A journey to the coast of North Sentinel Island, home to a tribe believed to be the most isolated human community on earth. The Sentinelese people want to be left alone and will shoot deadly arrows at anyone who tries to come ashore. As the web of modernity draws ever closer, the island represents the last chapter in the Age of Discovery—the final holdout in a completely connected world.
In November 2018, a zealous American missionary was killed while attempting to visit an island he called "Satan's last stronghold," a small patch of land known as North Sentinel in the Andaman Islands, a remote archipelago in the Indian Ocean. News of the tragedy fascinated people around the world. Most were unaware such a place still existed in our time: an island unmolested by the advances of modern technology.
Twenty years before the American missionary's ill-fated visit, a young American historian and journalist named Adam Goodheart also traveled to the waters off North Sentinel. During his time in the Andaman Islands he witnessed another isolated tribe emerge into modernity for the first time.
Now, Goodheart—a bestselling historian—has returned to the Andamans. The Last Island tells the stories of others drawn to North Sentinel's mystery through the centuries. It narrates the tragic stories of other Andaman tribes' encounters with the outside world. And it shows how the web of modernity is drawing ever closer to the island's shores.
Adam Goodheart is a historian, essayist, journalist, and bestselling author of 1861: The Civil War Awakening, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in history. It was named Book of the Year by the History Book Club.
Adam will be interviewed by author and photojournalist Tom Clynes, who writes for National Geographic, Nature, The New York Times and Popular Science, where he is a contributing editor. Tom is the author of the books Wild Planet and The Boy Who Played With Fusion. He lives in Vermont.