Watching Gilligan's Island and Posing a Question

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Mary Ann>>>>>>Ginger

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12:01AM GMT 08 Feb 2006

The Sentinelese, thought to number between 50 and 200, have rebuffed all contact with the modern world, firing a shower of arrows at anyone who comes within range.

They are believed to be the last pre-Neolithic tribe in the world to remain isolated and appear to have survived the 2004 Asian tsunami.

The two men killed, Sunder Raj, 48, and Pandit Tiwari, 52, were fishing illegally for mud crabs off North Sentinel Island, a speck of land in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands archipelago.

Fellow fishermen said they dropped anchor for the night on Jan 25 but fell into a deep sleep, probably helped by large amounts of alcohol.
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During the night their anchor, a rock tied to a rope, failed to hold their open-topped boat against the currents and they drifted towards the island.

"As day broke, fellow fishermen say they tried to shout at the men and warn them they were in danger," said Samir Acharya, the head of the Society for Andaman and Nicobar Ecology, an environmental organisation.

"However they did not respond - they were probably drunk - and the boat drifted into the shallows where they were attacked and killed."

After the fishermen's families raised the alarm, the Indian coastguard tried to recover the bodies using a helicopter but was met by the customary hail of arrows.

Photographs shot from the helicopter show the near-naked tribesmen rushing to fire. But the downdraught from its rotors exposed the two fisherman buried in shallow graves and not roasted and eaten, as local rumour suggested.

Mr Acharya said the erroneous belief in the tribe's cannibalism grew from the practice of another tribe, the Onge, who would cut up and burn their dead to avoid them returning as evil spirits.

"People saw the flesh cooking on the fire and thought they must be cannibals but this incident clearly contradicts that belief," he said.

Attempts to recover the bodies of the two men have been suspended, although the Andaman Islands police chief, Dharmendra Kumar, said an operation might be mounted later.

"Right now, there will be casualties on both sides," he said from Port Blair. "The tribesmen are out in large numbers. We shall let things cool down and once these tribals move to the island's other end we will sneak in and bring back the bodies."

Environmental groups urged the authorities to leave the bodies and respect the three-mile exclusion zone thrown around the island.

In the 1980s and early 1990s many Sentinelese were killed in skirmishes with armed salvage operators who visited the island after a shipwreck. Since then the tribesmen have remained virtually undisturbed.

DNA analysis of another tribe, the Jarawa, whose members made first contact with the outside world in 1997, suggest that the tribesmen migrated from Africa around 60,000 years ago.

However, the experience of the Jarawa since their emergence - sexual exploitation, alcoholism and a measles epidemic - has encouraged efforts to protect the Sentinelese from a similar fate.

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Majuro (Marshall Islands) (AFP) - An emaciated man whose boat washed up on a remote Pacific atoll this week claims he survived 16 months adrift on the Pacific, floating more than 12,500 kilometres (8,000 miles) from Mexico, a researcher said Friday.

The man, with long hair and beard, was discovered Thursday when his 24-foot fibreglass boat with propellerless engines floated onto the reef at Ebon Atoll and he was spotted by two locals.

"His condition isn't good, but he's getting better," Ola Fjeldstad, a Norwegian anthropology student doing research on Ebon, the southern most outpost of the Marshalls, told AFP by telephone.

Fjeldstad said the man, dressed only in a pair of ragged underpants, claims he left Mexico for El Salvador in September 2012 with a companion who died at sea several months ago.

Details of his survival are sketchy, Fjeldstad added, as the man only speaks Spanish, but he said his name was Jose Ivan.

"The boat is really scratched up and looks like it has been in the water for a long time," said the researcher from Ebon.

Ivan indicated to Fjeldstad that he survived by eating turtles, birds and fish and drinking turtle blood when there was no rain.

No fishing gear was on the boat and Ivan suggested he caught turtles and birds with his bare hands. There was a turtle on the boat when it landed at Ebon.

Stories of survival in the vast Pacific are not uncommon.

In 2006, three Mexicans made international headlines when they were discovered drifting, also in a small fibreglass boat near the Marshall Islands, in the middle of the ocean in their stricken boat, nine months after setting out on a shark-fishing expedition.

They survived on a diet of rainwater, raw fish and seabirds, with their hope kept alive by reading the bible.

And in 1992, two fishermen from Kiribati were at sea for 177 days before coming ashore in Samoa.

According to Fjeldstad, the Marshall Islanders who found Ivan took him to the main island on the atoll, which is so remote there is only one phone line at the local council house and no Internet, to meet Mayor Ione de Brum, who put in a call to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Majuro.

Officials at the Foreign Ministry said Friday they were waiting to get more details and for the man to be brought to Majuro.

The government airline's only plane that can land at Ebon is currently down for maintenance and is not expected to return to service until Tuesday at the earliest, with officials considering sending a boat to pick up the castaway.

"He's staying at the local council house and a family is feeding him," said Fjeldstad, who added that the man had a basic health check and was found to have low blood pressure.

But he did not appear to have any life-threatening illness and was able to walk with the aid of men on the island.

"We've been giving him a lot of water, and he's gaining strength," said the Norwegian.

The Marshall Islands, in the northern Pacific, are home to barely 60,000 people spread over 24 atolls, with most of them standing at an average of just two metres above sea level.

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