Reading the history of Westerners on the islands really broke my heart. Particularly this paragraph: > Perhaps no one fell so deeply under the islands’ spell

Reading the history of Westerners on the islands really broke my heart. Particularly this paragraph: > Perhaps no one fell so deeply under the islands’ spell as Maurice Vidal Portman, a minor English aristocrat and amateur anthropologist who was made Royal Navy officer in charge of the islands in 1879 when he was just 19. For two decades, Portman made ceaseless expeditions to find the various 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 calipers. Poor science cannot explain Portman’s additional recording of the size of islanders’ penises, breasts, and testicles; his evaluation 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, common 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 success. ... We cannot be said to have done anything more than increase their general terror of, and hostility to, all comers.” I cannot even begin to imagine how terrified those people must have been. To be kidnapped and then poked and prodded by a bunch of instruments you've never seen before by people you can't communicate with or understand. The way they were treated was truly barbaric.