Why Visiting This Lost Island Will Kill You

in October of 2018 a 26 year old American man had just arrived on a flight to the city of Port Blair the capital of the remote Andaman Islands that are a union territory of India but Port Blair wasn't his final destination he spent the next 11 days in Port Blair in complete isolation attempting to quarantine himself and Purge his body of any infectious diseases that he may have been carrying with him afterwards his next objective was both simple and insanely complicated he was going to bribe some local fishermen to literally take him to another universe and reality you see Port Blair is a modern city home to more than 140 000 people a major Naval base of the Indian Navy and has more than a dozen direct flights to cities across the rest of India it is majorly integrated with the 21st century globalized world that everyone watching this video is familiar with and anyone can fly there from New York City for less than two thousand dollars or from London for less than a thousand dollars and yet only 50 kilometers to the west of modern Port Blair is a largely untouched relic of Humanity's very distant past that nobody is ever allowed to enter under any circumstances North Sentinel Island the island is roughly the same area as Manhattan surrounded by coral reefs with a thin strip of beach around its entire perimeter and nearly entirely covered by a dense jungle making it impossible to see anything on the surface from above and it is also home to the centenalese a small hunter-gatherer tribe that has existed there in isolation for tens of thousands of years they continue to have no knowledge of anything outside of their small Universe on the island and they have no comprehension of anything more advanced than a bow and arrow to them the year is still effectively the same as twenty thousand BCE and they have no knowledge or comprehension of the modern city of Port Blair just 50 kilometers away to their East with regular Flight Services operated by Airbus aircraft as such the tribe is often considered to be a so-called uncontacted tribe a rare living relic of Humanity's distance and hunter-gatherer past that somehow remained lost and forgotten throughout the thousands of years of human history and technological development that eventually got us to the modern world of the 21st century North Sentinel Island is in a different Universe from ours but that hasn't stopped people from hours attempting to interfere with theirs over the centuries many from our world have gone to the island and attempted to establish contact with the centennialese but all have failed because the sentinelese usually attack an attempt to kill anyone who has ever tried they see every attempt by our world interact with them the same way that we would see an advanced alien invasion of our planet and as such they usually respond quite aggressively and in order to respect the tribe's clear desire to be left alone from our world the Indian government has sealed it off to all of us enforced by a three nautical mile wide no-go Zone that is illegal to enter and patrolled by the Indian Navy this is the world that John Allen Chao the 26 year old American man from our world was attempting to enter when he flew to Port Blair in 2018. his objective was to spread one of our religions to them Christianity and it would ultimately cost him his life with unknowable consequences to the sentinelese as well the news of his fatal Journey from our world to theirs would generate headlines and publicity all across the world for years and it would become one of the most talked about events for the entire year of 2018 but in order to understand the whole story you need to understand how the sentinelese managed to become so isolated and uncontacted by the outside world in the first place it had been long believed that they were direct descendants of the very first wave of modern humans that left the African continent for Asia around 50 to 75 000 years ago but it's now believed that the first humans who made it to the Andaman Islands arrived around 26 000 years ago back during the last glacial maximum when the global sea levels were significantly lower than they are today at that time the Andaman Islands were connected to modern-day Myanmar by a land bridge so Paleolithic Era hunter-gatherer tribes managed to simply walk over to it but over the preceding Millennia the glaciers were treated and the ocean's Rose and the Andaman Islands became the islands we know them as today with thousands of Paleolithic hunter-gatherer tribes people remaining trapped on them and there they largely remained isolated and uncontacted from anyone else in the outside world at least to our knowledge it's possible that from time to time various different kingdoms and empires in India and Southeast Asia would send parties out to the Andaman Islands for the occasional diplomacy or slave raiding Mission but we simply don't know because we don't have any good historical records regardless of how often these events may or may not have happened the indigenous enemies remained Paleolithic hunter-gatherers with essentially no knowledge of anything beyond their own Islands until a ship arrived from the British Empire in 1789 to suddenly announce the presence of the universe beyond the British had come to these remote far-flung Islands in order to set up a difficult to escape from penal colony for Corinthians who are rebelling against their growing conquests over on the subcontinent that penal colony eventually became the modern city of Port Blair and at the time of that ship's initial arrival in 1789 there were around 7 000 uncontacted indigenous people of the Andaman Islands made up of dozens of different tribes including about 10 on the island of great Andaman alone the shangil the charawat ionge and of course the centenalese and the arrival of the British and their Indian prisoners to the small hitherto unknown Universe continued on the trend that began when Christopher Columbus led the first visitors of the old world to the new world back in 1492. They Carried with them diseases like measles influenza and smallpox that their people had gradually acquired genetic resistances to over thousands of years of dense civilization Agriculture and livestock domestication the indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands just like those in the Americas had no resistance to any of these diseases and so the diseases quickly annihilated most of them it didn't also help that the British introduced dangerous substances to them like alcohol and opium that they had no history of experience or restraint with the indigenous population of Great andamen where the British established Port Blair was quickly replaced by Indians and britons of the old world and most of the indigenous survivors either assimilated or went extinct the only major exceptions were the jarawa tribe in the far south of great Andaman and the centenalese who remained largely isolated from the chaos caused by Port Blair's establishment because they were on a completely different and much smaller island of no strategic value so nobody from the outside world is known to have ever contacted them on their Island until a merchant ship of the British Raj just happened to wreck itself there in 1867. the ship's 106 British and Indian survivors managed to reach the beach and likely believed it to be uninhabited while they sat and waited for rescue but three days after their crash according to their own reports a group of naked Islanders suddenly emerge from The Jungle of the interior and attacked them with arrows the large 106 members of the crew were successfully able to Ward them off until they were rescued by the Royal Navy but the first Contact between our worlds had ended in violence it would set the tone for the next century and a half to the present then 13 years later in 1880 a 19 year old English aristocrat had recently been appointed as the British crowns administrator of the Andaman Islands and the head of the port Blair penal colony his name was Maurice Fidel Portman and he decided to lead a party to North Sentinel Island in order to figure out who he was administering there they landed and were avoided by the sentinelese for days as they patrolled and scouted Through the Jungle only managing fleeting glances at a time after a while the party finally encountered an elderly couple and four children Portman essentially kidnapped these six sentinelese and took them on his ship back over to Port Blair where the elderly couple quickly caught diseases and died frustrated Portman gave the four children gifts and then dumped them back on North Sentinel Island after these events Portman wrote in his journal that quote this expedition was not a success we cannot be said to have done anything more than increase their General Terror of at hostility too all Commerce it would have been better to have left the Islanders alone end quote there are many theories that suggest Portman's clumsy handling of the contact between our worlds is the reason that the sentinelese have remained hostile towards every other visitor ever since and that may well be true especially considering that the four children he abducted and returned would inevitably have told stories of the elderly couple that died potentially placing the blame for their deaths on the outside Invaders it's also possible that the returned children may have brought diseases back with them that infected much of the tribe and may have even killed some of them without any knowledge of how infections or diseases really work it would have been fair for the sentinelese to blame the outside invaders for mysteriously striking down some of their tribes these oral stories may have then been told across generations of sentinelese and become a sort of exaggerated Legend through to the present warning them against ever trusting any Outsider who comes to visit again Portman would return to visit the islands several more times across the 1880s but from then on the sentinelese would always fiercely assert their independence with massive aggression later in 1896 an Indian convict escaped from the penal colony at Port Blair on a makeshift raft and was unfortunate enough to drift across the ocean to the beach of North Sentinel a search party was organized by the British to find him and then several days later they found his body on the beach of the island with multiple Arrow piercings and a sliced throat the centenalese had killed their first known Invader only a few years after the clumsy visitation by Portman and the message they sent by doing so was clear there would be no known further visits from the outside world until decades later during the second World War War the Japanese invaded the Andaman Islands and occupied them for three years what exactly they did over those three years to the Islanders and potentially the sentinelese is very difficult to figure out because the Japanese deliberately destroyed all of their records about it just before they surrendered in 1945 but they are known to have committed many appalling atrocities as the Imperial Japanese Army did elsewhere during the war at least 10 percent of the pre-war population of Port Blair died beneath the Japanese Occupation and hundreds of people were known to have been tortured the biggest war in world history had come to the edge of the centenalese universe and it's possible that during those three years a group of Japanese soldiers may have paid a visit to North Sentinel Island but will probably never know for sure after the war ended in 1947 India achieved independence from the British Empire and they were quickly presented with a bit of a unique problem not everybody who suddenly became Indian following Independence was even aware of what India was as a country like the sentinelese of North Sentinel Island the Andaman Islands were granted to India as a part of the independence and that meant that in theory the sentinelese on North Sentinel Island were declared as Indians but of course these people had never even heard of India and had no comprehension of what this theoretical citizenship even meant and so the Indian government decided that they would attempt to change that by finally hopefully making the first peaceful contact with them but it was going to be tough going the language that the sentinelese on the island speak is only known to them and there aren't any related languages to it anywhere else on Earth even the other indigenous languages spoken by the other indigenous people of the Andaman Islands are considered to be mutually unintelligible by whatever the sentinelese call themselves and of course the sentinelese are too hostile to allow anybody close enough to gain any linguistic Clues from them that meant that communicating with them linguistically was effectively going to be impossible and that only left communicating through actions and body language so beginning in 1967 an Indian Anthropologist named trilognath Pandit began sailing around the island and depositing gifts across the beaches in order to try and gain the Islanders trust then in 1974 National Geographic decided to lead a film crew to the island with armed police and a team of experienced anthropologists including Pandit they were filming a documentary of the centenalese called Man In Search Of Man and some of the footage they managed to capture is the only surviving footage we have here in the outside world of them their objective was to sail around the island for three days and deposit gifts around the beaches to try and win over their trust once they got through the Barrier Reef the sentinelese emerged from the interior jungle and peppered their boat with arrows but undeterred the crew continued sailing around the island to a new location and deposited their gifts on another Beach a toy car a doll a set of aluminum cookware coconuts and a live Pig then the sentinelese emerged from the jungle again and one of them fired an arrow at the boat that's struck the documentary director in his thigh the man who fired the arrow was observed to laugh hysterically and then to make their point even clearer they speared the gifted doll and pig alive and buried each in the sand took the coconuts and the cookware and retreated back into the jungle the documentary project was a failure and not wishing to escalate the situation with him any further National Geographic canceled it and withdrew but panned it the Head Indian Anthropologist here was undeterred and continued making visits to the island and leaving gifts with them for years determined to eventually establish friendly contact with a sentinelese he and his team made many recordings of the tribe during their visits and gift drops and things seemed like they were going pretty well in 1975 he led the king of Belgium on an overnight cruise just offshore the island but other visitors from the outside world occasionally found themselves washing up on the Island's beaches as well in 1977 a cargo ship called the MV russley ran aground on one of the Island's Coastal reefs and then just four years later in E1 another cargo ship registered in Panama named the MV Primrose did the same thing the crew of the Primrose became Shipwrecked and they had to wait patiently for another ship to arrive and rescue them nothing too unusual was noticed until several days later when one of the crews suddenly spotted emerging from the jungle quote around 50 naked wild men waving bows and arrows on the beach terrified and crucially unarmed the crew had to hastily radio their shipping company's office and demanded an immediate airdrop to be flown in delivering guns and ammunitions to defend themselves with for the sentinelese it was like a repeat of the 1867 British Raj era shipwreck but luckily for everyone involved this time an American Helicopter pilots who happened to be working in the area nearby was contacted and was able to land on the ship's deck and airlifted around 30 of the crew members away to safety the sign of such a thing to the sentinelese on the beach was probably incomprehensible but they left behind their entire ship on the island and all of its iron which sort of immediately catapulted the sentinelese through the technological eras to at least the Iron Age because they are known to have gone aboard and scavenged this ship for iron and tools and weapons ever since you can still see the remains of This ship's wreckage today in Google Earth when you go to North Sentinel Island and look at the Island's far Northwestern corner but alongside these more clumsy encounters Pandit was still attempting to conduct his professional ones by 1988 Pandit observed that after depositing gifts on the beach a sentinelese man was seemingly dancing with joy a month later during another visit as he and his team were dropping off bags of coconuts there were some sentinelese who approached them on the beach and got within 10 yards of direct contact and then came what seemed to be the Breakthrough between the two worlds in 1991. Pandit had sent one of his Junior anthropologists to the island to lead a routine gift drop marumala chato patier who was notably a woman she reported that during this gift drop the sentinelese waded out into the waters directly to the a boat to accept their gifts the first time that anything like this had ever happened she suggested that her presence as a woman signaled to the tribe that her crew didn't have any aggressive war-like intentions and that made them more trusting the following month Pandit and Shadow patio each went to North Sentinel Island together and were stunned to witness around a dozen of the sentinelese rushing out directly to their boat to greet them and then shortly afterwards came the Breakthrough photograph Pandit and his team from our globalized modern world were right there in the water side by side with the uncontacted Paleolithic hunter-gatherer centenalese and for a moment each of them held the very same coconut together in their hands it was the culmination of 24 years worth of Panda's efforts to achieve a friendly contact with them and he and his team withdrew shortly afterwards delighted with the success but the very next year in 1992 Pandit turned 58 years years old and was hit with a mandatory retirement age he would never visit the island again after that initial friendly contact and the Indian government decided to ban all future visits from the outside world shortly afterwards North Sentinel Island was sealed off with a three nautical mile wide no-go Zone that would be patrolled by the Indian Navy based nearby at Port Blair nobody for any reason would ever be allowed to travel to North Sentinel Island ever again both for the protection of the sentinelese themselves and for the protection of what the sentinelese might do to anyone else who visited but that wouldn't stop future visitations after the island was indefinitely sealed off the first known visit that came next was in 2006 and it was accidental two Indian fishermen were illegally fishing in the no-go Zone and had likely gone in blasted drunk on wine their boat drifted a little too close to the island and then washed up on the beach other fishermen who were illegally fishing in the same area claimed that they then witnessed a group of sentence approach the boat with hatchets before hacking the two men to death a helicopter was later dispatched to the island to investigate but the sentinelese drove it away by shooting arrows up at them the sentinelese allegedly later hung the bodies of the two men up on bamboo poles on the beach facing outwards to the ocean as if they were scarecrows a warning to the outside world to never come visit again the fisherman's deaths were never further investigated or prosecuted by Indian authorities and then nobody else ever did come again until the American Christian Missionary in the fall of 2018. he came unprepared and after repeatedly visiting the island over a period of several days the centenalese killed him as well and he is now at least the fourth body from our world that remains on that island without any ability to recover the Indian government has given full legal immunity to whatever the sentinelese do on their Island including killing anyone who's foolish enough to disregard their laws and visit so don't ever do it and stay alive it's not worth visiting and it's not worth risking the lives of the sentinelese with your diseases either they have shown multiple times over decades that they want to be left alone from us and I believe that we should respect their Wishes the island is sealed off to the outside world for a very good reason and it's basically the real life version of the prime directive from Star Trek the closest you'll ever be able to Glimpse it is while flying on an Air India flight into or out of port Blair which often will take you directly over the island and offer you the only view you can ever have into another world now if you're anything like me you're probably intensely curious about why our world works the way it does but the world is a complicated and sometimes difficult to understand place science and math serve as the primary Tools in helping us understand our complicated reality but for myself and perhaps for you as well science and math are each subjects that have never come easy and may even seem impossible to truly grasp at times I struggled with learning science and math for years until I discovered this video's sponsor brilliant and now through them everyone regardless of prior knowledge or ability can get a little dose of scientific learning every day whether you're looking to learn something completely new or you're just trying to brush up on a few topics the best way to learn anything is by actually doing the work yourself and there's no better place to do that than on brilliant you see brilliant is an interactive stem learning platform that helps you learn concepts by working through them in a visual Hands-On and easy 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Channel: RealLifeLore

Views: 6,658,890

Keywords: real life lore, real life lore maps, real life lore geography, real life maps, world map, world map is wrong, world map with countries, world map real size, map of the world, world geography, geography, geography (field of study), facts you didn’t know

Id: oWarOTnOIeI

Length: 21min 26sec (1286 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 09 2022