Wise islanders

OF ALL the images to come forth from the great tsunami of 2004, most of them of suffering and catastrophe, consider that of the naked Sentinelese tribesman on a remote Andaman island taking a shot with his bow and arrow at a would-be rescuing helicopter. It reminded me somehow of the lone Chinese man standing before a column of tanks on their way to shoot down the protesters at Tienanmen Square.

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As the Chinese man seemed to symbolize the human spirit standing up to brute force, so did the Andaman islander symbolize for me a contrarian protest: No, we don't want to be rescued, we don't want your helicopter here, we don't want cellphones or television or movies, we don't want doctors or psychiatrists, we don't need counseling, we are not upset being left behind by globalization, and we are not even interested in wearing clothes. Most of all, we are not interested in you, so go away!

I had read of these remote tribes, Negritos as small as pygmies, who inhabit those islands and have been warding off modernization since Marco Polo dropped in on them in the 13th century. Anthropologists say they have been isolated from the rest of humanity for 30,000 to 60,000 years, and little is known of their languages or their gods.

Just after the wave hit, those in the outside world who knew of them worried that their few hundreds might have been all wiped out -- a last living link to the Paleolithic past. It turned out, however, that they were quite well, thank you, and said they didn't need any of the billions in aid that are pouring into the region in the wake of the disaster.

It has been speculated that they, living closer to nature, might have been able to anticipate the tsunami, and therefore moved out of its way in time. They may have been able to watch the behavior of animals and birds, as creatures are known to be able to anticipate earthquakes before any human being can feel the shock.

Early accounts of them have not been flattering. Marco Polo said they had the heads and teeth of dogs -- perhaps because they filed their teeth into sharp points.

The cheerfully racist Victorians were no kinder. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in "The Sign of the Four," has Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson encountering an Andaman islander brought to London by an escaped convict from the Andaman penal colony. During a chase on the river Thames, when Holmes's boat draws close to that of the suspects, Watson sees "a little black man, the smallest I have ever seen," with lips writhing back from his teeth, "which grinned and chattered at us with half animal fury." The fellow takes a shot at Holmes and Watson with a poisoned dart from a blow pipe.

There are very few people left on Earth who have been so successful at warding off modernity, a few in the rain forests of South America, maybe some in the remote regions of Africa.

As recently as the 1930s a large population of men and women living in the highlands of New Guinea made their first contact with the modern world when Australian gold prospectors stumbled into their territory. I have talked to old people in New Guinea who could still remember where they were and what they were doing when the news came of the coming of the white people.

The photographs these prospectors took of these first contacts show faces filled with shock, fear, and curiosity. Some of these island men thought that the white Australians might be the ghosts of their dead, and so they asked the Australians just what the natives of America first asked Christopher Columbus: Are you our ancestors?

It is easy to get too romantic about isolated peoples -- as I am clearly doing. Their lives were just as filled with anger, jealousy, greed, and murder as ours. The idea of the noble savage was always nonsense. Human beings are human, whether they bash each other with arrows or bombs.

Yet I find it impossible not to admire the man with the bow and arrow taking a shot at the helicopter, as his literary predecessor took a shot at Sherlock Holmes, and the resilience of his people in resisting the relentless march of modernity.

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.