The happiest people in the world?

IN MAY 1788, more than 215 years before last month's tsunami nearly destroyed the remote island of Car Nicobar in the Bay of Bengal, a self-described "Boston man" visited the island and became convinced that its inhabitants were "the happiest people in the world."

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Samuel Shaw was a veteran of the Revolution who had cheerfully emerged from eight years of service with a major's commission, a pile of debt, and a personal letter of recommendation from George Washington. No longer bound by Britain's imperial restrictions, American merchants were reaching out to the rest of the world, and Shaw signed on as the chief agent of the Empress of China, the first Yankee vessel to try the Asian trade.

The ship sailed eastward around Africa for the port of Canton with 30 tons of ginseng root in its hold. Bizarrely, the forest-harvested herb was the only commodity we had at hand that the Chinese were likely to want to trade for America's own stimulant of choice, fresh tea.

Shaw's first trip was a commercial and personal success, and he was to make the voyage twice more with an appointment -- unpaid -- as America's first consul to China. During his second stay at Canton, Shaw toured the cities of the British East India Company, Calcutta and Madras. So it was that he found himself landing on the sunlit beach of Car Nicobar.

Everything he saw on Car Nicobar delighted him. The food -- "cocoanuts, yams, hogs, poultry, fish in abundance" -- was wonderful; the pigs, he found to be "particularly delicious." Being fed on the coconuts, he wrote in his journal, made them "the best pork I have ever tasted." The air was clear and bracing, the beaches "constantly cooled by refreshing sea-breezes." The Nicobarese islanders were "in a state of nature . . . the men have no clothing, unless a small girdle round the waist, one end of which is drawn tight between the legs and tucked up behind, can be called such." The women wore only "a short petticoat and a small piece of cotton cloth bound over their breasts." Shaw admired the islanders' circular huts, raised on stilts in "clusters of a dozen or twenty . . . along the shore." He praised the adroitness of the men in climbing the coconut trees. "I have no doubt," he wrote, "that one of these people would climb the tallest tree while a person, at a common pace, could go the same length on the ground."

Most of all, Shaw was enchanted with the kindness and friendliness he found. "It is impossible for people to be more gentle than these islanders." To the American visitor, they possessed an abundance of "the milk of human kindness," despite having begun to encounter Europeans and "sometimes suffered by their rapacity."   Continued...