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The Last Island: Discovery, Defiance, and the Most Elusive Tribe on Earth
A journey to the coast of North Sentinel Island, home to a tribe believed to be the most isolated human community on earth. The Sentinelese people want to be left alone and will shoot deadly arrows at anyone who tries to come ashore. As the web of modernity draws ever closer, the island represents the last chapter in the Age of Discovery—the final holdout in a completely connected world.
In November 2018, a zealous American missionary was killed while attempting to visit an island he called “Satan’s last stronghold,” a small patch of land known as North Sentinel in the Andaman Islands, a remote archipelago in the Indian Ocean. News of the tragedy fascinated people around the world. Most were unaware such a place still existed in our an island unmolested by the advances of modern technology.
Twenty years before the American missionary’s ill-fated visit, a young American historian and journalist named Adam Goodheart also traveled to the waters off North Sentinel. During his time in the Andaman Islands he witnessed another isolated tribe emerge into modernity for the first time.
Now, Goodheart—a bestselling historian—has returned to the Andamans. The Last Island is a work of history as well as travel, a journey in time as well as place. It tells the stories of others drawn to North Sentinel’s mystery through the centuries, from imperial adventurers to an eccentric Victorian photographer to modern-day anthropologists. It narrates the tragic stories of other Andaman tribes’ encounters with the outside world. And it shows how the web of modernity is drawing ever closer to the island’s shores.
The Last Island is a beautifully written meditation on the end of the Age of Discovery at the start of a new millennium. It is a book that will fascinate any reader interested in the limits—and dangers—of our modern, global society and its emphasis on ceaseless, unbroken connection.
In November 2018, a zealous American missionary was killed while attempting to visit an island he called “Satan’s last stronghold,” a small patch of land known as North Sentinel in the Andaman Islands, a remote archipelago in the Indian Ocean. News of the tragedy fascinated people around the world. Most were unaware such a place still existed in our an island unmolested by the advances of modern technology.
Twenty years before the American missionary’s ill-fated visit, a young American historian and journalist named Adam Goodheart also traveled to the waters off North Sentinel. During his time in the Andaman Islands he witnessed another isolated tribe emerge into modernity for the first time.
Now, Goodheart—a bestselling historian—has returned to the Andamans. The Last Island is a work of history as well as travel, a journey in time as well as place. It tells the stories of others drawn to North Sentinel’s mystery through the centuries, from imperial adventurers to an eccentric Victorian photographer to modern-day anthropologists. It narrates the tragic stories of other Andaman tribes’ encounters with the outside world. And it shows how the web of modernity is drawing ever closer to the island’s shores.
The Last Island is a beautifully written meditation on the end of the Age of Discovery at the start of a new millennium. It is a book that will fascinate any reader interested in the limits—and dangers—of our modern, global society and its emphasis on ceaseless, unbroken connection.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published September 19, 2023
About the author
Adam Goodheart
6 books54 followersAdam Goodheart is a historian, essayist, and journalist. His articles have appeared in National Geographic, Outside, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Magazine, among others, and he is a regular columnist for the Times’ acclaimed Civil War series, “Disunion.” He lives in Washington, D.C., and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he is director of Washington College’s C. V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience. (source: adamgoodheart.com)
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 50 reviews
July 25, 2024
I first heard of North Sentinel Island after the Tsunami of 2004, when the Indian government, concerned about the fate of the natives, sent a helicopter to fly low over the island. Several of the inhabitants were seen and one warrior shot arrows at the helicopter. An image of this stone age warrior appeared worldwide on the Internet. They next made the news in 2018 when John Chau, an American missionary, was killed by the islanders after he landed there illegally in an attempt to bring Christianity to the place he considered “Satan’s Last Stronghold”. One can only feel sympathy for Mr. Chau’s family, but neither can I condemn the Sentinelese, which is the name we apply to the islanders. We know so little about them that we don’t even know what they call themselves.
The Andaman Islands are pretty remote from the centre of things, and North Sentinel is the remotest of the remote. It is surrounded by reefs and there are no good landing places, and it was simply too small and out of the way to attract much attention. From about the 1970s to the 1990s the Indian government tried to make contact with the natives. Officials and anthropologists would wade ashore with gifts, and were almost invariably met with showers of arrows. Eventually the government decided that if the islanders wanted to be left alone then fair enough. The Indian Navy now patrols the waters around the island to intercept any would-be adventurers.
So North Sentinel really is “The Last Island”. Its people have rejected contact with the modern world, and they maintain their ancient hunter-gatherer lifestyle on their own territory, with no outsiders present. It’s really quite astonishing that such a society can still exist.
The author freely admits the island is something of an obsession for him. His book tells of two journeys he made to the Andamans, one in 1998 and one in the early weeks of 2020. On the first journey he was sneaked aboard a fishing boat that took him around the coast of North Sentinel, though of course he didn’t land. On his second trip he mainly describes the other islands in the chain. In between he tells us something of the history of attempted contact with the Sentinelese. Most of the attempts were made at the end of the 19th century by a British official, Maurice Portman, a very dubious character of aristocratic background who was sent to the islands in disgrace and given the job of overseeing relations with the native Andamanese. As the author puts it, he was given “the worst job in the worst place in the British Empire.” To Portman’s credit he seems to have been genuinely interested in the Andamanese and recorded much about their language and culture. On the other hand, there’s a lot on the debit side of his account. I will spare you the details.
It's inevitable that the reader doesn’t really learn that much about the Sentinelese – nobody knows much about them. The author uses records about the other Andamanese tribes to infer conclusions about the Sentinelese, but this book is as much about the author as it is about the islanders. He’s reflective enough to ask himself whether his obsession is really that different from John Chau’s.
An enjoyable enough read though.
The Andaman Islands are pretty remote from the centre of things, and North Sentinel is the remotest of the remote. It is surrounded by reefs and there are no good landing places, and it was simply too small and out of the way to attract much attention. From about the 1970s to the 1990s the Indian government tried to make contact with the natives. Officials and anthropologists would wade ashore with gifts, and were almost invariably met with showers of arrows. Eventually the government decided that if the islanders wanted to be left alone then fair enough. The Indian Navy now patrols the waters around the island to intercept any would-be adventurers.
So North Sentinel really is “The Last Island”. Its people have rejected contact with the modern world, and they maintain their ancient hunter-gatherer lifestyle on their own territory, with no outsiders present. It’s really quite astonishing that such a society can still exist.
The author freely admits the island is something of an obsession for him. His book tells of two journeys he made to the Andamans, one in 1998 and one in the early weeks of 2020. On the first journey he was sneaked aboard a fishing boat that took him around the coast of North Sentinel, though of course he didn’t land. On his second trip he mainly describes the other islands in the chain. In between he tells us something of the history of attempted contact with the Sentinelese. Most of the attempts were made at the end of the 19th century by a British official, Maurice Portman, a very dubious character of aristocratic background who was sent to the islands in disgrace and given the job of overseeing relations with the native Andamanese. As the author puts it, he was given “the worst job in the worst place in the British Empire.” To Portman’s credit he seems to have been genuinely interested in the Andamanese and recorded much about their language and culture. On the other hand, there’s a lot on the debit side of his account. I will spare you the details.
It's inevitable that the reader doesn’t really learn that much about the Sentinelese – nobody knows much about them. The author uses records about the other Andamanese tribes to infer conclusions about the Sentinelese, but this book is as much about the author as it is about the islanders. He’s reflective enough to ask himself whether his obsession is really that different from John Chau’s.
An enjoyable enough read though.
July 7, 2024
To colonize or not to colonize, that is the question. Adam Goodheart wrestles with this quandary in his book The Last Island. The island we are talking about is North Sentinel Island near India which has a tribe of isolated people. You may have heard of it when an American went to the island to try and bring Jesus to the tribe and was killed. Yes, Goodheart discusses that and no, Goodheart does not try and do the same thing.
Readers should be aware that Goodheart uses the experiences of many of the contacted tribes in the surrounding area of the Andaman Islands to fill in a lot of the blanks. I know other reviewers felt these were just padding, but I felt they filled in a lot of background and gave an idea of what the Sentinelese might be avoiding. And there is still plenty on the Sentinelese people including a British officer who was probably super creepy when you get all the facts.
Overall, I got exactly what I wanted out of this book and more.
Readers should be aware that Goodheart uses the experiences of many of the contacted tribes in the surrounding area of the Andaman Islands to fill in a lot of the blanks. I know other reviewers felt these were just padding, but I felt they filled in a lot of background and gave an idea of what the Sentinelese might be avoiding. And there is still plenty on the Sentinelese people including a British officer who was probably super creepy when you get all the facts.
Overall, I got exactly what I wanted out of this book and more.
February 25, 2024
It is indeed a story of the Andamans and the most elusive tribe in the world. Having read about the sentinelese this book didn't offer me anything new. But still it's an important read because the story fascinates. It's true that sometimes the book feels like a compilation of different sources but that's the best one could do for the Sentinelese.
It does awaken a primordial sense of wonder but more than that it's a deeper reflection on the so-called civilised world. The dichotomy is there for everyone to see but is it eternal or is it always going to be in conflict ? I am not sure if there are any direct answers to it. Probably not every question needs an answer.
It does awaken a primordial sense of wonder but more than that it's a deeper reflection on the so-called civilised world. The dichotomy is there for everyone to see but is it eternal or is it always going to be in conflict ? I am not sure if there are any direct answers to it. Probably not every question needs an answer.
August 30, 2023
An interesting little book, not what I expected when the blurb was talking about contact with an isolated island, but that's partly what makes this such a cool story. This isn't Captain Cook and Hawaii, or Cortez and the Aztec. This all happened so recently. It's amazing to think of the Internet being invented and there still being hunter/gatherers living so close to civilization. These people aren't in the heart of the Amazon or another dense jungle hundreds of miles from the nearest WiFi connection. They just have their very own little island, one of among 600 other islands, but for some reason, none of the great powers of the last several hundred years wanted to colonize it. These isolated people were able to just keep living the way they've always lived while modernity came to the islands around them.
The book details the author's encounters with the island and its people over many years, along with others who interacted with the islanders in one way or another. Some of the stories of these interactions are crazy and fascinating. But the real stars of the book are the photographs (and occasionally drawings/paintings). They are peppered throughout the book and really give a face to the people discussed. I love looking at the clothing and accessories, tattoos and hairstyles of people like this. It all fascinates me. There's also a very detailed list of sources at the back of the book for anyone who wants to know more about this interesting little island. Recommended for anyone who likes the thought of "modern history" and Stone Age people living today almost exactly as they have for centuries.
I received an ARC of this book through Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.
The book details the author's encounters with the island and its people over many years, along with others who interacted with the islanders in one way or another. Some of the stories of these interactions are crazy and fascinating. But the real stars of the book are the photographs (and occasionally drawings/paintings). They are peppered throughout the book and really give a face to the people discussed. I love looking at the clothing and accessories, tattoos and hairstyles of people like this. It all fascinates me. There's also a very detailed list of sources at the back of the book for anyone who wants to know more about this interesting little island. Recommended for anyone who likes the thought of "modern history" and Stone Age people living today almost exactly as they have for centuries.
I received an ARC of this book through Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.
November 1, 2023
I liked the way the author has compiled all the information about the civilization's history and its accounts of attempted colonization along with his observations during his two expeditions, years apart. The book is precise and doesn't drag or overly express views, rather states facts bluntly. The disruptive arrogance of the colonizers, the defiance of the tribals, the attempts by the other tribes to find a middle path and the consequences that nearly wiped out their existence, etc. are all narrated in the book in a manner that makes us think about the human tendency of the compulsive need to invade the privacy of the forbidden. This book gives us an insight about a minute island which is a part of our world but has chosen to still live on its terms, rejecting modern living. After the years of horrors these tribals have witnessed, it's time for us to learn to respect their choice.
Wonderful book. I learnt something about my country's history which I was not aware of through this book. Highly recommended.
Wonderful book. I learnt something about my country's history which I was not aware of through this book. Highly recommended.
November 1, 2023
I’ve kickstarted my non-fic November by finishing Adam Goodheart’s The Last Island, a story of the Andamans and the most elusive tribe in the world.
On one of these islands live the Sentinelese people who want to be left alone and will shoot deadly arrows at anyone who tries to come ashore.
In November 2018, a zealous American missionary was killed while attempting to visit an island he called “Satan’s last stronghold,” a small patch of land known as North Sentinel in the Andaman Islands, a remote archipelago in the Indian Ocean. News of the tragedy fascinated people around the world. Most were unaware such a place still existed in our time: an island unmolested by the advances of modern technology. Twenty years before the American missionary’s ill-fated visit, Adam Goodheart also traveled to the waters off North Sentinel. During his time in the Andaman Islands he witnessed another isolated tribe emerge into modernity for the first time. Now, Goodheart returns to the Andamans with a work of history as well as travel, a journey in time as well as place. It tells the stories of others drawn to North Sentinel’s mystery through the centuries, from imperial adventurers to an eccentric Victorian photographer to modern-day anthropologists. It narrates the tragic stories of other Andaman tribes’ encounters with the outside world. And it shows how the web of modernity is drawing ever closer to the island’s shores.
On one of these islands live the Sentinelese people who want to be left alone and will shoot deadly arrows at anyone who tries to come ashore.
In November 2018, a zealous American missionary was killed while attempting to visit an island he called “Satan’s last stronghold,” a small patch of land known as North Sentinel in the Andaman Islands, a remote archipelago in the Indian Ocean. News of the tragedy fascinated people around the world. Most were unaware such a place still existed in our time: an island unmolested by the advances of modern technology. Twenty years before the American missionary’s ill-fated visit, Adam Goodheart also traveled to the waters off North Sentinel. During his time in the Andaman Islands he witnessed another isolated tribe emerge into modernity for the first time. Now, Goodheart returns to the Andamans with a work of history as well as travel, a journey in time as well as place. It tells the stories of others drawn to North Sentinel’s mystery through the centuries, from imperial adventurers to an eccentric Victorian photographer to modern-day anthropologists. It narrates the tragic stories of other Andaman tribes’ encounters with the outside world. And it shows how the web of modernity is drawing ever closer to the island’s shores.
August 30, 2023
Adam Goodheart’s book The Last Island collects compelling and tragic anecdotes about various failed efforts, from the Victorian age to the present, to encounter and establish permanent contact with perhaps the last self-isolated people on Earth—the small tribe on North Sentinel Island, which belongs to the Andaman archipelago in the eastern Indian Ocean.
In the 1990s, a journalism assignment brought Goodheart in contact with the nearby, reclusive Jarawa tribe and near North Sentinel Island’s shore, which set off his lifelong obsession with understanding North Sentinel Island’s people and why they have been persistent (and somewhat successful) in resisting the outside world. Goodheart retraces contacts both accidental (shipwrecks) and deliberate (expeditions, government initiatives) with the tribe, including his own stealthy predawn boat ride to the island. Most encounters were brief; many were deadly for one or both parties. There are stories of kidnappings, murders, infectious diseases, and unsuccessful efforts to introduce the islanders to Western culture.
Goodheart’s research took him to archives in Calcutta and London. His accounts are accompanied by a series of stunning black-and-white portraits of the islanders taken in the late 1800s; these have a timeless, haunting quality.
There is more awe than adventure in the book’s meandering vignettes, and more searching for answers than discovery. Artful metaphors combine with the deft use of seafaring language to propel the narrative. But curiosity lingers. Why, as recently as 2018, would the tribe kill someone coming ashore waving a proverbial white flag (this time a young, zealous would-be Christian missionary from America, John Chau)?
Ultimately, while The Last Island does not provide such answers, it’s a worthy addition to adventure and survival narratives—a satisfying effort to dispel some of the mystery shrouding the last earthly outpost of inhabitants who still live outside of time as many know it.
In the 1990s, a journalism assignment brought Goodheart in contact with the nearby, reclusive Jarawa tribe and near North Sentinel Island’s shore, which set off his lifelong obsession with understanding North Sentinel Island’s people and why they have been persistent (and somewhat successful) in resisting the outside world. Goodheart retraces contacts both accidental (shipwrecks) and deliberate (expeditions, government initiatives) with the tribe, including his own stealthy predawn boat ride to the island. Most encounters were brief; many were deadly for one or both parties. There are stories of kidnappings, murders, infectious diseases, and unsuccessful efforts to introduce the islanders to Western culture.
Goodheart’s research took him to archives in Calcutta and London. His accounts are accompanied by a series of stunning black-and-white portraits of the islanders taken in the late 1800s; these have a timeless, haunting quality.
There is more awe than adventure in the book’s meandering vignettes, and more searching for answers than discovery. Artful metaphors combine with the deft use of seafaring language to propel the narrative. But curiosity lingers. Why, as recently as 2018, would the tribe kill someone coming ashore waving a proverbial white flag (this time a young, zealous would-be Christian missionary from America, John Chau)?
Ultimately, while The Last Island does not provide such answers, it’s a worthy addition to adventure and survival narratives—a satisfying effort to dispel some of the mystery shrouding the last earthly outpost of inhabitants who still live outside of time as many know it.
August 12, 2024
With the end of The Age of Discovery (Or rediscovery to be correct) 300 yrs ago, the World assumed that there is nobody or no terra incognita to be discovered in the 21st century. But time and time again, there comes the exciting news about an uncontacted tribe of the Amazon Jungle and Papua New guinea.
But, very few people know about the Sentinelese people including and esply the people of India. I personally did not know about the existence of Sentinelese people until recently (May be five years ago). They are listed as one of the very few Uncontacted or “Doesn’t want to be contacted” tribes in the world along with the people of Amazonian jungles and Papua New Guinea highlands.
Being born and brought up in India, to my dismay, I was not taught about the history of the Great Andamanese tribes including the now well-known Jarawa and Sentinelese. But once I learned about the existence of a totally isolated tribes who are also Indians (Which they don’t know yet) , I started collecting more and more information scattered in the Internet. Very few books or literature exists in or outside of India on this subject. Only book I was able to find was a very small book on the Sentinelese by Charles River Editors ,.But, it was very high level and generic for my liking.
I was super excited when I found this book last year and immediately added to my tbr list. I read this book in a couple of days. Surprisingly, the book is not just about the Sentinelese people, but also about the other tribes of the Greater Andaman. Book talks about how the British “civilized” the tribes using force one after another. The last one to surrender were the Jarawas in the main island of the archipelago.
To my disappointment book only had already known facts and stories about the north Sentinelese people I did not learn anything new unfortunately. I was expecting this book to talk about the origin of these people, when did they come to the Andamans and what is their place in the great human tree backed by genetic data. But instead, the author chose to talk about his experience in Andaman more and the role of British in re-discovering and annihilating the way of living for several tribes of Andaman like Onge. Earlier chapter talks how some of the efforts by Indian Anthropologists and officials to make contact was sometimes welcomed but most of the time discouraged by the Sentinelese. Book has some really cool photos of different tribes of the Andaman archipelago.
We still don’t know a great deal about them. But we should leave them alone until they are ready to connect with the rest of the world. In that respect, I welcome the decision of the Indian government to protect them from the fishermen, tourists and thrill seekers.
But, very few people know about the Sentinelese people including and esply the people of India. I personally did not know about the existence of Sentinelese people until recently (May be five years ago). They are listed as one of the very few Uncontacted or “Doesn’t want to be contacted” tribes in the world along with the people of Amazonian jungles and Papua New Guinea highlands.
Being born and brought up in India, to my dismay, I was not taught about the history of the Great Andamanese tribes including the now well-known Jarawa and Sentinelese. But once I learned about the existence of a totally isolated tribes who are also Indians (Which they don’t know yet) , I started collecting more and more information scattered in the Internet. Very few books or literature exists in or outside of India on this subject. Only book I was able to find was a very small book on the Sentinelese by Charles River Editors ,.But, it was very high level and generic for my liking.
I was super excited when I found this book last year and immediately added to my tbr list. I read this book in a couple of days. Surprisingly, the book is not just about the Sentinelese people, but also about the other tribes of the Greater Andaman. Book talks about how the British “civilized” the tribes using force one after another. The last one to surrender were the Jarawas in the main island of the archipelago.
To my disappointment book only had already known facts and stories about the north Sentinelese people I did not learn anything new unfortunately. I was expecting this book to talk about the origin of these people, when did they come to the Andamans and what is their place in the great human tree backed by genetic data. But instead, the author chose to talk about his experience in Andaman more and the role of British in re-discovering and annihilating the way of living for several tribes of Andaman like Onge. Earlier chapter talks how some of the efforts by Indian Anthropologists and officials to make contact was sometimes welcomed but most of the time discouraged by the Sentinelese. Book has some really cool photos of different tribes of the Andaman archipelago.
We still don’t know a great deal about them. But we should leave them alone until they are ready to connect with the rest of the world. In that respect, I welcome the decision of the Indian government to protect them from the fishermen, tourists and thrill seekers.
June 15, 2024
"In a world rushing towards the future, the last island stands as a beacon of what we leave behind – both the beauty and the burden of history." - Adam Goodheart
The Last Island is an exploration of a remote island's struggle against the forces of modern imperialism and technology. Goodheart weaves a narrative that begins with a personal obsession and spirals outward into a profound examination of the human condition and the value of contact.
North Sentinel Island is a tiny speck of land in the Indian Ocean, inhabited by a reclusive tribe that has almost no contact with modernity. Located on the fringes of the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, it caught the attention of the world in 2018, when a young, Bible- clutching American missionary tried to visit the island and was killed by islanders. While not the only reclusive tribe to survive into the twenty-first century, the Sentinelese are the only ones to have an island wholly their own and have been described by Survival International as 'the most isolated people in the world'.
The Andaman islands were home to many such isolated tribes until the establishment of a British penal colony in the mid-nineteenth century. The Sentinelese, stubbornly resistant to outsiders, remained and continue to remain-independent.
Part travelogue, part narrative history, it is based on historian Adam Goodheart's two expeditions, more than twenty years apart, to the archipelago.
The book is an adventure and a thoughtful meditation on a small tribe's resilience in the face of globalized modernity. Echoing with historical insights and contemporary relevance, The Last Island is a read that bridges past and present with depth.
🌊 What does it mean to truly connect?
🏝️ Adam Goodheart's The Last Island is a tale of a small tribe's fight against modern imperialism. What's your favorite book about cultural preservation?
Non - fiction
Price - Rs 699
Pages - 236
The Last Island is an exploration of a remote island's struggle against the forces of modern imperialism and technology. Goodheart weaves a narrative that begins with a personal obsession and spirals outward into a profound examination of the human condition and the value of contact.
North Sentinel Island is a tiny speck of land in the Indian Ocean, inhabited by a reclusive tribe that has almost no contact with modernity. Located on the fringes of the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, it caught the attention of the world in 2018, when a young, Bible- clutching American missionary tried to visit the island and was killed by islanders. While not the only reclusive tribe to survive into the twenty-first century, the Sentinelese are the only ones to have an island wholly their own and have been described by Survival International as 'the most isolated people in the world'.
The Andaman islands were home to many such isolated tribes until the establishment of a British penal colony in the mid-nineteenth century. The Sentinelese, stubbornly resistant to outsiders, remained and continue to remain-independent.
Part travelogue, part narrative history, it is based on historian Adam Goodheart's two expeditions, more than twenty years apart, to the archipelago.
The book is an adventure and a thoughtful meditation on a small tribe's resilience in the face of globalized modernity. Echoing with historical insights and contemporary relevance, The Last Island is a read that bridges past and present with depth.
🌊 What does it mean to truly connect?
🏝️ Adam Goodheart's The Last Island is a tale of a small tribe's fight against modern imperialism. What's your favorite book about cultural preservation?
Non - fiction
Price - Rs 699
Pages - 236
August 19, 2024
I must say that while I enjoyed the book overall, it didn’t focus on North Sentinel Island like the title and synopsis had me believe. Instead it went over the history of the whole Andaman Island chain itself, which, I understand that’s there to help get an idea of Sentinelese culture, since it hasn’t been directly studied, but I feel like this book should have been retitled and the synopsis rewritten to better convey that this book talks about the island chain as a whole. That aside, this book is fairly insightful on the experiences of the Andamanese and Sentinelese people within the last couple hundred years, many of which were tragic under British rule, and I learned some pretty interesting things.
August 28, 2024
Lot of interesting stuff in this little book. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
September 24, 2023
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Mr. Goodheart weaves personal experience with deep historical research into a journey through time. He leaves you grappling with what discovery and responsible contact means. The book is thought provoking and educational. The combination makes the historical journey come alive. Rarely does a history book read like a page turner. Highly recommend this book!
October 5, 2023
5 stars because the author perfectly blends historical, personal, and anthropological perspectives. He keeps it short and to the point without ever making it feel like something has been left out. The few times he indulged in creative descriptions were effective and well chosen. Overall, engaging and worthwhile
December 2, 2023
Each time the moment repeated itself at each fresh beachhead, there was one less island to be found, one less chance to start everything anew.
Now just one island remains. It is a place already all but known, encircled by the buzzing, thrumming web of a world still unknown to it, and by the mesh of a history that has been forever drawing closer.
The curiosity about the uncontacted peoples, or indigenous peoples who choose to live in isolation, on our planet is eternal, and this excellent book is an interesting journey to the edges of what we can know of them and through the layers of human cruelty and curiosity of the past, a paradox that exists, is devastating, and must be confronted so it isn’t repeated. And a similar paradox exists in me where I want to learn more, but also want to protect them from us and our knowledge.
The 571, 37 inhabited, islands of the archipelago of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Indian Ocean stretch between Myanmar and Indonesia in the Bay of Bengal. They are closer to Southeast Asia/Myanmar than India, but the reach of British colonization was massive and laid claim early on, and then India continued the possession and some of the colonization, and migrants from India have populated this area from the times of penal colonies and more recently for opportunities.
The isolated tribe is the Sentinelese, which we know little about, and how we try to understand them by extrapolating from the Andamanese who we do know more about. It is thought they may have inhabited these islands since 50,000 years ago, serving as a stopover for continued migration to southeast Asia and eventually Australia. By virtue of appearance including short stature, hair texture, and skin color, both were thought to be related to African pygmy groups, but more research is refuting that, ascribing more to adaptation in the rainforest, or environment versus genetics.
The author focuses on the cultural and historical narratives of history and present day. The author may have been the first to read and understand what the private diaries of one particularly heinous colonizer meant, the drugging and physical and sexual abuse of native men, probable spread of syphilis. Can we imagine that one man could start a biological genocide of a group of humans? It complicates the paradox as well; this person did a lot of cataloguing of traits and people, with some of the only detailed photos of the time, which are mesmerizing and awful, the beauty of a human contrasting with their expressionless or melancholic faces and knowledge of what was done to some of them.
When I was standing on Railay Beach in Thailand, I was facing the southern Nicobar Islands across the Andaman Sea, out of sight, one of my favorite imaginative exercises in exploration, and I marvelled that I had not heard of this archipelago, and learned a little more, and read of the North Sentinel Islands natives and the Jarawa on the largest island that are also semi-isolated. Those two populations are more similar than the Jarawa to the other Andamanese on the same island. When the British colonized and set up a penal colony, it is estimated that the population of all the islands was over 3,500 people with 13 linguistically defined groups known, and only three survive (Jarawa, Sentinelese, and Onge).
My next exposure to this part of the world was an amazing novel, Latitudes of Longing by the Indian writer Shubhangi Swarup, and I did some more research and wondering. Her prose is sublime:
SILENCE ON A TROPICAL ISLAND is the relentless sound of water. The waves, like your own breaths, never leave you.
Somewhere below lies the heart of the Himalayas—a grain of sand hidden in the block of ice below their feet. The oceans feared the entire earth would turn into land, so the jade sea leaped up to capture the grain and froze the instant it did.
For the rains have flooded deep into their beings. An invisible wall has caved in, filling them with curiosities and preoccupations from another time.
That rains can turn into fossils, ones that can only be heard not seen, is an interesting thought. It is worth dreaming about.
He wondered what the continents were thinking. Perhaps Pangaea dreamed of being a million islands. Perhaps the million islands now dreamed of being one.
It needs to be acknowledged that the Jarawa and the Sentinelese still may each only number less than 100 each despite their aversion to any incursion into their territory. The genetic diversity within the populations is lacking, so that may account for their inability to thrive, or perhaps they are in a steady-state balance with births and deaths. Or are they thriving? Experts estimate the island which is 20 square miles, could support 5000 people. There is math that can be done that was designed to help date when populations arrive to certain places, but I don’t know if it has been employed forward, or if there are too many unknowns. The Sentinelese repurpose things that wash up on their shores like metal, and anything that does could possibly have germs that could kill them. Big unknowns.
I am still musing on the bigger picture here, which the author didn’t address in a substantial way: how does a tribe decide to remain isolated year after year after year? There were some people kidnapped to England, and some returned with others dying, so the stories of that could trickle down and help keep the people united on their resolve. I am so curious and fascinated by things, and it is hard to understand how they are not curious about the helicopters and boats, how what we think of as an integral part of human nature does not manifest. An Indian official spent many years with boat trips to the waters offshore and the Sentinelese accepted coconuts and some other things, but that was stopped, and no contact since.
My mind goes in all directions: is there a dictator or leader or a worldview that the civilized world is evil, or just a hive mind of harmony that keeps them isolated? How long before sea level rise threatens this, and do we have a moral obligation to help them before they die out? Nature would just dictate that sea level rise would slowly rise and their food and water sources may wither away in a slow period, or a fast period; would they seek out help? No one knows what their drinking water source is, a spring or just rain water possibly, and what if their water source ended, would they know without fresh water they will die quickly? It is a fascinating and murky ethical question for the times.
Climate scientists predict that rising sea levels may leave much of the Andaman archipelago underwater within less than a century. Global warming, overfishing, pollution, and plastic debris will continue a campaign of devastation against the plants and animals that North Sentinel’s inhabitants depend on to survive. The island’s perfect isolation, unmoored from ordinary space and time, is our own self-consoling fantasy: as long as the Sentinelese remain, we can tell ourselves that our planet is still, to some tiny degree, inviolate. We see those islanders through vision as fogged with our own preoccupations as Columbus’s first glimpses of the Caribs.
Within all the enveloping layers of myth and meme, a small stubborn truth remains: the inarguable fact of their persistence. Their presence in our world enlarges the boundaries of what it means to be human. Holding fast to a few square miles of their planet, they declare their independence. With eyes as shrewd as any explorer’s, the Sentinelese look at all that we have to offer them—our planes, our plastics, our inflatable boats, and our waterproof Bibles—and say: Thanks anyway. We’d rather not.
The island where the ship lay grounded had somehow managed to slip through the net of history. Although its existence had been known for centuries, its inhabitants had experienced virtually no contact with the rest of humanity. Anthropologists referred to them as Sentinelese, but no one knew what they called themselves, nor what name they gave the island they inhabited—indeed, no one even knew what language they spoke. And in any case, no one within living memory had gotten close enough to ask.
Even the archipelago’s name is unstable—as if the outside world had discovered it, then lost it, then rediscovered it again, many times: Caracuffaya. Dandemos. The Islands of Man. The Islands of the Satyrs. The Naked Land. Angamanain. To this day, no scholar has resolved the question of how and when the islands came to be called Andaman, nor even determined the language and culture in which this strange toponym emerged. Still, those three measured syllables, deep and rhythmic as distant drums, suit the place somehow.
There is a name on late-medieval charts that derives, in turn, from those of the second-century Romano-Egyptian geographer Claudius Ptolemy. When I daydream about the islands, as I often do, this name comes into my thoughts more than all the others: Insulae Bonae Fortunae. The Latin phrase means islands of good fortune, and it also evokes a similar name from ancient times, the mythical Insulae Fortunae, or Isles of the Blessed, a paradise where Greek heroes, having passed three times through the Elysian Fields, dwelled in endless summer.
The inhabitants of North Sentinel Island are not the only remote, reclusive tribe to persevere into the twenty-first century. Experts believe there are still more than a hundred such groups, most of them huddled in the innermost valleys of the Amazon Basin, with smaller populations in the forested highlands of western Papua New Guinea. Statistically speaking, these citizens of terra incognita are a vanishingly tiny sliver of our species, at most ten thousand of the eight billion humans now on earth.
Even the more approachable Andamanese tribes elsewhere in the archipelago remain enigmatic. The languages they speak have no apparent relationship to any other human tongue.
Their physical resemblance to certain African populations led some nineteenth-century scholars to conclude that they must descend from survivors of a slave ship shipwrecked in the archipelago. More than a century later, in the early 2000s, another generation of scientists hypothesized that the Andamanese might be living testimony to an early, previously unknown human migration out of Africa, one whose traces have been obliterated elsewhere by later waves of human settlement. Over the past decade or two, geneticists have managed to study DNA samples taken from an Andamanese tribe—the Onge of nearby Little Andaman Island—believed to be closely related to the Sentinelese, perhaps both culturally and genetically. The results are far from conclusive, but seem to demonstrate that the islands’ natives share gene sequences with Aboriginal Australians, as well as with a few remnants of other tribes that survive in remote parts of Malaysia. What is clear is that their branch of the human species has been separate from others for as much as fifty thousand years.
On a planet with almost no lost islands left—almost no human places unexplored—our true terrae incognitae can now be mapped in the geography of time. Nearly all of us, by the time we reach adulthood, have journeyed into a New World that would have seemed impossibly exotic to our childhood selves; reconstructing what it felt like even to live our own daily lives twenty or thirty years ago can be a challenge. (How exactly did I track down T. N. Pandit’s phone number in 1998, or navigate the twisting streets of Delhi and Port Blair?) Novel experiences and devices scarcely have time to develop from miraculous to commonplace before becoming passé. Solid truths crumble; topographies dissolve and re-form. Each of us is Jack Andaman in Calcutta, again and again. The future itself is now our looming, unseen shore, a blank map-space of marvel and menace, whose nature we try to discern from a drifting scrap of withered branch, or the stray echoes of drums in the middle distance. Forever present and unknowable; forever unreachable and inevitable.
The geography of history also has a radically different shape in the Andaman archipelago. Westerners use rivers and roads as metaphors for history. The native islanders, who know no such things as rivers or roads, use the wind. History travels to them, sweeping off the fathomless ocean, passing through them and among them, in breezes or cyclones, easterly or westerly, ceaseless and variable. The past abates, down to just the slightest stirring of breath, but will soon rouse itself.
Despite the outsize niche that North Sentinel Island fills in millions of people’s imaginations, this is the first full-length book on it that has ever been published. The travel writer’s instinct is always to go there. He sets his boots on the ground of a place, experiences it with his own senses, encounters its inhabitants on their own turf and their own terms. With North Sentinel Island, that wasn’t quite possible. At times, I have felt more like an astronomer, straining for signals from a familiar-yet-distant planet; even my close encounter with the island’s sandy shore was an orbit rather than a landing. Still, while I regret not being able to trace much of the island’s interior landscape—let alone the inner lives and thoughts of the islanders—I have worked hard, over the course of many years, to chart its surrounding geography, both literal and otherwise.
Now just one island remains. It is a place already all but known, encircled by the buzzing, thrumming web of a world still unknown to it, and by the mesh of a history that has been forever drawing closer.
The curiosity about the uncontacted peoples, or indigenous peoples who choose to live in isolation, on our planet is eternal, and this excellent book is an interesting journey to the edges of what we can know of them and through the layers of human cruelty and curiosity of the past, a paradox that exists, is devastating, and must be confronted so it isn’t repeated. And a similar paradox exists in me where I want to learn more, but also want to protect them from us and our knowledge.
The 571, 37 inhabited, islands of the archipelago of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Indian Ocean stretch between Myanmar and Indonesia in the Bay of Bengal. They are closer to Southeast Asia/Myanmar than India, but the reach of British colonization was massive and laid claim early on, and then India continued the possession and some of the colonization, and migrants from India have populated this area from the times of penal colonies and more recently for opportunities.
The isolated tribe is the Sentinelese, which we know little about, and how we try to understand them by extrapolating from the Andamanese who we do know more about. It is thought they may have inhabited these islands since 50,000 years ago, serving as a stopover for continued migration to southeast Asia and eventually Australia. By virtue of appearance including short stature, hair texture, and skin color, both were thought to be related to African pygmy groups, but more research is refuting that, ascribing more to adaptation in the rainforest, or environment versus genetics.
The author focuses on the cultural and historical narratives of history and present day. The author may have been the first to read and understand what the private diaries of one particularly heinous colonizer meant, the drugging and physical and sexual abuse of native men, probable spread of syphilis. Can we imagine that one man could start a biological genocide of a group of humans? It complicates the paradox as well; this person did a lot of cataloguing of traits and people, with some of the only detailed photos of the time, which are mesmerizing and awful, the beauty of a human contrasting with their expressionless or melancholic faces and knowledge of what was done to some of them.
When I was standing on Railay Beach in Thailand, I was facing the southern Nicobar Islands across the Andaman Sea, out of sight, one of my favorite imaginative exercises in exploration, and I marvelled that I had not heard of this archipelago, and learned a little more, and read of the North Sentinel Islands natives and the Jarawa on the largest island that are also semi-isolated. Those two populations are more similar than the Jarawa to the other Andamanese on the same island. When the British colonized and set up a penal colony, it is estimated that the population of all the islands was over 3,500 people with 13 linguistically defined groups known, and only three survive (Jarawa, Sentinelese, and Onge).
My next exposure to this part of the world was an amazing novel, Latitudes of Longing by the Indian writer Shubhangi Swarup, and I did some more research and wondering. Her prose is sublime:
SILENCE ON A TROPICAL ISLAND is the relentless sound of water. The waves, like your own breaths, never leave you.
Somewhere below lies the heart of the Himalayas—a grain of sand hidden in the block of ice below their feet. The oceans feared the entire earth would turn into land, so the jade sea leaped up to capture the grain and froze the instant it did.
For the rains have flooded deep into their beings. An invisible wall has caved in, filling them with curiosities and preoccupations from another time.
That rains can turn into fossils, ones that can only be heard not seen, is an interesting thought. It is worth dreaming about.
He wondered what the continents were thinking. Perhaps Pangaea dreamed of being a million islands. Perhaps the million islands now dreamed of being one.
It needs to be acknowledged that the Jarawa and the Sentinelese still may each only number less than 100 each despite their aversion to any incursion into their territory. The genetic diversity within the populations is lacking, so that may account for their inability to thrive, or perhaps they are in a steady-state balance with births and deaths. Or are they thriving? Experts estimate the island which is 20 square miles, could support 5000 people. There is math that can be done that was designed to help date when populations arrive to certain places, but I don’t know if it has been employed forward, or if there are too many unknowns. The Sentinelese repurpose things that wash up on their shores like metal, and anything that does could possibly have germs that could kill them. Big unknowns.
I am still musing on the bigger picture here, which the author didn’t address in a substantial way: how does a tribe decide to remain isolated year after year after year? There were some people kidnapped to England, and some returned with others dying, so the stories of that could trickle down and help keep the people united on their resolve. I am so curious and fascinated by things, and it is hard to understand how they are not curious about the helicopters and boats, how what we think of as an integral part of human nature does not manifest. An Indian official spent many years with boat trips to the waters offshore and the Sentinelese accepted coconuts and some other things, but that was stopped, and no contact since.
My mind goes in all directions: is there a dictator or leader or a worldview that the civilized world is evil, or just a hive mind of harmony that keeps them isolated? How long before sea level rise threatens this, and do we have a moral obligation to help them before they die out? Nature would just dictate that sea level rise would slowly rise and their food and water sources may wither away in a slow period, or a fast period; would they seek out help? No one knows what their drinking water source is, a spring or just rain water possibly, and what if their water source ended, would they know without fresh water they will die quickly? It is a fascinating and murky ethical question for the times.
Climate scientists predict that rising sea levels may leave much of the Andaman archipelago underwater within less than a century. Global warming, overfishing, pollution, and plastic debris will continue a campaign of devastation against the plants and animals that North Sentinel’s inhabitants depend on to survive. The island’s perfect isolation, unmoored from ordinary space and time, is our own self-consoling fantasy: as long as the Sentinelese remain, we can tell ourselves that our planet is still, to some tiny degree, inviolate. We see those islanders through vision as fogged with our own preoccupations as Columbus’s first glimpses of the Caribs.
Within all the enveloping layers of myth and meme, a small stubborn truth remains: the inarguable fact of their persistence. Their presence in our world enlarges the boundaries of what it means to be human. Holding fast to a few square miles of their planet, they declare their independence. With eyes as shrewd as any explorer’s, the Sentinelese look at all that we have to offer them—our planes, our plastics, our inflatable boats, and our waterproof Bibles—and say: Thanks anyway. We’d rather not.
The island where the ship lay grounded had somehow managed to slip through the net of history. Although its existence had been known for centuries, its inhabitants had experienced virtually no contact with the rest of humanity. Anthropologists referred to them as Sentinelese, but no one knew what they called themselves, nor what name they gave the island they inhabited—indeed, no one even knew what language they spoke. And in any case, no one within living memory had gotten close enough to ask.
Even the archipelago’s name is unstable—as if the outside world had discovered it, then lost it, then rediscovered it again, many times: Caracuffaya. Dandemos. The Islands of Man. The Islands of the Satyrs. The Naked Land. Angamanain. To this day, no scholar has resolved the question of how and when the islands came to be called Andaman, nor even determined the language and culture in which this strange toponym emerged. Still, those three measured syllables, deep and rhythmic as distant drums, suit the place somehow.
There is a name on late-medieval charts that derives, in turn, from those of the second-century Romano-Egyptian geographer Claudius Ptolemy. When I daydream about the islands, as I often do, this name comes into my thoughts more than all the others: Insulae Bonae Fortunae. The Latin phrase means islands of good fortune, and it also evokes a similar name from ancient times, the mythical Insulae Fortunae, or Isles of the Blessed, a paradise where Greek heroes, having passed three times through the Elysian Fields, dwelled in endless summer.
The inhabitants of North Sentinel Island are not the only remote, reclusive tribe to persevere into the twenty-first century. Experts believe there are still more than a hundred such groups, most of them huddled in the innermost valleys of the Amazon Basin, with smaller populations in the forested highlands of western Papua New Guinea. Statistically speaking, these citizens of terra incognita are a vanishingly tiny sliver of our species, at most ten thousand of the eight billion humans now on earth.
Even the more approachable Andamanese tribes elsewhere in the archipelago remain enigmatic. The languages they speak have no apparent relationship to any other human tongue.
Their physical resemblance to certain African populations led some nineteenth-century scholars to conclude that they must descend from survivors of a slave ship shipwrecked in the archipelago. More than a century later, in the early 2000s, another generation of scientists hypothesized that the Andamanese might be living testimony to an early, previously unknown human migration out of Africa, one whose traces have been obliterated elsewhere by later waves of human settlement. Over the past decade or two, geneticists have managed to study DNA samples taken from an Andamanese tribe—the Onge of nearby Little Andaman Island—believed to be closely related to the Sentinelese, perhaps both culturally and genetically. The results are far from conclusive, but seem to demonstrate that the islands’ natives share gene sequences with Aboriginal Australians, as well as with a few remnants of other tribes that survive in remote parts of Malaysia. What is clear is that their branch of the human species has been separate from others for as much as fifty thousand years.
On a planet with almost no lost islands left—almost no human places unexplored—our true terrae incognitae can now be mapped in the geography of time. Nearly all of us, by the time we reach adulthood, have journeyed into a New World that would have seemed impossibly exotic to our childhood selves; reconstructing what it felt like even to live our own daily lives twenty or thirty years ago can be a challenge. (How exactly did I track down T. N. Pandit’s phone number in 1998, or navigate the twisting streets of Delhi and Port Blair?) Novel experiences and devices scarcely have time to develop from miraculous to commonplace before becoming passé. Solid truths crumble; topographies dissolve and re-form. Each of us is Jack Andaman in Calcutta, again and again. The future itself is now our looming, unseen shore, a blank map-space of marvel and menace, whose nature we try to discern from a drifting scrap of withered branch, or the stray echoes of drums in the middle distance. Forever present and unknowable; forever unreachable and inevitable.
The geography of history also has a radically different shape in the Andaman archipelago. Westerners use rivers and roads as metaphors for history. The native islanders, who know no such things as rivers or roads, use the wind. History travels to them, sweeping off the fathomless ocean, passing through them and among them, in breezes or cyclones, easterly or westerly, ceaseless and variable. The past abates, down to just the slightest stirring of breath, but will soon rouse itself.
Despite the outsize niche that North Sentinel Island fills in millions of people’s imaginations, this is the first full-length book on it that has ever been published. The travel writer’s instinct is always to go there. He sets his boots on the ground of a place, experiences it with his own senses, encounters its inhabitants on their own turf and their own terms. With North Sentinel Island, that wasn’t quite possible. At times, I have felt more like an astronomer, straining for signals from a familiar-yet-distant planet; even my close encounter with the island’s sandy shore was an orbit rather than a landing. Still, while I regret not being able to trace much of the island’s interior landscape—let alone the inner lives and thoughts of the islanders—I have worked hard, over the course of many years, to chart its surrounding geography, both literal and otherwise.
December 29, 2023
Probably could’ve been condensed to a long article instead of a book, but glad I read it.
August 4, 2024
This is really an excellent book. The author is very thoughtful -- about history, colonialism, anthropology, encounters with cultures, our longing for unspoilt places, his own motivations -- and he writes unusually beautifully for a non-fiction book, blending historical records with his own travels and expderiences in the Andaman Islands over the past quarter century.
October 29, 2023
My issue with this book is that it’s not exactly as advertised. I was expecting it to be primarily about North Sentinel island and its remote people. It was mostly about the British colonization of the Andaman islands. There was a lot of research and details on that and the history is horrific. There was very little on North Sentinel. Also the narrator of the audiobook sounds like AI.
January 21, 2024
Fascinating history and beautifully written. Will definitely look for other books but this author/historian
December 31, 2023
Engaging, interesting, and honest. I like that the author does not shy away from the atrocities the British committed against the Andamanese, and the humiliation to which the Andamanese were subjected. Too often, colonial history is explained in a defensive posture to make the disease and degradation the white men brought to societies justifiable or palatable to western readers. Thoroughly, calmly, logically, the author explains how the Islanders were mistreated and exploited throughout history, and yet he manages to end on a positive note: that they are the ones who reject our society, they don’t want what we have. I really enjoyed this book.
December 24, 2023
A unexpectedly good book about the history of the Andaman Archipelago and its remote North Sentinel, unknown to the everyone until a missionary was killed by he isolated tribes there in 2018. Unknown to everyone except the author, that is. Goodheart had become enamored with the Island in the 90s and is one of the few people to report about its people before the 2018 incident.
The North Sentinelese people remain in large part a mystery at the end of the book, but Goodheart fills the pages with the history of the Andaman Archipelago, which is part of India and was controlled by the British for many years. This, combined with his thoughts on the effects of modernity on the last few remote places in the world, make this book a great read.
The North Sentinelese people remain in large part a mystery at the end of the book, but Goodheart fills the pages with the history of the Andaman Archipelago, which is part of India and was controlled by the British for many years. This, combined with his thoughts on the effects of modernity on the last few remote places in the world, make this book a great read.
September 28, 2023
Really fascinating! Introduced an interesting idea that discussed how it may actually be unethical to leave uncontacted people groups in complete isolation.
July 5, 2024
An easy to read, entertaining book on the last untouched indigenous people in the world. While Most of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean have been assimilated, parts of them - most notoriously North Andaman Island, have not, remaining home to a race of people (no one's sure where they came from, originally) living a stone-age existence, and remaining steadfastedly violent to intruders. Although North Andaman remains off limits to visitors - you can be arrested just for boating too near - the last fatality was in 2018, when a nutbag who claimed missionary status made it to N.A. to "Christianize" the locals, irrelevant that they neither desired it, nor that he spoke their language, knew their customs, etc, since no one had had decent contact with them. Very soon, he was dead, and the Nutbag Fundamentalists who supported him were calling him a martyr. He was not. He was a self-righteous, mentally ill piece of garbage who got what he deserved.
Goodheart had studied the Andamans in the 90's, got a sighting of North Andaman before a storm nearly swamped his boat, and then did research on little-known materials in the 2000's. Then, in 2020, he returned, amazed at the modernization (they were stringing underwater cable to Little Andaman, to improve internet reception), and though he followed up with the tribe of Jaranda, who walked both sides of the line (kinda like the Amish) between traditional life and modernization (they liked the medical care and potato chips), he did not get to travel anywhere near North Andaman, which remains, to this day, the most isolated community on Earth, though our garbage and plastic now wash up on their shores.
Goodheart chooses no sides, just calls it like he sees it, and lets you make the decisions.
A really good read about an area of the world we know so little about.
Goodheart had studied the Andamans in the 90's, got a sighting of North Andaman before a storm nearly swamped his boat, and then did research on little-known materials in the 2000's. Then, in 2020, he returned, amazed at the modernization (they were stringing underwater cable to Little Andaman, to improve internet reception), and though he followed up with the tribe of Jaranda, who walked both sides of the line (kinda like the Amish) between traditional life and modernization (they liked the medical care and potato chips), he did not get to travel anywhere near North Andaman, which remains, to this day, the most isolated community on Earth, though our garbage and plastic now wash up on their shores.
Goodheart chooses no sides, just calls it like he sees it, and lets you make the decisions.
A really good read about an area of the world we know so little about.
December 27, 2023
This book is pretty good, it's just not what the title suggested it to be. The author gives us a travel/adventure story combined with an interesting discussion of colonial British and Indian attitudes towards indigenous peoples. His description of these remote islands, how the native tribes are being systematically diminished and yet exploited for tourism, is fascinating and maddening. The author does a really good job at exposing these issues, yet admitting that he and you (as people probably fascinated by the "savagery" of these tribes) are part of the problem. But if you're looking for a comprehensive narrative about North Sentinel Island and the people who live there...this isn't quite it. There are some interesting interviews with anthropologists and locals who tell stories about the islanders, a timeline of outside contact with the islanders, and a constant rehashing of that story about the dumb missionary kid, but that's about it. The long story short is that there isn't enough known about these people to warrant an entire book. Which is fine, I just wish the author himself realized that before taking us through a million (fascinating, but jarring) tangents.
February 21, 2024
In 2018 North Sentinel Island made headlines when its uncontacted inhabitants killed a Christian missionary.
Author Adam Goodheart actually visited the Andaman Island which North Sentinel is a part of twenty years before the missionary's tragic death. So he was in a unique position to write this book.
The subject if fascinating, Goodheart is quite a wordsmith, and I learned plenty about British Colonial Administration of the Andamans.
And Goodheart should be lauded for his relentless pursuit of primary sources.
But In the end I didn't really learn that much about North Sentinel Island and its inhabitants, because it's not really possible for anyone do this research and reporting without risking their life, or the lives of the North Sentinelese.
This really could have been two long articles, not one book.
3.5 Stars
Author Adam Goodheart actually visited the Andaman Island which North Sentinel is a part of twenty years before the missionary's tragic death. So he was in a unique position to write this book.
The subject if fascinating, Goodheart is quite a wordsmith, and I learned plenty about British Colonial Administration of the Andamans.
And Goodheart should be lauded for his relentless pursuit of primary sources.
But In the end I didn't really learn that much about North Sentinel Island and its inhabitants, because it's not really possible for anyone do this research and reporting without risking their life, or the lives of the North Sentinelese.
This really could have been two long articles, not one book.
3.5 Stars
December 25, 2023
Gorgeously written and impeccably researched rumination (if not direct exploration) by my friend Adam Goodheart of North Sentinel Island in the Andaman archipelago, a place famous for being isolated -- populated by an indigenous tribe that is hostile to any outside contact. Bookended by Adam's two trips to/near the island the late 1990s and early 2020s and the profound realization that the world is invading North Sentinel anyhow, with rising seas and endless plastic waste washing up in the surf. We made a planet in which isolation is no longer possible. Adam also dissects the presumptions and cultural narcissism that informed the whole "first contact" dynamic of exploring and colonizing until very recently. Fascinating from start to finish.
April 2, 2024
This book was fascinating. I didn’t know much about The Andaman Islands, of course, and to learn about tribes that have sort of evaded civilization for so long is very interesting. My issue is that this book made it seem like it was about North Sentinel Island, an island that’s vastly been left alone. The tribe there kills people who attempt to visit and even after gifts are left, they still avoid outsiders. The author had “three” experiences with the island. I can’t remember the first, the second was passing it in a fishing boat, and the third was flying over it in a plane, but not seeing it bc he was on the other side of the plane. I kept thinking he was going to go and live among these people, so I didn’t pay as much attention to the other islander stories.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 14, 2023
Embarking on an odyssey through the mysterious Andamans, Adam Goodheart reveals the story of the Sentinalese, the world's most reclusive tribe. Resistant to external interactions, they fiercely defend their isolation, resorting to arrows against intruders. Untouched by the internet, they cling to traditional ways. Goodheart's exploration is a testament to his fascination. The book unveils gripping stories of infectious diseases and murders, blending the author's experiences with meticulous historical research. Accompanied by vivid images, it provides an immersive understanding of the Sentinalese and their unique lifestyle—a dedication to unraveling the mysteries of this secluded community.
November 29, 2023
The Last Island by Adam Goodheart (Published by Juggernaut) is the window to the world so close to India and yet an archipelago that we know nothing much. Unless you read this book and clear up the cobwebs of mind!
I loved the way Adam narrates his journeys and his conversations with the people who are trying to understand the North Sentinelese people
Humane way of looking at people – empathetic front
Historical and archival accounts laid bare for better understanding of the Andamanese
Well researched book with photographic references too for better understanding
Good blending of history, geography, anthropology and sociology.
A complete book from past centuries till present day
I loved the way Adam narrates his journeys and his conversations with the people who are trying to understand the North Sentinelese people
Humane way of looking at people – empathetic front
Historical and archival accounts laid bare for better understanding of the Andamanese
Well researched book with photographic references too for better understanding
Good blending of history, geography, anthropology and sociology.
A complete book from past centuries till present day
April 24, 2024
My first non-fiction book this year. And I'm very proud of that because last year I didn't read any non-fiction.
This is a very refreshing book for me. I have never read something like this. I've learned and realized a lot of things all through out; about our civilization, colonialism, and our own humanity. And it made me question if my own country Philippines were not touched or colonized by the west, what would it be now? Are we going to be like that last island, the Sentinal Island, where we still use spears to hunt our food, or can we develop our civilization on our own?
This is a very refreshing book for me. I have never read something like this. I've learned and realized a lot of things all through out; about our civilization, colonialism, and our own humanity. And it made me question if my own country Philippines were not touched or colonized by the west, what would it be now? Are we going to be like that last island, the Sentinal Island, where we still use spears to hunt our food, or can we develop our civilization on our own?
June 10, 2024
I'm an armchair traveler and this was right up my alley. Plus I'm an anti-colonialist and what happened to the indigenous on this 'last' island was way too typical of what happens when the 'civilized' world comes in contact with small, undiscovered bands of hunter-gatherers. Read it as see.
Goodheart did a lot of great research and includes his sources. He also made several trips to these remote islands. I highly recommended The Last Island to those who miss John McPhee's books and NY'er articles.
Goodheart did a lot of great research and includes his sources. He also made several trips to these remote islands. I highly recommended The Last Island to those who miss John McPhee's books and NY'er articles.
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