They were immediately attacked by a swarm of tribal warriors. Nobody else stopped near the island again until 1867, when the Indian ship Nineveh shipwrecked on the beach after a storm. In 1771 a British East India Company ship surveyed the island, dubbing it “North Sentinel” (we have no idea what the actual inhabitants call the place, because every time we try to talk to them they attempt to shiv us), and even though they saw fires on the beach the Brits wisely chose not to dock there. Neither of these descriptions sounded particularly appealing to adventurers, so North Sentinel went untouched for the next five hundred years, because, sure, sounds good to me. The next time we hear about them is 1,100 years later (!), when Marco Polo describes them as a bunch of psychotic headhunting cannibals who could not be reasoned with. That’s some forward-thinking shit right there – these guys were fighting World War Z when the rest of the world was beating rocks together. According to him, the men who lived there brutally murdered anyone who approached them, then cut up and ate their bodies to prevent these unwanted outsiders from coming back to life as zombies. Back in the 2nd century AD, the ancient Greek astronomer Ptolemy mentioned an “island of cannibals” in the Bay of Bengal that may have been North Sentinel. They haven’t invented oars (they use long poles to push their canoes along), but – get this – they fucking created iron-tipped arrows by hacking off scrap metal from a goddamn British ship that wrecked there in 1981.ĭespite being completely untouched by the outside world for something like 60,000 years or some shit, the Sentinelese have a long and glorious history of being badass as hell and scaring the ever-lovin' piss out of everyone who dared set eyes on North Sentinel Island. They can’t create fire, but they can use it. We know they gather coconuts on the beach, go fishing in wooden canoes, and friggin’ spear-hunt for turtles, birds, and goddamn wild warthogs. They have no agriculture that we know of. We think there are somewhere between 50 and 400 of them, but we don’t know because no satellite imagery can see through the canopy jungle on the heart of the island. What we do know is that these hardcore pipe-hittin' ass-stompers are resourceful, tough, ingenuitive, and hard as yesterday’s fucking meatloaf, and they respond to any attempts at pussy shit like negotiations and friendly neighborliness by charging screaming out to the beach in He-Man loincloths and ripping off a hail of murderous arrows from 8-foot-tall longbows that they can fire with deadly sniper accuracy. We have never taken a DNA sample of a tribesperson, so we have no clue what their genetic lineage might be. These loinclothed tribesmen have very dark skin, leading some anthropologists to believe that they are of African descent, but how the fuck they got to the Bay of Bengal is a complete mystery. Not only can we not decipher their spoken language, but it bears no resemblance to any spoken language of any civilization in existence. There is no living person on the planet right now who has set foot in those jungles and lived to tell the tale. To this day, in the Golden Age of Google Maps and Other Crazy Satellite Robot Drone Shit, the only photographs you will ever see of the North Sentinelese people were taken either from an aircraft or a boat. We defend our fucking island to the death. And the tribal people that live there have a long-standing policy – if you set foot on our island, we will kill the shit out of you, slit your throat, dump your corpse on the beach, and then disappear into the jungle. 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 fucking nothing. This cordon is there for your protection.
To this day, it is illegal for anyone to set foot on this ultra-remote would-be paradise – the Coast Guard of India maintains a 3-mile cordon around the island. Canopy forests circled by large sandy beaches, this mysterious place has no natural harbors, is completely surrounded by ship-disintegrating coral reefs, and has been almost completely untouched by human civilization sinec the dawn of mankind. Deep in the Bay of Bengal, somewhere between Indonesia and India, is a heavily-jungled island roughly 20% larger than Manhattan, New York.
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