Land of the dong-waving, doll-hating lost

Turns out the formerly-exiled king of Belgium and I probably would've made good drinking buddies. No surprise there, but I didn't realize it until coming across a story about a bizarre island in the Bengal Sea: on a tour of the Andaman Islands east of India in the 70s, his ship pulled near the notoriously-mysterious island of North Sentinal. They pulled close enough to coax the aggressively-isolationist natives out of the jungle to raise their bows and arrows, but just out of their range. I assume the king chuckled, maybe gave a few high fives and sailed off, "most satisfied with this adventure".

Thirty-five years later, one could have the same experience the kind did in the 70s or, if you like, the same experience of the first "outsiders" to reach the island in 1867, who were promptly killed for being there.


By all accounts, the inhabitants of this tiny island (estimated at 50-400 people) live just as they did in the times of the earliest explorers and the first nomads. They use primitive weapons, think clothes are for suckers, and apparently haven't figured out how to make fire, relying on lightning strikes. They intend to keep every modern asshole, well-intentioned or not, the hell off their island, too. Aside from the poor shipwrecked crew in 1867, they slit the throat of an escaped convict who managed to swim to the shore a couple decades later. People apparently learned their lesson until the 1970s, when a couple of smartass anthropologists and National Geographic photographers thought they knew the trick: "gesture peacefully" and give them a toy doll. The natives replied with a barrage of arrows, hitting a photographer in the leg, all the while laughing and waving their dongs on the beach, burying the doll in the sand. Lastly, there was the Primrose freighter which ran aground near the island in 1981. The captain watched as the natives wandered out on the beach, then began trying to hit the ship with arrows. Just out of reach, he then watched in horror as they began trying to build boats to come out to kill them. The captain issued a panicked call for help, eventually being rescued by helicopter which the natives, of course, shot at.

There's something very cool that in 2010, there's still virtually untouched tribes like this in remote corners of the world. It's even cooler that they're pissed off at every single one of us.