![]() The man drew his bow but was thwarted by Portman’s convict orderly, who jumped on him. ![]() Some days later – and after one snake-infested night on shore – his group encountered in the jungle an old man with his wife and child. After a few days he released the woman and one child with the usual gifts. Portman also found some villages and managed to capture a woman with four small children. ‘The jungle is in many places open and park like and there are very beautiful groves of bullet-wood trees.’ His party came across magnificent specimens of Bombax malabaricum and measured the buttressed root of one to be ‘27 feet long and 15 feet high where it left the trunk.’ ‘The soil is light and admirably suited for the growth of coconut palms,’ he observed, the surface drainage being excellent. ![]() He found the island was composed mostly of limestone and coral, the jagged edges of which made walking difficult. Portman, as Officer in Charge of the Andamanese, went ashore on North Sentinel in 1880 to search for natives. Photo reprinted in Satadru Sen (2009) Savage Bodies, Civilized Pleasures. The Great Andamanese on board were frightened of the men and told Homfray that they hailed from Little Andaman and were very fierce. The first glimpse of the Sentinelese was evidently in 1867, when Jeremiah Homfray, a keeper of the Andaman Homes, went to their island in pursuit of escaped convicts: ‘We saw some ten men on the beach, naked, long haired, and with bows and arrows, shooting fish.’ They hid on seeing the boat approach. NASA Earth Observatory image created by Jesse Allen, using data provided by the NASA EO-1 team. They were checking out a wreck, I was told, and fled when four dugouts, each with three men, approached them very fast. The divers clearly had been at North Sentinel, not South – the latter is known more for its surfing. In 1998, the extraordinarily hot summer – caused by an El Nino on top of global warming – had killed, off half the world’s corals, including many on the Andamans. ‘They’re dying, like everywhere else,’ the first one finally volunteered. ‘Have you seen them?’ The two exchanged glances. He feared that fishermen were being tempted by the shoals in the island’s pristine waters. ‘We saw a large trawler very close to North Sentinel, four to five kilometres from land,’ another interjected. New corals were growing in it, it was so beautiful.’ ‘This shark was so close, swimming so slow,’ said one, his face aglow with the ecstasy that divers on the Andamans floated about in. One evening I visited some divers at their haunt they’d had a good day and now looked very merry and tipsy. I had to believe it was an accident, if only because the alternative was too horrible. Neither could I find real evidence of foul play, nor think of any motives: Onge complaints, however vocal or specific, hardly posed a threat to anyone’s interests. I’d been in Prakash’s hut on three evenings and seen no sign of liquor. I didn’t know what to make of the alcohol rumour. ![]() I heard one report that they were both drunk.’ ‘Prakash and Entogegi went turtle-hunting at night, three other dugouts went too,’ explained Kanchan Mukhopadhyay, an anthropologist. ‘No one made much of it, seems that sometimes they’d be away for days,’ Ramu, one of the Onge men, had found the bodies on a northern beach he’d also said that the young men were drinking. ‘They went to catch fish and didn’t return,’ related a pharmacist who was posted at Dugong Creek shortly after the deaths. The sea was calm.’ Evidently one of the young men had complained about the depredations of poachers. Andrews was convinced that the youths were murdered: ‘We were there that day, near South Bay. ‘They couldn’t have drowned.’ I was asking everyone who might have a clue about the deaths of Prakash and his companion Entogegi. ‘The Onge are great swimmers,’ asserted Harry Andrews, a researcher with the Andaman and Nicobar Environmental Team. I have a suspicion they might have been from Sentinel. ‘They were pointing arrows, were very violent, and unused to interaction with outsiders. Two years earlier, three rather unusual men had visited Kadamtala along with some Jarawa. The Sentinelese were on the beach, with taut bows and arrows, waiting. ‘There was a navy exercise last month,’ he said. The administration had a new, hands-off policy on North Sentinel: no one, not even the contact mission, was allowed near it. ‘That was just for the public,’ Mishra assured me when I asked about the statement. ‘No citizen of India can be allowed to live in the wilderness or as savages after more than fifty years of country’s independence,’ he was reported as saying. The chairman of the National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes felt ‘anguished’, noted the Andaman Herald in April 2000, that little attempt had been made to civilize the Sentinelese. – Great Andamanese song, in The Andaman Islanders, 1922
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