The Sentinelese of the Andamans

Subraj, my friend calls him, but the newspapers name him Sunder Raj. They say he was a fisherman, but my friend, who spent time drinking toddy and smoking ganja cheroots with him, says Subraj wasn't quite familiar with boats. He made his living scamming bits of semi-precious sea-life that other people stole from the ocean: nautilus shells, corals, bêche-de-mer and turbo shells inlaid with swirls of mother-of-pearl. Subraj's lack of seafaring experience, said my friend, was due to his having spent years in prison for battering to death his first wife and her lover (ironic, given the Andamans' long history as a penal colony, that he'd done his time on the mainland). Upon returning to the islands he had married again. He was a charming, jolly man with a huge mutton-chop moustache. Everyone liked him. It came as quite a shock to hear that he had been eaten by the North Sentinelese.

Tales of fierce cannibal islanders have drifted for millennia on the currents of the Indian Ocean. The West first heard them from the Venetian, Marco Polo. Locked in a Genoese jail, he entertained his cellmate Rustichiello of Pisa with yarns of faraway islands whose people had protruding muzzles and jaws and teeth like mastiffs. 'They are terribly cruel,' Polo told the wide-eyed Pisan, 'and dine on every foreigner they can catch.' His information likely came from sailors' legends retold in Rialto taverns, but Rustichiello's account of Polo's travels, Il Millione, was a 14th-century bestseller. Its success ensured that the slur on the character of the Andamanese has survived to our own day.