Sentinel Island's 'peace-loving’ tribe had centuries of reasons to fear missionary.

Pedro_P

From the exiled king of Belgium to the Primrose freighter in 1981, outsiders have regretted contact with the Sentinelese – as have the islanders themselves.

A tribesman aims his bow and arrow at an Indian coastguard helicopter over North Sentinel island. Photograph: AFP/Getty
▼ In 1981, a freighter called the Primrose ran aground on a coral reef in the Bay of Bengal. Winds were high and the surf around the hapless vessel was heaving. The rough conditions probably saved the lives of the 28 crew aboard.
After a few days stuck in the reef, a watchman reported seeing a group emerge from the jungle on the island a few hundred metres away. The sailor’s relief at the sight of a possible rescue party ebbed as the men came into view: nearly naked, carrying spears and bows and arrows that they waved in the direction of the ship.
“Wild men, estimate more than 50, carrying various homemade weapons, are making two or three wooden boats,” the Primrose’s captain radioed to his headquarters in Hong Kong. “Worrying they will board us at sunset. All crew members’ lives not guaranteed.”
The same tribe killed American missionary John Allen Chauon 17 November. The crew of the Primrose survived. The surging swell repelled the tribespeople’s boats, while the strong winds kept blowing their arrows off the mark, according to an  accountby the author and historian Adam Goodheart. After three terrifying days – the crew keeping vigil with pipes, flares and other makeshift weapons – an Indian navy boat winched the stranded sailors to safety. The Primrose still lies where it ran aground 37 years ago.
Chau would have seen the ship’s wreckage as he circumnavigated North Sentinel Island the evening of 14 November, on a boat with five fishermen whom police say he paid 25,000 rupees (£275) to smuggle him there.
Like the Primrose incident, Chau’s apparent murderas he tried to preach to the Sentinelese – in breach of Indian law and advice that exposure to foreign pathogens could kill them – has fuelled fascination with one of the world’s most isolated communities. And among the most misunderstood, according to the handful of anthropologists and historians who have observed them.
Encounters between the tribe, loosely estimated to number 100 people, and the outside world are a violent catalogue. In 1974, a member of a National Geographic crew filming a documentary on the island was hit in the leg with an arrow.

Clouds hang over the North Sentinel Island, home to about 100 tribespeople. Photograph: Gautam Singh/AP
The following year, the exiled king of Belgium reportedly aborted his visit when a single, armed tribesman emerged from the jungle and waved his bow at the craft. In 2006, two men looking for flotsam on North Sentinel ran aground on the sand, and were hacked apart with axes. Police said this week their bodies were hung from bamboo poles and displayed to the ocean “like scarecrows”.
Yet those experienced with the Sentinelese reject the idea they are inherently aggressive. “They are a peace-loving people,” TN Pandit, an anthropologist who conducted one of the first successful meetings with the tribe in 1991, told an Indian news outlet this week.
“Their hostility is a sign of great insecurity,” agrees Vivek Rae, a former chief administrator of the Andaman and Nicobar islands, the Indian territory that includes the Sentinelese home.
Often characterised as a kind of irrational barbarism, their extreme suspicion of outsiders may be well-founded. “It has been passed down through generations,” Pandit says.
Centuries ago, the Andaman archipelago was a magnet for Burmese slave traders who seized members of its four hunter-gatherer tribes and sold them into slavery in south-east Asia. From 1857, the islands became a permanent British colony, a prison for those who had taken part in that year’s Indian Rebellion, the largest armed uprising against colonial rule on the subcontinent.
“The British embarked on a policy that veered between assimilation, containment and annihilation,” says Clare Anderson, a professor of history at the University of Leicester. (▪ ▪ ▪)

► Please, read the full note/article here: Source

vikash123vt

We are humans not because we have ability to talk but because we have humanity. Humanity is something which is a creation of human brain. It has benefited from religion but it is in fact not dependent on religion. We have to understand this basic fact. Your religion is as much to be respected as others. Your laws are as much to respected as those of others. IF ONLY missionary John Chow and his mission organisation would have understood this fact, Chow would have been alive till now.
The reason of British conquest of North America was not their guns but the diseases Britishers gifted to native american who were not tolerant to these new pathogens. Same holds for Chow's gift to senatinelese who would have surely faced slow painful death from similar diseases. We must weigh our choices that are we ready to let a tribe and its distinct culture die just because we want to preach them something.
When we are able to make a just choice to such questions, believe me this world will be a happy place to live in FOR ALL.