North Sentinel Island is one of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal,The island belongs to the South Andaman administrative district, part of the Indian union territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands.North Sentinel is surrounded by coral reefs, and lacks natural harbours. The entire island, other than the reefs, is forested.
British surveyor John Ritchie, observed “a multitude of lights” from an East India Company hydrographic survey vessel, the Diligent, as it passed by the island
Homfray, an administrator, travelled to the island in March 1867.[18]:288 Toward the end of the same year’s summer monsoon season, the Nineveh, an Indian merchant ship, was wrecked on a reef near the island. The 106 surviving passengers and crewmen landed on the beach in the ship’s boat and fended off attacks by the Sentinelese. They were eventually found by a Royal Navy rescue party.
An expedition led by Maurice Vidal Portman, a government administrator who hoped to research the natives and their customs, accomplished a successful landing on North Sentinel Island in January 1880. The group found a network of pathways and several small, abandoned villages.
After several days, six Sentinelese (an elderly couple and four children) were captured and taken to Port Blair. The colonial officer in charge of the kidnapping wrote that the entire group, “sickened rapidly, and the old man and his wife died, so the four children were sent back to their home with quantities of presents.
Indian exploratory parties under orders to establish friendly relations with the Sentinelese made brief landings on the island every few years beginning in 1967.
The first peaceful contact with the Sentinelese was made by Trilokinath Pandit, a director of the Anthropological Survey of India, and his colleagues on 4 January 1991.
The Sentinelese survived the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and its after-effects, including the tsunami and the uplifting of the island. Three days after the event, an Indian government helicopter observed several of them, who shot arrows and threw stones at the hovering aircraft. Although the tsunami disturbed the fishing grounds of the Sentinelese, they appear to have adapted.
On 26 January 2006, two fishermen were killed by Sentinelese when their boat drifted near the island
A group of indigenous people, the Sentinelese, live on North Sentinel Island. Their population is estimated to range from 50 to 400 individuals The Sentinelese reject any contact with other people, and are among the last people to remain virtually untouched by modern civilisation. The population faces the potential threats of infectious diseases to which they have no immunity, as well as violence from intruders. The Indian government has thus declared the entire island, which is approximately the size of Manhattan, and its surrounding waters extending 3 nautical miles (5.6 kilometres) from the island, to be an exclusion zone.
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