The chilling reason a deadly tribe cut off by civilisation kill all outsiders might have been revealed.
The Sentinelese people shot to public attention when they slaughtered Christian missionary John Allen Chau in 2018, who had described the North Sentinel Island as “Satan’s last stronghold on Earth”.
He’s just one of many who have been killed by the Sentinelese, who refuse all contact with the outside world. But recently unearthed documents reveal why the Sentinelese have been so hostile to outsiders – and they tell a story of kidnap, disease, and disturbing sexual photographs.
Canadian-born colonial administrator Maurice Vidal Portman had been on Royal Navy orders when he made landfall in North Sentinel Island. “This expedition was not a success,” he wrote. “We cannot be said to have done anything more than increase their general terror of, and hostility to, all comers.”
Portman, who was superintendent of the nearby Andaman Island Penal Colony, abducted two Sentinelese adults and four children, taking them to the capital of the South Andaman Island, Port Blair.
The Sentinelese, who had lived in isolation from the rest of humanity for thousand of years, had no immunity from a number of common diseases, and soon fell ill. The adults died, but the children, who appeared to have recovered from their illness, were then sent back to the island where the diseases they still carried sparked a devastating epidemic among the tribespeople.
