The death of an American missionary on an ultra-isolated Indian island has cast a rare and unwelcome spotlight on the Sentinelese, thought to be the world’s most reclusive hunter-gatherer tribe.

But it’s not the first time the fiercely territorial tribe has attacked intruders. John Allen Chau, 27, is just the latest victim to be killed by the islanders, after he illegally paid fishermen to take him there in a bizarre plan to convert them to Christianity.

He joins the two local fishermen who were killed in 2006 when they accidentally washed up on their shores, and the director of a National Geographic documentary who took an arrow in the leg in the 1970s.

A member of the tribe was also photographed in 2004, in the wake of the catastrophic tsunami in the Indian Ocean, firing arrows at a helicopter sent to check on their welfare.

It is clear that the sole inhabitants of the heavily forested North Sentinel Island, around the size of Manhattan, guard their territory ferociously — and when you learn about their history, it isn’t hard to understand why.

KIDNAPPED AND KILLED
For thousands of years, the people of North Sentinel Island were happily isolated from the rest of the world.

They used spears and bows and arrows to hunt the animals that roamed their small island, and gathered plants to eat and to fashion into homes.

But in the late 19th century, a British naval officer discovered the extraordinarily remote community in the Andaman Sea.

Fascinated, the officer, Maurice Vidal Portman, essentially kidnapped several islanders, according to the New York Times.

He took them to a British-run prison on a larger island where he watched the adults grow sick and die.

After that, he returned the children to their home and ended his experiment, calling it a failure.

Over the next few centuries, few outsiders ever returned and the islanders were left to deal with the traumatic experience.

“We cannot be said to have done anything more than increase their general terror of, and hostility to, all comers,” Mr Portman admitted in his 1899 book.

‘THEY WANT TO BE LEFT ALONE’
Centuries later, in the 1960s, anthropologists succeeded in exchanging gifts and conducting field visits but abandoned their efforts some 25 years ago in the face of renewed hostility.

No one really knows why they are deeply suspicious of outsiders but perhaps it could stem from the trauma of the original kidnapping.

“The Sentinelese want to be left alone,” anthropologist Anup Kapur said.

And anthropologists agree with them.

“Just for our curiosity, why should we disturb a tribe that has sustained itself for tens of thousands of years?” Anvita Abbi, who has spent decades studying the tribal languages of India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands, asked.

“So much is lost: People are lost, language is lost, their peace is lost.”

In addition, contact with such isolated people can be catastrophic on their health, scholars have warned, with islanders having no resistance to foreign diseases.

This could be another traumatising factor behind the aggressive hostility of the Sentinelese.

When the British first made attempts to colonise these islands in the 19th century, their population was estimated to be some 8000. Now, their current population is believed to be 150, although a national census based on photos taken from afar put their numbers as low as 15.

“We have become a very dangerous people,” said P.C. Joshi, an anthropology professor at Delhi University.

“Even minor influences can kill them.”

Veteran anthropologist T.N. Pandit, who visited North Sentinel 50 years ago, believes there should be no rush to make contact with the Sentinelese.

“Of the four Andaman tribal communities, we have seen that those in close contact with the outside world have suffered the most. They have declined demographically and culturally,” he told Down To Earth magazine in a recent interview.

The Sentinelese “are a highly vulnerable population and would disappear in an epidemic,” he added.

“The government’s responsibility should be to keep a watch over them in the sense (that) no unauthorised people reach them and exploit them. Otherwise, just leave them alone.”

The native tribal groups that inhabit the Andaman islands and are protected by Indian laws which ban any contact with the indigenous people.

Most of what is known about the Sentinelese has been gathered by viewing them from boats moored at a safe distance from the shore.

However, Survival International, an organisation that works for the rights of tribal people, said Mr Chau may have been encouraged by recent changes to Indian rules about visiting.

While special permissions are still required, visits are now theoretically allowed in some parts of the Andamans where they used to be entirely forbidden.

“The authorities lifted one of the restrictions that had been protecting the Sentinelese tribe’s island from foreign tourists, which sent exactly the wrong message, and may have contributed to this terrible event,” the group said in a statement.