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Sentinels were discovered in 1771, when a navigator on a British research vessel reported that night was visible on the island, suggesting that it was inhabited. The British ship did not stop to study the island in detail, but the logbook contains the first written mention of the North Sentinel’s population.
After almost a century, in 1867, the Niniveh Indian merchant ship crashed on the reef near the island. The 86 passengers and 20 crew members managed to survive, using a lifeboat to reach the island. On the morning of the third day, the survivors of the shipwreck were suddenly attacked.
The captain of the ship Niniveh managed to escape in the rescue boat and survived, being rescued a few days later by a ship passing through the area. He later reported that “the wild were completely undressed, with short hair and nose painted in red, and their arrows had a metal tip.” Most likely, the sentinels recovered the metal remains of the nearby failed vessels, a behavior observed even today. After a few days, a British Royal Navy vessel recovered the island’s survivors, who had managed to keep the locals away.
In 1896, an Indian who served his sentence in the penitentiary colony of Great Andaman Island managed to escape with the help of an improvised raft. Its boat floated drifting, crossing the approximately 50 miles to North Sentinel Island and crashing along its shoreline. The team detached by the officials of the penal colony to look for the escaped one discovered after three days his corpse on the shore of the island. His neck was severed and his body pierced by arrows in many places.
As a result of this incident, the Sentinels were not disturbed by the intruders for more than half a century.
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