The Last Island, page 10
But if the large-scale military clashes had ceased, they were soon succeeded by a series of more intimate tragedies. One awful incident in particular would irrevocably determine the destiny of all those peculiar strangers.
Kidnapping indigenous people is a practice that goes back to the dawn of the Age of Discovery. On the day of his first landing in the New World, Christopher Columbus wrote in his journal of his intention to take six newly captured natives back to Spain with him “so that they can learn to speak.” He also believed that his countrymen could convert them quite easily to Christianity, “for it seemed to me that they had no religion.”
A few days later, two of the captives managed to escape and swim to shore, but the Spaniards later seized three women, five or six young men, and seven children. Later, a man who was the husband of one of the women and father of three of the children came onboard the Santa Maria and begged Columbus to let him join, a request that the admiral granted. Two months later, the little fleet set sail for Spain. Only eight of the captives survived the voyage, to be paraded through the streets of Seville during Holy Week. Soon, four of them were sick with European diseases. Nothing further is known of their fate.
One day in early 1863, a small party of Royal Navy brigadesmen, who had been dispatched to an Andamanese camp “to establish friendly relations,” returned to Port Blair with a shocking report. It seemed that the inhabitants had suddenly turned hostile, seized a sailor named Pratt, pinned the poor man to the ground, and shot him to death with their arrows as the other brigadesmen watched in horror. The soldiers loosed a volley or two of musket fire at the mass of agitated natives —several of whom dropped, wounded or dead—and made a hasty retreat to their longboat.
The colony’s superintendent at the time was not a man to brook any such insubordination. Colonel R. C. Tytler was a hard-eyed, blunt-spoken martinet whose lifelong career in the Bengal Army—he had enlisted as a cadet at seventeen—accustomed him to far worse horrors than this. As a young lieutenant, he had first seen combat in the Afghan War, helping avenge the notorious massacre near Kabul in 1842, when a usurper king had slaughtered an entire British garrison after promising safe passage back to friendly lines. More recently, he and his young wife, Harriet—she eight months pregnant, with two small children at her side—had narrowly escaped Delhi in 1857 when the sepoys mutinied. They had seen wagons laden with corpses of slain officers; heard the screams of suspected spies impaled on red-hot pokers; fled the city by night as their house and all their possessions, together with the rest of the army cantonment, went up in flames. The redoubtable Mrs. Tytler gave birth in the back of a bullock-cart a few days later, amid the din of nearby shellfire. (In appreciation of his wife’s sangfroid, the colonel later named the highest point in the hills above Port Blair in her honor: Mount Harriet.) He had accepted the Andaman appointment grudgingly, certain that something better would come his way soon. Nothing did. His wife, despite her fortitude in the retreat from Delhi, now languished in their official residence, plagued by a relentless succession of tropical ailments. Irritated and impatient, the Tytlers—like many British functionaries who ended up in that sickly and inhospitable post—bore up as best they could, hating the place.
When news of Pratt’s murder reached the colonel, he saw it as simply another instance of native malfeasance, one that demanded swift and severe justice. But Tytler was a man to do things by the book, so instead of ordering a wholesale massacre, he wrote to the authorities in Calcutta suggesting that the guilty Andamanese be captured and sent to the mainland for proper trial. (In a letter, he referred to the Andamanese as “a race of treacherous, cold-blooded murderers, assuming the garb of friendship for the purpose of carrying out their diabolical plans.”) Within a few weeks, his troops had successfully captured the suspected ringleaders of Pratt’s murder, two native men named Tura and Lokala. With customary British wit, they nicknamed the small, dark-skinned men “Jumbo” and “Snowball,” bringing them back to Port Blair in fetters.*
Then a fact emerged that should have changed everything: Pratt had been in the act of raping an Andamanese woman—Tura’s wife, in fact—when he was killed. At this news, sharply worded communiqués from the viceroy’s council arrived on Colonel Tytler’s desk, ordering him to stand down from his plans for “a general hunt against the aborigines,” laden with phrases like “unfortunate occurrences,” “interests of humanity,” and “much regret.” But by that point, the two Andamanese were in the colonel’s custody, and he did not intend to let them go back to their own people. He saw an opportunity here, and he intended to take it: only by civilizing these savages could their race be properly brought to heel.
So instead of executing Tura and Lokala for their misbehavior, the colonel simply kept them in fetters in the naval barracks for several months—determined to punish any violent transgression against a white man, whether provoked or not—then released them from their chains and treated them almost as honored guests. He had a special house built for them on Ross Island, appointed convict servants to look after their needs, and provided all the food and tobacco that they wished. He placed them under the solicitous care of Port Blair’s chaplain, one Mr. Corbyn, a young Anglican priest with an Oxford divinity degree and impeccable references. This assiduous gentleman commenced teaching them basket weaving and the English alphabet, at both of which the two Andamanese displayed admirable aptitude. The only privilege that these natives were not allowed was that of returning to their homes and families.
Their keepers soon gave Tura and Lokala’s special house a cozy-sounding name: the Andaman Home. Soon—perhaps unexpectedly—the two were joined by others. The British had always remarked upon the fondness that the Andamanese showed for one another, and their sorrow at parting from friends and relatives. Now it appeared that the men’s loved ones must have been pining for them. One day, a woman and child made their way across the harbor to Ross Island. She was evidently Tura’s wife—recently the victim of Seaman Pratt’s assault—and the child was their son. The Englishmen dubbed the woman Topsy, after the enslaved girl in Mrs. Stowe’s famous abolitionist novel. Before long, these new occupants were joined by others, until a dozen or more crowded into the Home. A pair of Andamanese were caught stealing crops from the colony’s gardens: they, too, were sent to the growing establishment as compulsory inmates, followed by their families. So noticeable were the comings and goings of these unclothed visitors that the Home was soon moved to a less conspicuous location on Ross Island, lest the innocent eyes of Englishwomen be further polluted.
In a report to Calcutta, Colonel Tytler congratulated himself on the “firmness, decision, and kindness” with which the Andamanese guests were being treated. “They must see the superior comforts of civilisation compared to their miserable savage condition,” he explained. “Though not immediately apparent, we are in reality laying the foundation-stone for people hitherto living in a perfectly barbarous state, replete with treachery, murder, and every other savageness.” Then the colonel added: “Besides which it is very desirable, even in a political point of view, keeping these people in our custody as hostages.” He assured his superiors that although the Andaman Home was now fenced in with stout bamboo palings and guarded by armed Indian soldiers, its residents “otherwise enjoy full liberty.” Their orderly and submissive conduct, the colonel wrote, must surely “ripen into an intimate and warm attachment, and be productive of incalculable blessings both to us and to this benighted outcast race.”
The Reverend Mr. Corbyn’s progress reports were not so sanguine. Himself the product of a well-rounded English private education, he had resolved to treat his charges like schoolboys—which meant, in those days, that he would slap them smartly when they misbehaved. And as increasing numbers of natives were confined at the Home, they misbehaved more and more. Topsy would smear herself with body paint, then flop naked into an armchair, ruining the upholstery. One of the boys, rather than submitting cheerfully to instruction in his ABCs, seized a sewing needle and lunged as if to jab Mr. Corbyn’s eyes out. Worst of all, these hellions showed none of the customary deference of Eton or Harrow boys: when he slapped them, they slapped back. Even when his pupils seemed better disposed, their behavior was often disconcerting, with the women sitting naked on the chaste young Englishman’s lap—albeit without any apparent libidinous motives—and affectionately fastening chunks of coral to his necktie.
“Adult male drinking from a Nautilus shell,” photograph by Maurice Vidal Portman, Andaman Islands, c. 1893.
“Adult male and female sitting on a mat, hugging each other,” photograph by Maurice Vidal Portman, Andaman Islands, c. 1893.
“Andamanese group with Mr Homfray, their keeper, photographed at Calcutta,” 1865.
“Adult male sleeping on a mat; another man is squatting behind him; they are wearing head and neck-ornament,” Andaman Islands, c. 1893.
“Mrs. Ford’s Honeymoon group,” c. 1895. The two Andamanese men in front are identified as “Moha” and “Daniel.”
At last, the clergyman hit upon what seemed an excellent idea for subduing the Andaman Home’s rambunctious inmates. He would impress upon them the manifold blessings—and the majestic power—of European civilization, in a way that he could not do in the rough frontier settlement at Port Blair: by taking a select group of them to the mainland.
Reaching Calcutta, Mr. Corbyn’s eight travel companions—Tura, Topsy, a man nicknamed “Jacko,” and five children—were received with even greater enthusiasm than “Jack Andaman” had been a few years earlier. To demonstrate British military might, they were taken on tours of the city’s fortifications. To show off British technological prowess, they were shown the thundering steam-driven presses at the Calcutta Mint, then whisked aboard a railway car for a daylong excursion across fifty miles of countryside. To impress upon them the achievements of British scholarship, they were welcomed to a meeting of the venerable Asiatic Society, where they sat patiently while the learned members debated, at considerable length, whether it was advisable or even possible to civilize them.
They also became celebrities. Word spread quickly among the city’s native and white inhabitants that cannibal “monkey-men” with long tails were staying in a house near the town hall. Within less than twenty-four hours, the building was thronged with Calcuttans clamoring to see them firsthand. Soon, the surrounding streets became impassable as curiosity seekers lined up all day for a glimpse of the picturesque visitors.
To the Andamanese, it must have been startling to realize that the world contained so many people, that they and all their fellow islanders were so vastly outnumbered within the immense galaxy of the human species. Frustratingly for Mr. Corbyn, however, they remained apparently un-awed by all the military fortifications, steam-presses, railway cars, and scholarly gentlemen.
Exposure to throngs of gawking civilians had other consequences. Topsy was the first of the eight Andamanese to fall sick. She eventually recovered a bit, but still, only half of the little group returned alive to Port Blair. Under circumstances only vaguely described in the official records, two of them drowned, one was “murdered,” and one died “of natural causes.”
Back at Ross Island, it became apparent that Mr. Corbyn’s project to subdue the intractable natives by exposing them to the manifold blessings of civilization was having the opposite of its desired effect. On his return, he acknowledged, he had found their morale at its lowest ebb, and confided in his journal—though not in his official report—that some of the females appeared to have suffered “unwanted advances” from the naval petty officer left in charge of them. Soon, the Home’s residents began escaping. Despite the stout fence, despite the armed guards, they slipped away by night. Most managed to swim the half mile to shore, some pushing their children on makeshift bamboo rafts. They fled by ones and twos, then en masse. One man even contrived somehow to get across while still in iron fetters.
After a few weeks, almost the only ones left were Tura and Topsy. She was still ailing, and he would not leave her behind. Then, one night, he got into an altercation with the guards and was hauled away in chains.
With her husband gone, the woman who had been called Topsy at last made her escape from Ross Island. She crept out of the Home under cover of darkness, slipped into the phosphorescent water, and started to swim. But her lingering illness had left her too weak to reach the opposite shore. Her small body was found on the beach a few days later, half covered by the shifting sand.
Beneath the high-arched Victorian ironwork of the Pitt Rivers anthropological museum at the University of Oxford, in a large glass vitrine labeled “Treatment of the Dead,” amidst Egyptian sarcophagi fragments, Nicobarese funeral headdresses, and an ancient Celtic mortuary urn, rests the skull of a person who lived and died in the Andaman Islands sometime in the mid-nineteenth century. Deep-socketed, daubed with dark-red ochre, and adorned with a delicate fringe of dentalium shells, it seems even more deathly than ordinary human remains. Despite the jumble that surrounds it, this curio catches the attention of many museumgoers, and often appears a day or two later in the visitors’ Instagram feeds.
Nothing is known about who the dead man or woman was, the family he or she came from, or the village where he or she lived. A shelf card from the 1880s records simply that the relic was donated to the university by one of the early overseers of the Andaman Home. It also explains that the skull was that of a “deceased relative” and that the mourner who wore it—probably a parent, spouse, or child—did so to honor the departed loved one and also to ward off disease and misfortune, in keeping with native traditions. (Later anthropologists have come to understand this practice as deeply bound up with the native Andamanese concept of cyclical time and the enduring presence of the past.) The card does not reveal how these cherished remains left the family’s possession and came into European hands.
Early colonial officials, anthropologists, soldiers from the local garrison, and occasional passing tourists all avidly collected Andamanese artifacts: by bartering for them, stealing them from the natives’ huts, picking them up from the ground after skirmishes, or simply nagging and wheedling until the owners were convinced to give them up. Those made with human remains held a particular attraction, especially at a time when scientists in Europe and America were beginning to make serious study of the human body in all its ethnic variations. In one of the Reverend Mr. Corbyn’s reports, he wrote that despite the natives’ strong reluctance, he had eventually “persuaded” them, “for scientific purposes,” to let him take one especially well-ornamented skull, probably that of “an important chief.”
In fact, the skull could not have been that of an “important chief,” since the concept of a chief, or indeed a political ruler of any kind, did not then exist among the Andamanese. Traditionally—indeed, among the Onge and Jarawa to this day—decisions in the tribe are made consensually, with particular deference paid to elders, both men and women. But this was, of course, inconceivable to the loyal subjects of Queen Victoria.
Throughout the world today, one can find bits and pieces of the nineteenth-century Andamanese, sometimes still on public display, but more often removed into deep museum storage. There are four skulls at the Smithsonian in Washington. A skull and mandible at the Museum der Kulturen in Basel. Four skulls and five mandibles at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Another skull and jaw in Vienna. Three skulls in Edinburgh. Two skulls at Harvard. Assorted human remains in Chicago. In 2019, an Andamanese skull, evidently brought home by a colonial tourist, was offered for sale on the website of a high-end English antiques dealer.
No living Andamanese is known to exist today anywhere outside the Andaman Islands. But those involuntary exiles can be found in a dozen or more countries.
On one occasion in the late nineteenth century, according to an entry in the colony’s official records, word reached British authorities that a Chinese junk, wending its way between Moulmein and the Strait of Malacca, had been shipwrecked on Little Andaman. The crew members were reported to have been captured or massacred by hostile islanders, so in due course a punitive expedition was sent out from Port Blair. The officer in charge was given specific instructions to capture some of the tribesmen, if possible, so that something might be learned of this previously uncontacted group’s language and culture.
After a short battle that pitted native bows and arrows against British rifles—a fight which, the commander reported drily, “ended in favour of the Enfields and Sniders”—the invaders managed to seize one of the natives unharmed. Back on Great Andaman, the young prisoner was placed in the protection of a renowned Danish linguist who had come to the archipelago to study native tongues. The erstwhile warrior proved sufficiently tractable that he was given comfortable lodgings at the chief commissioner’s villa, atop Mount Harriet.
Unfortunately—although “the greatest kindness was shown” to the prisoner—the linguist’s investigation proved unsuccessful. One day, the Andamanese man happened to catch a glimpse of himself in a looking glass, and he responded with such alarm that his captors believed he thought he had seen a ghost, perhaps that of one of his own countrymen.
After that, the young man pined away. For a long time before his death, he spent entire days looking out from the summit of Mount Harriet toward North Sentinel Island, which was visible in the distance—as if it were his home, the Englishmen thought. Was it possible, they wondered, that he might somehow have come to Little Andaman from that other, even more mysterious, island?
