An Indian Tribe Lives a 90-Minute Boat Ride Off Port Blair and Won't Let You Land

North Sentinel Island is a small forested chunk of land — roughly 60 square kilometers — in the Andaman archipelago in the Bay of Bengal, about 90 minutes by boat from the regional capital Port Blair. Its inhabitants, the Sentinelese, are direct descendants of one of the first waves of human migration out of Africa. They make stone tools, build outrigger canoes, hunt with iron-tipped arrows scavenged from twentieth-century shipwrecks, and have refused all sustained contact with the rest of the world.

Who counts as the rest of the world has shifted. The British surveyor M. V. Portman tried to land in 1880 and ended up kidnapping six Sentinelese; four died of disease, and the survivors, returned to the island, almost certainly took back pathogens that killed many more. India's Anthropological Survey ran cautious gift-dropping expeditions in the 1990s but discontinued them in 1997 after concluding contact was unethical and dangerous. India's 1957 declaration of the island as a tribal reserve, with a 3-nautical-mile exclusion zone enforced by the coast guard, is the current policy. The estimated population today, by aerial surveys, is somewhere between 35 and 500, most plausibly between 50 and 200.

The most famous recent incident is the death of John Allen Chau, an American evangelical missionary who paid local fishermen to drop him on the island in November 2018. He attempted to communicate by shouting Christian prayers, was shot with arrows on his second visit, and was buried on the beach by the islanders. His body was not recovered. Indian authorities declined to prosecute the Sentinelese on the grounds that they have no legal status capable of recognizing the question. Aerial photos taken after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami showed Sentinelese on the beach standing and shaking arrows at the rescue helicopter; they had survived without help.