Setting his fears aside, he resolved to go back that night. “What makes them become this defensive and hostile?” he wrote. In his journal, Chau wondered if North Sentinel Island might be “Satan’s last stronghold,” and he expressed frustration that he hadn’t been greeted with open arms. He paddled back to the fishermen whom he’d paid about $350 to bring him there and await his return. As he saw two other tribesmen readying arrows in their bows, Chau beat a hasty retreat in his kayak. That initial approach was rebuffed when an arrow pierced a waterproof copy of the Bible Chau held aloft in his quest to evangelize the tribe. Efforts to recover the bodies were abandoned after archers launched projectiles at a helicopter as it attempted to land.Ĭhau’s own death was made especially poignant by notes he scrawled in a journal after his first attempt to come ashore, on November 15. That fierce reputation was reinforced in 2006, when two fishermen were killed by the tribe after their craft drifted ashore while they slept. Even today, the iconic images of warriors prancing with bows and arrows along the island’s white-sand beaches taken on that expedition by National Geographic photographer Raghubir Singh remain a testament to tribe’s defiance of the outside world.

The director of a National Geographic documentary about the Andamans was wounded by a spear flung at him as he filmed the Sentinelese from a boat in 1974. Previous attempts at contact have been met with showers of spears and arrows. Believed to number no more than a hundred, they’re the sole inhabitants of the densely forested island. The Sentinelese are deft archers who have developed a fearsome reputation as staunch defenders of their homeland. Like uncontacted and isolated tribes elsewhere in the world, most notably in the Amazon rain forest, the Sentinelese are considered to be at high risk for contagious diseases borne by outsiders, against which they have little or no immunological defense. No one knows for sure how long the Sentinelese-the last demographically intact, essentially uncontacted tribe of the Andamans-have lived there, but some studies indicate the tribe may have migrated from Africa tens of thousands of years ago. North Sentinel is part of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a sprawling archipelago administered by India that stretches between India’s southern tip and the west coast of Myanmar.

The coral-fringed island, which is about the size of Manhattan and strictly off-limits to outsiders, harbors one of the planet’s most isolated hunter-gatherer societies, known as the Sentinelese.

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