An Andaman story: A battle, a ‘rescue’ and a dog
Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from ‘The Last Island’ by Adam Goodheart—which is slated as “a traveller’s tale of death, discovery, and the most elusive tribe on earth.” The bestselling historian tells the story of the encounters between the North Sentinel tribes and modernity—from imperial adventurers to an eccentric Victorian photographer to modern-day anthropologists. Below is one such meeting that ends in sorrow—except for the consolation of a dog. The excerpt has been republished with permission from Juggernaut.
On December 31, 1857—the last day of the last year before their world began to end—a group of Andamanese went down to catch fish off the beach at South Reef Island, a tiny islet in the northern part of the archipelago. They brought with them bows and arrows, nets woven of bark fiber, and seven outrigger canoes, delicate little craft that they had made by laboriously hollowing out the trunks of fallen trees. (Many of the possessions they were carrying that day are now in the British Museum.)
Before the fishermen had a chance to push their boats out into the surf, however, they saw something strange in the distance: an immense black shape, half ship and half sea monster, coughing out great exhalations of dark smoke as it moved across the ocean. It was coming toward them.
The vessel was a small East India Company steamer, inauspiciously named the Pluto, that had left Calcutta several weeks earlier on a mission to investigate the Andaman Islands, particularly their suitability as the site of a new penal colony. On the Indian mainland, the Great Mutiny was in full blaze, and jails were overflowing with unfortunate captives who had raised arms against their British overlords. Despite the gravity of their assignment, the explorers had had a pleasant journey.
Like many ships of its era, the Pluto was a kind of floating experiment in multiculturalism—its crew and officers included not just Britons but Irishmen, Italians, Maltese, Scandinavians, Portuguese, Americans, Chinese, Africans, Bengalis, Burmese, Malaysians, a Frenchman, and an Arab—and in this case, the experiment turned out quite well.
A Scottish sailor entertained his shipmates on the bagpipes; some Goan sailors formed an impromptu band; and the Arab boatswain strummed melancholy airs on his guitar. At Christmas, crewmen held sack races on the steamer’s deck and boat races around its hull. The government officials on board—members of a special “Andaman Committee” appointed by the East India Company’s directors—were also in a good mood, because they had already found a splendid site for a penal settlement (the future Port Blair) and were headed back to Calcutta with this happy news. Their one disappointment was their failure, so far, to have any significant interaction with the Andamanese aborigines.
There had been a few brief glimpses, a few arrows ineffectually fired, and that was all. So when the officials caught sight of the native fishermen on the beach at South Reef Island, they decided that here was an opportunity they did not want to miss. The Pluto hove to and lowered its longboats; the native canoes also put to sea and approached the steamer. As they drew closer, the chairman of the Andaman Committee stood up in the stern of his longboat and started waving a white pocket handkerchief, hoping that the indigenes would recognize this international symbol of peaceful intentions.
A beautiful old lithograph freezes in time the moment before the two sides met. Sunlight slants down through high banks of cumulus clouds. The Pluto rides gracefully on the water, twin masts slightly raked, British ensign flying proudly at the stern rail. The longboats, bristling with oars, cut across scallop-edged waves. The canoes are little more than lines above the water, their passengers stick figures silhouetted by the sun. On the beach, more stick figures watch from beside a mound of jungle.
A moment later, everything exploded. The natives fired first; the Andaman Committee, an instant later. Three Andamanese were shot dead, including one warrior—a “chief,” the committee later decided—who sank down in his canoe “almost with the dignity of Caesar.” The survivors leapt into the sea and made for shore.
All was chaos in the explorers’ longboats as well: men howled in pain, some of them wounded by arrows and others by a volley of bullets that the second boat had accidentally discharged at the first. And somehow, amid this confusion, an Andamanese ended up inside one of the European boats. It is not clear how he got there.
The only contemporary sources are two conflicting accounts by the Andaman Committee chairman; one says that the man was seized as he tried to swim away; the other, that he grabbed a leather strap thrown to him from the longboat. Willingly or not, he fell into enemy hands, and was brought back to the Pluto. Once aboard the steamer, at least, he does not seem to have struggled.
The sailors promptly named the stranger “Jack Andaman,” and dressed him in an old coat and trousers. (The clothes must have belonged to one of the cabin boys, since Jack, though a full-grown adult, was well under five feet.) One of the crewmen gave him a plug of chewing tobacco, which he swallowed; another tried to teach him, unsuccessfully, to smoke a clay pipe. Meanwhile, the members of the Andaman Committee earnestly debated what to do with him.
They finally decided, in “the interests of humanity,” to take him with them. So the Pluto got up steam and headed north again, with Jack gazing wistfully over the rail as the Andaman Islands slipped into the distance. The only thing that cheered him up was Neptune, the ship’s dog, who came trotting over to sniff at him. Remarkably—for dogs were completely unknown to the Andamanese—Jack threw his arms around the animal’s neck and began to caress it, and the two were inseparable companions for the rest of the voyage.
