Sentinel Island: A Novel tells the story of the last people entirely cut off from the modern world and fiercely resistant to outsiders. It is also the story of the relationship between two unlikely friends, Krish and Markus, and their doomed fascination with this forbidden island. In this blog post, author Benjamin Hoffmann discusses the history of Sentinel Island and how it came to inspire his novel, now translated into English by Alan J. Singerman.
Although Sentinel Island seems to emerge from a novel by Joseph Conrad, it does exist in the Bay of Bengal, with an area equivalent to twenty-three square miles, which is roughly the size of Manhattan.
Scholars can pinpoint the exact moment when this mysterious space entered Western consciousness for the very first time. It took place in 1771 when North Sentinel Island was observed by an English surveyor, John Richie, aboard a ship of the East India Company. Nearly a century later, in 1867, North Sentinel Island was officially incorporated into the British Empire when the British Navy came to the rescue of survivors from a boat that had run aground on its reefs, and whose passengers had repelled attacks by the Sentinelese, the people who has been living there for millennia. Since India gained independence in 1947, North Sentinel Island has been under the jurisdiction of the Indian state. After encouraging anthropological missions in the 1990’s, India adopted a policy of absolute isolation for the Sentinelese that continues to this day. The mediocre results of these expeditions did not justify the risk of introducing viruses among them or the dangers faced by anthropologists while visiting the unwelcoming natives.
According to most specialists, the Sentinelese have lived in isolation for over sixty thousand years, after leaving Africa and crossing coastlines that have been submerged since time immemorial. Everything suggests that they are the people with the longest continuous territorial occupation in human history. Available knowledge about them is exceedingly limited: their exact number is unknown, with cautious estimates ranging from a few dozen to a few hundred. Their language and their religious beliefs remain a mystery, although it is widely assumed among specialists that they both have deep seated connections with those of the Jarawas and the Onges, two tribes living nearby on the Great and Little Andaman Islands.
The Sentinelese do not know how to make fire, nor do they possess mathematics, writing, agriculture, or metallurgy, although it is confirmed that they use metals found in the wreckage of boats that occasionally run aground on their shores. It is the destiny that befell the Primrose, a 16,000-ton boat that was en route to Australia when a typhoon, on the night of August 2, 1981, stranded it on the island’s reefs where it remains to this day.
In every respect, the Sentinelese display extraordinary resilience. In December 2004, when India sent a helicopter over their island to determine if they had survived the tsunami that had struck the Indian Ocean and caused damage as far as East Africa, the pilot observed the presence of several dozen individuals on their shores. One of them took aim at the helicopter with a bow, as evidenced by a photograph that circulated around the world.
To this day, the Sentinelese continue to avoid contact with foreigners who approach their territory. Their solitude is guaranteed by the eleven-mile exclusion zone that the Indian Navy has maintained around their territory since the early 2000s in order to protect them from individuals with harmful intentions, and from those who could introduce viruses against which their immune system would be defenseless.
However, there are various occasions when this security perimeter is breached by outsiders who manage to approach the island. Among those seeking to visit the Sentinelese, there are writers, like American journalist Adam Goodheart. Goodheart is the author of an article titled “The Last Island of the Savages,” in which he recounts his unsuccessful attempt to land on Sentinel Island, driven by a literary dream inspired by the works of Joseph Conrad. There are also surfers unaware of the danger, like John Callahan, who recalls in 1999 he surfed in the vicinity of the island, allowing a Sentinelese canoe to approach him. Lastly, there are evangelists who believe it is their moral responsibility to teach the Gospel to the Sentinelese, such as John Allen Chau, who was killed by the Sentinelese in 2018 after landing on their island.
As for me, my very first contact with this tribe happened by chance many years ago. It wasn’t a navigation in the Indian Ocean like the one undertaken by Venetian traveler Marco Polo, who briefly mentions the Andaman archipelago in his Book of the Marvels of the World. Instead, it was a random internet search that led me to discover the existence of this island, when I came across an article titled, “There is an Island Where People Live in Self-Sufficiency Like 15,000 Years Ago.” It was an article published on Slate in which French journalist Leïla Marchand presented Sentinel Island in five short paragraphs. She noted: “It’s a web legend that comes up every few years: there is a wild island in the Indian Ocean that is difficult to access and, when you get there, you die. And this legend is true. Contrary to what the fake tourist posts on its Google page suggest, you will never vacation on North Sentinel.” From this very first contact, I had the intuition that a novel could be dedicated to North Sentinel Island – a novel I spent the next four years writing in French, before it was translated into English by Alan J. Singerman.
Sentinel Island tells two stories in parallel. The first one retraces the long history of contacts between the Western World and the Sentinelese: North Sentinel Island was indeed described by Pliny the Elder, Ptolemy, Polo, Verne and Doyle – to name only a few – and visited by British imperial agents, Indian anthropologists, and the former king of Belgium, Leopold the second. The second story follows the relationship of two men, Krish and Markus, who meet during their studies at Yale University. Krish is an anthropologist of Indian origin married to an American; and Markus is a young American of Swedish origin and the heir to a colossal fortune built up by his father in the art business. They have nothing in common, nothing except their fascination for the forbidden island where one of them disappears. Sentinel Island is the story of their doomed friendship and of the Sentinelese’s attempt to survive outside our globalized world.
Benjamin Hoffmann is an Associate Professor of French at The Ohio State University and the Director of the Center of Excellence and the Jules Verne Writing Residency at OSU.
Alan J. Singerman is Richardson Professor Emeritus of French at Davidson College.
Find out more about Sentinel Island: A Novel on the Liverpool University Press website.
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