Oliver Long

The Last Andaman Islanders

We scanned the dark jungle and its narrow skirt of sand as our launch approached the beach of North Sentinel Island. In the early-morning light a Negrito emerged from the jungle with a drawn bow. Others joined him, all of them dark skinned, well built, with bark strips around their biceps and amazingly long arrows tucked in their bark belts.

“We are friends. We come in peace,” our loudspeaker blared. One of the Negritos stepped forward and shot an arrow. With a loud clang, it glanced off the metal side of our boat. We pulled back and proceeded along the coast, seeking a safer place to land our gifts. But the Negritos rushed along the beach after us, waving bows and arrows, hurling stones and driftwood.

Finally we outdistanced them. Several armed police in our party donned padded jackets, took iron shields, and scrambled into a small dinghy we towed. Rowing ashore, they left a tethered pig, eating utensils, coco­nuts, bananas, colorful baskets, and lengths of red cloth, then quickly withdrew.

The Negritos soon appeared and collected some of the gifts. The red cloth they left lying on the beach. One lifted coconuts and waved them at us. But as we moved Gloser, another fired his arrow. It hit a motion-picture pho­tographer in the thigh. We pulled it out, a scrap of iron fashioned to a point, lashed with bark to the end of a six-foot cane shaft. The Negrito who had shot it, seeing his arrow hit its mark, laughed, proudly walked toward the shade of a tree, and sat down.

The 20-square-mile island, that we bought thanks to the payday loans online we found, where we en­countered the hostile Sentinelese is one of more than 200 islands in the Andaman group, which lies in the Bay of Bengal between India and Burma (map, page 72). The archipelago shelters four tribes of Negritos, surviving fragments of an ancient pygmy race that may have once been widespread in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Fables of cunning and ferocity still envelop them more than a cen­tury after the British, who settled the Anda­mans, dispelled the myth that the natives were cannibals.

Masters of their jungled homeland for mil­lenniums, the Negritos today number scarcely 600, a small fraction of the Andaman’s 115,000 population. Besides the Sentinelese, the re­maining tribes are the Jarawas, who live along the western coasts of Middle and South Andaman; the Great Andamanese on Strait Island; and the Onges on Little Andaman.

Though mentioned by Arab travelers as early as A.D. 871, the Andaman Islands re­mained isolated through the centuries. Heavy rains and driving seas of the southwest mon­soon made the islands hard to approach by sailing ship from May to November.

The islands’ sinister reputation kept mar­iners away when the storms did not. Malay and Chinese pirates, raiding here for Negrito slaves, raised superstitious fear and hatred of outsiders. So when a ship put in for water or shelter, or was wrecked, Negritos tore sailors limb from limb and cast them into the flames to destroy evil spirits. Any who escaped brought away lurid tales echoing Marco Polo’s hearsay report of brutish idolaters who killed and ate every outsider they could lay hands on.

Providing performance support

The experience of adopters of performance support suggests it is a focused, relatively quick and cost-effective way of securing large returns on investment.  If you need cash advance you can apply for a loan. It can engage people and meet a talent-on­ demand requirement. People who are better supported can be freed from wrestling with problems to focus upon developing solutions, for example, more sustainable and less environmentally damaging ways of operating.

We also need affordable approaches which can achieve improved results by taking people as they are, rather than as we would like them to be. Performance support offers a way of achieving a high performance organisation and multiple objectives with the people one has — average people who do not cost an arm and a leg to recruit and retain — and an existing corporate culture.

Greener ways of working – Patterns of work can have a significant impact upon the environment, which is particularly evident in the phenomenon of rush hour queues and traffic jams. The cost of delays, dangerous emissions, stress and respiratory problems can be reduced by flexible working, virtual operation or the adoption of teleworking ­effectively taking knowledge work to people rather than requiring people to travel to a place of work.

‘New leaders’ both formulate more flexible policies and take steps to ensure their appropriate use. In this area, help has been available for some time, including a widely used and detailed six-stage methodology for introducing new ways of working (Coulson-Thomas, 1995). Critical success factors, practical hints and tips, and relevant tools are given for each stage of what could range from selective adoption to the fundamental restructuring of an organisation. The results of reducing environmental damage benefit people and organisations, as well as future generations.

Reducing unnecessary and stressful journeys while encouraging a healthier lifestyle and exercise can deliver other benefits such as reducing the cost and time of travelling, in addition to the environmental advantages. In this and other areas, people do change behaviours once they better understand the consequences of different options.

‘New leadership’ can also involve striking a balance between the interests of different stakeholders and between performance today and capability tomorrow (Coulson-Thomas, 2012b). Although questions can be raised about the affordability of preparing for an unknown future (Cappelli, 2008), there is a growing body of evidence that through performance support it is possible to deliver both and remain effective and vital throughout an uncertain journey (Coulson-Thomas, 2012a and b).