An American man has been arrested for entering a restricted tribal reserve area on a remote Indian island – and leaving a can of coke and coconuts as an offering.
Mykhailo Viktorovych Polyakov, 24, was detained after taking a boat to North Sentinel Island, part of India’s Andaman and Nicobar islands, home to five of the world’s last remaining isolated tribes.
He was spotted on a boat near South Andaman and landed on the island home to the world’s ‘most dangerous’ tribe, the Sentinelese.
The indigenous tribe have called the islands, more than 700 miles from India’s mainland, home for 60,000 years.
Other nearby tribes include the Onge, Shompens, Great Andamanese and Jarwa.
His ‘excursion’ is shocking, considering the tribe is particularly vulnerable to modern-day diseases and has been known to attack and kill any trespassers on their land.
Police director HS Dhaliwal said: ‘We are getting more details about him and his intention to visit the reserved tribal area.
‘We are also trying to find out where else he has visited during his stay in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. We are questioning the hotel staff where he was staying in Port Blair.’
Polyakov reportedly made a makeshift craft to cross the 25-mile distance to the remote island.
It appears he wasn’t noticed by the dangerous Sentinelese tribe, who have killed trespassers before.
It’s unclear if they drank the coke left on the island.
Why is the area restricted?
The Sentinelese have not assimilated with the outside world for the 60,000 years they’ve spent on their island.
The tribe is primitive, using hand-made canoes and bows and arrows to ward off any unwanted visitors.
This unwanted contact with the world might stem from an encounter in 1880, when a Royal Navy officer, Maurice Vidal Portman, landed on Sentinel Island.
They reportedly found abandoned villages, with locals having fled to the interior of the island to avoid the settlers – but children and an elderly couple ‘lagged behind’, and were captured and taken to Port Blair.
They became sick, likely from pathogens they had no defence against, given they were isolated for tens of thousands of years. It seems this encounter may have made the Sentinelese more wary of outsiders.
A prisoner who escaped in a makeshift raft in the late 1800s washed up onshore, and his body was found with arrows in it and his throat was slit.
Perhaps the closest the outside world has got to making friends with the tribe was through regular visits by a team of anthropologists led by Trinok Nath Pandit.
The group began visiting the island in 1967 and continued to do so for decades. Pandit and his team would drop gifts off: from a pig, to toys, metal pots and pans and coconuts.
Although the pig got killed and buried, and the toys also laid to rest in the sand, the Sentinelese developed a penchant for coconuts, and seemed to appreciate the pans.
in November 2018, American missionary John Allen Chau then attempted to visit the island to convert them to Christianity.
The tribe chased him away twice, but on his third attempt, it’s believed he was killed.
The fishermen who had taken Chau near to the island saw tribe members dragging a body along the beach and burying it.
Chau wrote in his journal (which was left behind) that he felt the North Sentinel was ‘Satan’s last stronghold’, frustrated he hadn’t had a warm welcome.
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