68 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE 09/10.19
disease, lived out their days. A closer look
reveals a town struggling to impose itself.
The roads are buckled. The walls are cracked
and crumbling under black mold. The jet-
ties have splintered under the assault of the
dozens of cyclones and storms that roll in off
the Bay of Bengal every year. The sense is of
a place that could disappear at any moment.
Anyone researching the islands soon
comes across the Hindi term kala pani,
which translates as “black waters” and orig-
inates in a Hindu taboo on ocean voyages.
The injunction contends that long-distance
travel does not broaden the mind, as com-
monly supposed, but putrefies the charac-
ter by exposing it to impurity. This view of
exploration as corruption—either because
what the traveler finds infects them, or per-
haps because finding themselves so far from
home, they hang up their moral compass—
finds support in the long history of foreign-
ers showing up on the islands and behaving
abominably. Anthropologists speculate that
the ancient hostility recorded by Ptolemy
and Marco Polo was a reaction to slave raid-
ers. That reasoned xenophobia was rein-
forced by British colonialists, who turned
their muskets and cannons on the islanders,
stole their land, then stood back as pesti-
lence carried off most of the population.
A particularly grim example was Port
Blair’s Cellular Jail, opened in 1906 to house
Indian freedom fighters shipped off to rot.
Built on a spur above town, the prison’s
design was based on a panopticon, allow-
ing wardens and doctors to see into every
cell—the better to monitor medical experi-
ments they conducted on inmates, such as
measuring the efficacy of different malaria
medicines. Among Indians, kala pani came
to refer to the jail itself.
Perhaps no one fell so deeply under the
islands’ spell as Maurice Vidal Portman, a
minor English aristocrat and amateur an-
thropologist who was made Royal Navy of-
ficer in charge of the islands in 1879 when
he was just 19. For two decades, Portman
made ceaseless expeditions to find the vari-
ous Andaman tribes, who he would kidnap
and transport to Port Blair. Portman was an
enthusiastic practitioner of “race science,”
believing that intelligence could be gauged
by measuring a subject’s cranium with cali-
pers. Poor science cannot explain Portman’s
additional recording of the size of islanders’
penises, breasts, and testicles; his evalua-
tion of their “lustfulness” (which he equated
with willfulness); and his photographs of
naked tribesmen in classical poses. But his
ambivalence about whether his subjects
lived or died is explained by the view, com-
mon in Europe at the time, that the beings
before him were so distantly of his species,
they were best categorized as fauna. “They
sickened rapidly, and the old man and his
wife died, so the four children were sent back
to their home with quantities of presents,”
Portman wrote of six Sentinelese he took to
Port Blair. “This expedition was not a suc-
cess. ... We cannot be said to have done any-
thing more than increase their general terror
of, and hostility to, all comers.”
The end of colonialism was accompanied
by evolving ideas about indigenous peoples.
Among the theories gaining currency were
those of Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, a British
researcher who visited the Andamans from
1906 to 1908, whose study of the tribes was
foundational to the new discipline of social
anthropology. Radcliffe-Brown rejected the
notion that all societies followed the same
path to progress and that the tribes were less
advanced and thus inferior to Europeans. He
proposed that the tribes’ hunter-gatherer
lifestyle was best explained not by back-
wardness but by superior adaptation to theirenvironment. Such ideas spelled the end of a
consensus that racism had scientific justifi-
cation, and the emergence of the notion that
all human beings are of equal worth.
Against this history, a Westerner setting
off into the jungle to find a lost tribe presents
a uniquely unfortunate image. Once, that
figure had been me. Reading John’s journal
as I retraced his footsteps around Port Blair,
I recognized his sense of virtuous, selfless
mission. This, I began to think, was the es-
sence of the kala pani curse: obsession, arro-
gance, self-deception, even moral rot, all of it
buttressed by an almost inhuman absence of
doubt. At the time I was going after the tribes,
I never questioned myself. Portman and the
Cellular Jail torturers carried on undisturbed
for decades. The words Patrick used to de-
scribe John’s state of mind—“reckless,” “ban-zai,” “like an arrow on a pulled bow string”—
suggested a kind of mania.
Looking for a missionary who had changed
course, I found Daniel Everett, who ventured
into the Brazilian Amazon in 1977 to convert
a tribe called the Pirahã but lost his resolve,
and his faith, when he confronted their un-
shakable contentment. Everett’s story, told
in his book Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, is
partly about breaking free of a way of think-
ing that values steadfastness so highly that
the protagonist is all but unable to accom-
modate a new or different perspective—or
even sometimes plain common sense.
When we spoke, I asked Everett about the
adulation that many evangelists still heap on
Bruce Olson, a missionary contemporary of
his in South America who John mentioned
as a hero. In his 1973 memoir Bruchko, Olson
recounts how, in 1960, in the library at the
University of Minnesota as a 19-year-old
freshman, God gave him a new calling, or-
dering him with the words: “Bruce, I want
you in South America.”
Flying to Venezuela on a
one-way ticket with $70 in
his pocket, Olson walked
alone into the jungle and
found his way to the Bari
tribe, who shot him through
the leg with an arrow, then
accepted him as their savior.
To a lay reader, Olson’s story
hovers between narcissism
and fabulism by way of some
crass stereotyping. He eats
“squirming grubs ... about
the size and shape of a hot
dog,” observes how the na-
tives “love bright things,”
and finally triumphs when
he confronts the Bari’s fear
of a mythical tiger.
Those who knew Olson
were unsparing. A French anthropologist
who lived with him for a year in the Amazon
denounced him as a mythomaniac and char-
latan. Everett told me: “I know Bruce Olson.
I think he’s telling a lot of untruths in those
stories.” Yet for half a century, fellow char-
ismatics have hailed Olson as an idol. Ever-
ett observed that it wasn’t that Olson and
his fellow missionaries rejected the truth.
It was that they couldn’t hear it. Whatever
happened in life, Everett said Olson’s dis-
ciples knew—with absolute certainty—that
“if it is good, then it is God, if it is bad, then
it is Satan.”Journal entry
November 15, 2018
North Sentinel Island, Southwest Cove
Well, I’ve been shot by the Sentinelese. AfterBY LATE 2016, PATRICK CHAU
FELT THAT TIME WAS RUNNING
OUT TO TRY AND STOP HIS SON.
“IN MY OBSERVATION, HE WAS
SELECTIVELY COLLECTING
WHATEVER PREACHER’S
DOCTRINES WERE IN FAVOUR
OF HIS SELF-DIRECTED, SELF-
GOVERNED, SELF-APPOINTED
PLAN,” PATRICK WROTE.