North Sentinel Island

North Sentinel Island is one of the Andaman Islands, an Indian archipelago in the Bay of Bengal. It is a protected area of India and is home to the Sentinelese, an uncontacted indigenous tribe. The Sentinelese have defended their isolation from the outside world, often with violence.

A law from 1956, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Protection of Aboriginal Tribes Regulation, bans travel to the island and any approach closer than five kilometres (three miles). The law aims to protect the tribe from "mainland" diseases, against which the islanders likely have no immunity. The Indian Navy patrols the area.

The island officially belongs to the South Andaman district, which is part of the Indian union territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. In practice, Indian authorities respect the islanders' wish to be left alone. Outsiders are only allowed to watch from a safe distance, by boat and sometimes by air. The Government of India has said it will not prosecute the Sentinelese if they kill an outsider who goes ashore. In 2018, the government removed 29 islands, including North Sentinel, from the Restricted Area Permit rules to help boost tourism. Later that year, the home ministry said the change would let approved researchers and anthropologists visit the islands.

The Sentinelese have often attacked boats that come near the island, whether they were visiting on purpose or had run aground on the coral reef. People have seen islanders shoot arrows at boats and at low-flying helicopters, and these attacks have caused injuries and deaths. In 2006, islanders killed two fishermen whose boat had drifted ashore. In 2018, an American Christian missionary, 26-year-old John Allen Chau, was killed after he tried three separate times to contact the islanders illegally. He had paid local fishermen to take him to the island.

History

See also: Sentinelese § Contact

The Onge, another indigenous people of the Andamans, knew the island existed and called it Chia daaKwokweyeh. Onges taken to the island by the British in the 1800s could not understand the Sentinelese language. In 1771, British surveyor John Ritchie saw "a multitude of lights" from the East India Company survey ship, the hydrographic survey vessel Diligent. In 1880, a group led by Maurice Vidal Portman landed on the island and took six Sentinelese to Port Blair. The elderly couple in the group died, and the four children were sent home with presents. Portman later returned to the island several times, including after the eruption of Krakatoa was mistaken for a ship's distress signal in 1883.

After India became independent, Indian exploration parties made brief landings on the island every few years starting in 1967. In 1991, Triloknath Pandit, a director of the Anthropological Survey of India, made the first peaceful contact with the Sentinelese. Madhumala Chattopadhyay, the first female anthropologist to make contact with the tribe, was part of his team. Although friendly contact was repeated, no progress was made in understanding the Sentinelese language. After the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and its tsunami, islanders shot arrows and threw spears at an Indian government helicopter. In 2018, an American Christian missionary, John Allen Chau, who had been sent by the Missouri-based All Nations, was killed during an illegal trip to the island. The 2023 documentary film The Mission discusses this event. In March 2025, another US citizen made an unauthorised landing on the island, leaving behind Diet Coke and coconuts before he was arrested by the Indian Police Service.

Geography

North Sentinel lies 36 km (22 mi) west of the village of Wandoor in South Andaman Island, and 50 km (25 nmi) west of Port Blair. It is 60 km (30 nmi) north of its counterpart, South Sentinel Island. The island covers about 59.67 km² (23.04 sq mi) and has a roughly square shape. Coral reefs surround it, and it has no natural harbours. Apart from the shore, the whole island is covered in forest. A narrow, white-sand beach goes around the island. Behind the beach, the ground rises to 20 metres (66 ft), then gradually to between 46 and 122 metres (151 and 400 ft) near the centre. The reefs reach out to between 0.9 and 1.5 km (0.5–0.8 nmi) from the shore. A small forested islet, Constance Island, also called "Constance Islet," was about 600 metres (2,000 ft) off the southeast coast, at the edge of the reef.

The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake tilted the ground under the island, lifting it by one to two metres (3 to 7 ft). Large areas of the surrounding coral reefs were left uncovered by the water. They became permanently dry land or shallow lagoons, reaching as much as one kilometre (3,300 ft) out on the west and south sides. This joined Constance Islet to the main island.

Flora and fauna

The island is mostly covered in tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forest. Because few surveys have been done, scientists do not know exactly which plants and animals live on land. In 1880, Maurice Vidal Portman visited the island and described an open, "park-like" jungle with many groves of bulletwood (Manilkara littoralis) trees and huge, buttressed Malabar silk-cotton trees. Indian boar are also found there, and they are an important food for the Sentinelese. The IUCN Red List describes North Sentinel as an important home for coconut crabs, which have disappeared from most other Andaman Islands except South Sentinel and Little Andaman. The island and South Sentinel are also an Important Bird Area according to BirdLife International, since the untouched habitat likely supports many kinds of birds.

Coconut palms are reportedly missing from North Sentinel, although they grew across the Andaman Islands before European colonization. This is thought to be because the islanders traditionally ate coconuts that washed ashore. During a 1985 visit led by Triloknath Pandit, no coconut palms were seen on the coast. Saplings were planted in 1987, and some had grown when he returned in 1988, but it is not known whether they ever became full-sized trees. The sea around the island is also not well studied. A large coral reef surrounds the island, and mangroves grow along its shores. Divers reported around 1999 that the reefs suffered bleaching during the 1998 El Niño, but they have since begun to recover. Sharks have been seen in the nearby waters, and sea turtles and dolphins have also been recorded.

Demographics

North Sentinel Island is home to the Sentinelese, an indigenous people who defend their voluntary isolation by force. A 2012 report estimated their population at between 50 and 400 people. India's 2011 census showed 15 residents in 10 households, but this was also only an estimate, which The Times of India called a "wild guess." The official census numbers only count people who have been seen while sailing around the island, so they likely include just a small part of the population.

Like the Jarawas, whose numbers have been going down, the Sentinelese face threats from infectious diseases, which they have no immunity to, and from violence by intruders. To protect them from outside interference, the Indian government has declared the entire island and the waters extending five nautical miles (nine kilometres) from it to be an exclusion zone.

Political status

The Andaman and Nicobar (Protection of Aboriginal Tribes) Regulation, 1956 protects the Sentinelese and other native tribes in the region. In 2005, the Andaman and Nicobar Administration said that it has no intention of interfering with the Sentinelese way of life or their home. It also said that it is not interested in making any further contact with them or governing the island.

Although North Sentinel Island is not legally an autonomous administrative division of India, scholars have described it and its people as effectively self-governing, or de facto sovereign.