the primrose has one gun and two flare guns like one pistol, two flare guns and some firefighting axes. And they are fighting off the North Sentinel. These were attempting to board their ship with these homemade canoes they're fighting on. The reef off the coast of north central Island fighting for their lives. And the crew of the primrose is eventually rescued by helicopter via helicopter over drop a ladder. And these guys, like Kit, picked up and taken off as like the central keys, are swarming over the ship trying to kill them.

Pat [00:22:08] Wow. So the crew members abandon ship. They just. Okay, helicopter, we're out of here. And so the primrose is just kind of there. Yeah. And the Sentinels are taking it over.

Ben [00:22:18] They swarm over it and they loot it. They take everything, the value off of it. They strip the metal off of it and start making metal arrowheads out of it. Because, of.

Pat [00:22:27] Course, you would.

Ben [00:22:27] Yeah, right. It's that. And if you go on Google Maps today and you search for North Central Island, you can find the wreck of the primrose. You can see it from Google Maps or from the satellite view or it's still there. So that kind of puts us with The Sentinel is who we are now in 1981. And nobody has like successfully fucked with them and lived to tell the tale. Yeah, they are extremely dangerous and extremely protective of their of their land. And there have been many indigenous tribes that have been very fearless and very brave and very protective of their homelands. But very few of those tribes have made it to 1981 without some British East India Company or British East India Company adjacency organization managing to assert their dominance. But 1981 and spoiler alert 2023 as this is being recorded. Still, nobody has. One thing that I do want to say is that we have been kind of. Talking a lot about the violent reactions they've been having. And there is another layer to this, and I know you've been wanting to talk about it. And so, yeah, we're going to get into that after this. There's a second side. There's another side of the story that that really we should we should get into as well. So we'll get into that right after this break. Okay. Welcome back. We are going to talk now. We've talked a lot about the North Sentinel, these and them attacking and fighting and being very violent. But there's more to it than that, right, Pat?

Pat [00:24:07] Oh, totally. Yeah. So they're dangerous. The thing is, are they inherently dangerous or do we see their dangerous side because they have reasons to be suspicious of outsiders. So their image as being bad, as dangerous, do not mess with them. In a way, it's good PR for them because it reinforces the message that, hey, just leave them alone, okay? They won't be left alone. Okay? And on the other hand, there have been a few non bad encounters. So, you know, we left you in 1981 when the Hong Kong freighter, the Primrose, ran aground on a reef, and the crew of the Primroses really fearing for their lives because the sentinels were making canoes and coming after them and looking kind of hostile, saying like, Go away, leave us alone. And then a decade later, the anthropological survey of India, which is something we got set up after Indian independence from Britain, decides that maybe they want to learn more about the island. Is there a chance we could learn more about these people? No. So one of the people on the team is a woman named Dr. Madhubala Chattopadhyay, and she gets Why the Sentinel? We are suspicious of outsiders. She knows the story of Maurice Portman. She tell our listeners the story of Maurice Portman.

Ben [00:25:25] Then we should. I skipped it chronologically because we wanted to put it in this section, but this was one other attempt to contact the North Sentinel by, of all things, the British East India Company. Morris Portman was a British officer and he landed on the island in 1880. And it seems that like most of the people who lived there just kind of avoided him. Once he came in, they didn't come out to attack him. I think he was there with like pretty superior numbers and weapons. And maybe the Sentinel decided it was better to not try to fight him. But then he did eventually come across a group of six people, two elderly folks and four children. He grabbed them and brought them back with them to the end of the islands as hostages and the two elderly individuals. They died pretty much immediately. They got sick and died because encountering the North Sentinel is when you are a British officer from India, you are exposing these people to a lot of germs that they have never been exposed to before. And these two elderly folks, they couldn't they they died within weeks of coming in contact with Maurice Portman. He felt bad about this. So he released the four children back onto the island. He tried to research them the island a little bit more, but didn't have much success contacting anybody and and left. But, you know, that was a pretty negative experience with outsiders for the North Sentinel is.

Pat [00:26:59] Yeah. And so this is the context in which we can see say that hostile reaction to the National Geographic team or the hostile reaction to the Primrose in 1981. The thing is, 1991 rolls around and India wants to send some anthropological teams to, I guess, learn what they can maybe see. What should the Indian government's relationship be to this island? And I'd like to talk a little bit about Marta Mala Chattopadhyay herself. She's in her own way. She's kind of about us. She actually had a lifelong dream when she was 12. She learned about various people living on the islands in this part of the world. She learned about the armies, islanders. She wanted to meet them. She became an anthropologist. She wrote her dissertation based on work that she did among the Andaman Islanders and the Nicobar Islanders, all in that area. She wanted to make another attempt at North Central Island. And the thing is, the anthropological survey of India didn't want to give her a grant because they thought that it would be too dangerous for a woman.

Ben [00:28:07] The no girls allowed role that we keep seeing on this podcast.

Pat [00:28:11] Yes. Yeah. Now the thing is, the truth of the matter is Chattopadhyay, his academic record was so good that they gave her the grant anyway. They did make her sign waivers, and they didn't just make her sign a waiver saying, Yes, I recognize the risks, I'm not going to hold the Indian government liable, yada, yada, yada. They also made her parents sign waivers, I guess. I guess they're just trying to think like anyone who could possibly sue us should things go horribly awry, needs decide.

Ben [00:28:35] You know, what your daughter is up to. Well, you know, I don't know. I don't know.

Pat [00:28:41] She's part of a team, 13 person team, mostly men, including a director of tribal welfare, a medic support staff. And Chattopadhyay herself is the anthropologist they set off to the coast of North Central Island to get in smaller boat and they get nearest to the shore and they make a peace gesture. And they dropped some coconuts in the water. And I know, Ben, you said that in an earlier encounter. You said the National Geographic folks left an offering or a gift of coconuts and a baby doll and a pig. And that gift was rejected and destroyed and buried in the sand.

Ben [00:29:13] Well, one thing that they did, too, that was better was that that no, the National Geographic folks walked on the beach and set the coconuts down and were standing on the beach when the Sentinels came out. And Chad and her team float the coconuts to shore from a boat off. So they're not standing on the beach. Yeah. They're not on your lap. Not on your land. Yeah. Float you some presents from here. You stay there. I'll. I'll toss it to you. You know, if you were going to like a drug deal in the movies, you know, like, I'll put this over here.

Pat [00:29:47] Yeah.

Ben [00:29:47] Like.

Pat [00:29:48] Okay, you say drug deal. I say, you know, trying to demonstrate that you respect boundaries.

Ben [00:29:54] It's probably anthropologically more accurate. But.

Pat [00:29:58] Yeah, you know, jokes aside. Okay, Yeah, there's if this were a movie, this would be a very tense moment in the movie. So they put the coconuts in the water and kind of maybe give them a gentle shove and the coconuts drift on to the beach and Sun-Sentinel these men with weapons. These are armed sentinels. They go out. They gather the coconuts. And the Indian team on their boat is observing.

Ben [00:30:26] This is military history in a nutshell, right? Like, if you have an assault rifle, then you're not scared as scared of the dude with the bow and arrow. But if you're unarmed and he's got a bow and arrow, that is scary. Yes. Bone areas of bone areas have been killing people for thousands of years. Yes. And in 1991, they are still just as capable of killing a person as they were at the Battle of Agincourt.

Pat [00:30:48] So here's this guy. He's about fire. He looks serious. And Dr. Chattopadhyay calls out. Not intentionally is because no one on the outside knows how to speak sentinel ese. And the only reason I'm calling it Sentinels is because I don't have a better name for it. We don't know what the Sentinels themselves call their language. So she calls out in a language of one of the neighboring islands. Mother, Mother, come and have more and more coconuts. And why does she say mother, Mother? Because she has a hypothesis based on based on what she's observed of the culture of the peoples of some of the neighboring islands. The anger and the cognitive barriers that in those cultures, women are often a moderating influence or have some sort of authority when it comes to keeping violence within bounds. So she's gambling is maybe not the right word, but she's maybe kind of hoping that if she, a woman, can somehow kind of vibe with a woman among the certain ways, maybe there's a chance to avoid violence. So as it turns out, you know, our assumption, this guy who is getting his bow and arrow ready, he's there. But there's a certainly woman standing next to him. She reaches out her hand and she gently puts her hand on his arm and pushes his arm down. Condi was right. Worked. It worked. It worked. So they were able to have an encounter of a few hours. I guess, you know, bottom out. I got to live her childhood dream of meeting people indigenous to these islands.

Ben [00:32:31] Making contact with an undiscovered, you know, undiscovered, for lack of a better word, like tribe. Quote unquote, in 1991 at a time in which that didn't really exist anymore in the world, right? Yeah. Yeah. Like, I think that today we have very few undiscovered. You know, I had like I said, I don't I think there's probably a better word for this, but I don't know what it is except my head uncontacted tribe. Oh. Huh. Yeah. It's all like maybe the Congo. Brazil. If we're going to do another Brazil to North Central Island connection and then New Guinea. And that's pretty much it, right? There's not a lot of opportunity. So to be able to do that. Yeah. Is is amazing.

Pat [00:33:11] And to do it in a way that at least as far as I can tell, was peaceful and mutually respectful and was like, okay.

Ben [00:33:20] And the anthropological survey of India had brought cameras with them and video and audio recording, and they were able to get the vast majority of the data we have on these people comes from from this expedition. And then I think they did another one, right?

Pat [00:33:35] They did, Yeah. Yeah. Soon thereafter, in the same year, India sent along another expedition featuring researcher and Puppet, who is the world's foremost expert on the sexual abuse. And he figured out the thing of leaving a bunch of coconuts and then sailing away and just, you know, doing like that. But the thing is, for a while, for much of the time, anytime he saw people on the beach, they either shot arrows at him or honestly wave their dicks at the boat or, you know, if we're talking about making gestures with your body bent over, pretended to poop.

Ben [00:34:09] Mm hmm.

Pat [00:34:09] Fantastic. As a way to show it. Hey, you're a piece of shit or whatever. Yeah.

Ben [00:34:14] Go see what we think of you right here.

Pat [00:34:16] Yes. We're excreting you from our presence.

Ben [00:34:19] Not a lot of ways to misinterpret that. So, yeah.

Pat [00:34:22] I mean, I guess it's one thing. It's one thing to show someone you bear, but another thing to actually, like, go through the gestures of getting to take a shit.

Ben [00:34:30] They're not very welcoming.

Pat [00:34:32] And so then eventually the Sentinel is do eventually come out to the boat. In this encounter he gets out and he had some coconuts, but as soon as the boat starts to drift away, an arrow lands in his boat. But the thing is, this one didn't have an arrowhead. It was just like, Uh huh, no, no, we could get you if we wanted to.

Ben [00:34:53] So Chapatti Chattopadhyay, I was on this journey as well. Yeah. So she makes two trips to the island and it's the independent kind of is the overarching guy for the anthropological survey of India setting a lot of this up. And she's on the first expedition, but he doesn't go on that first expedition. He does go on the second one, and they've had some success on that first expedition. So he was like, Let's try it again. Yeah, let's see if we can go a little further. And she's there for this as well. Yeah, but he's kind of the guy and he's kind of taken over and, and this is like not a knock on him because he got farther than anybody else. Yeah, Yeah. But like, they pushed it a little too far and they got offended and they didn't like it. And when he went to leave, they shot this arrow onto his boat and that was his cue that, like, we don't really want you to come back. Yeah. And he didn't. And that's kind of the end to the anthropological survey of India's story here. The Indian Navy sets up a cordon around the island, and it's declared illegal under Indian law for any person to ever visit the island. It's not just for the safety of outsiders, but it's also for the safety of these people, Right. Like, yeah, you float them a couple bags of coconuts, but like, maybe you have.

Pat [00:36:13] If you breathe on them.

Ben [00:36:14] COVID know. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Pat [00:36:17] Of the diseases, right. You know, make Portman's mistake you.

Ben [00:36:20] Have to be very careful when you're contacting indigenous populations and because it is extremely dangerous for the people that live there free. Yeah. Show up there with all your grotty European diseases. Yeah.

Pat [00:36:35] Or Indian diseases as the case may.

Ben [00:36:37] Be or whatever. Yeah. Yeah.

Pat [00:36:39] And if you just barge on in you might, you might also not just from a medical point of view but also from a cultural social point of view, do things to disrupt their culture. I feel like I'm getting all like prime directive in a Star Trek sense here.

Ben [00:36:55] That's how I feel about it, though, right? Like, I mean, it's it is like making contact with aliens in a science fiction movie, right? Like there are a million different ways that this can go bad. And we've seen it all kind of represented that way in sci fi and stuff. But like, I mean, this is real people on Earth, right? Yeah. Yeah. Human beings. But there is a lot of ways in which trying to make contact can go very poorly for the people that live there and for the people trying to make contact. We get into the 2000s and we start saying, like, maybe it's better to just leave these people alone. They don't want to be bothered. And like there's a lot of stuff that can go wrong if they are bothered. And this kind of extenuating circumstances happened around 2004, 2004. There there's a huge tsunami that happens in the Bay of Bengal that causes tons of destruction in the Andaman Islands and the surrounding areas, the Indian coastline. And it's just kind of smashes everything in its way. And a lot of people in the Indian government were thinking that this is possibly catastrophic for the people that live on north Central Island. So they send helicopters to provide aid and to see what's going on. What they discover is very interesting. So the tsunami did devastate the island. It did create a lot of destruction on the forest and the beach. But it turns out not only did it not wipe out the sentinel EEZ, but it didn't seem to affect them that badly. Anthropologists, including Chad here, they think that it's possible that the North Sentinel is knew that the tsunami was coming to some degree, just were kind of people who were a little bit more in tune with nature. It didn't look like it affected the population that much. But the Indian government was like, all right, we should do something. Like people might be hurt, people might need medical attention. So they they landed Indian Red Cross helicopter on the beach.

Pat [00:38:57] Delivered right on the beach.

Ben [00:38:58] Food and medical supplies. Yeah, on the beach.

Pat [00:39:01] So how did that work out?

Ben [00:39:02] Well, the sensitivities came out of the forest and they shot arrows at the helicopter and they wounded the pilot and he had to fly away in a hurry, fearing for his life. Okay. So, yeah, that that was it. The Indian Red Cross was like, okay, well, you don't have to tell me twice. Okay, I'm back. Yeah. Just two years later, in 2006, we have another encounter with the North Sentinel. Is this is another accidental encounter? Mm hmm. There were some fishermen who were off the coast of one of the Andaman Islands. They probably had a little too much to drink. Both these guys have been killed by the North Sentinel. These and their bodies are left on the beach. Oh. Oops. The Coast Guard helicopter attempts to land to recover the dead bodies. And the sensitivity is charged out of the forest after the helicopter and start attacking it. Pilot It just gets out of there is like, I'm not even going to try to recover these bodies. I'm out of here. Yeah. You know, it's like she's just not into you. This is just not that. India, right? Yeah. He's got to let it go at some point. Yeah. Yeah. Well, one guy who didn't let it go in 2018, there was another encounter with the outside world, and this one involved an American. And this one was also international news that kind of brought North Central Island back into the public view.

Pat [00:40:17] Yeah, I remember that headline when it came out.

Ben [00:40:19] Yeah. Yeah. There was a an American missionary and his name was John Allen Chow, and he had heard about North Central Island. He was a very devout evangelical Christian, and he didn't like the idea that there was this island of people out there who hadn't heard the word of God. Yeah. And so he was going to go teach them about Jesus. Everybody told him not to do it, and the Indian government told him not to do it. And he bribed a couple of fishermen to take him out there. And he writes in his journal that like, you know, I'm going to do this because this is what I believe in. And and even if they kill me, I got to do what I believe in. And of course, they shoot arrows at him and they leave his dead body on the beach, as they have been doing to people since presumably the second century A.D., possibly even before that. And when the Coast Guard went to try to recover his dead body on two different occasions, they were attacked by the North Sinhalese and had to flee. As we have seen happen repeatedly, there's, you know, whatever technology you show up with, they completely fearless. And I do not want you on their island. And how many times do I have to tell you they.

Pat [00:41:32] Stay on message?

Ben [00:41:33] Stupid helicopters away from me. Yeah, Yeah. We don't want it. We're not interested. Please take me off of your caller list. No solicitors don't bother me. Yes. Unsubscribe from your email messages. And that's where it stands today. There's been no other way to contact the North Sentinel since then, and there is still a five mile cordon of Indian Navy ships that are kind of telling you that it's illegal to go there and don't let you through. North Central Island is completely autonomous, belongs to the indigenous people that live there, which is an extreme rarity in the world today, and there are no current plans. As of the time of this recording to change that. Yeah. So that is North Central Island. It is. Is it crazy and weird and amazing story of people who have so strongly do not want you to try to talk to them or contact them. And it's amazing to me that, like these guys have been able to kind of maintain their autonomy and presumably there is much more to their culture than violence and presumably a lot more depth that we don't know about. Yeah, Yeah. And I think it's cool that we don't know about it. Yeah.

Pat [00:42:46] Yeah. It's none of our business.

Ben [00:42:48] Do you want to talk a little bit about the sources that you we use for this? I saw an interview with Chad a pretty that Yeah, a very good one. And we'll put a lot of this in the show notes. I think that's probably the best place for it.

Pat [00:43:02] Yeah. To Academic Anthropological Articles by Suzie Kumar in the Journal of the Anthropological Survey of India. And I also got some stuff from an article by Michael Synnott in Anthropology today from 2019.

Ben [00:43:17] It's a lot of kind of news article kind of thing. Yeah, you can go check the show notes and you can kind of see where we got a lot of our data from and definitely learn more. Yeah. Which is more can be learned about North Central Island. But yeah. Uh, anyway, thanks so much for listening as always. And uh, we hope to see you next week.

Pat [00:43:35] Badass of the Week is an iHeart radio podcast produced by High Five Content. Executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Pat Larash, and Ben Thompson. Writing is by Pat and Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs, Brandon Fibbs and Ali Lemer. Mixing and music and Sound Design is by Jude Brewer. Consulting by Michael May. Special thanks to Noel Brown at iHeart. Badass of the Week is based on the website BadassoftheWeek.com, where you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses. If you want to reach out with questions or ideas, you can email us at badasspodcast@badassoftheweek.com. If you like the podcast, subscribe, follow, listen and tell your friends and your enemies if you want, as we'll be back next week with another one. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.