and Nicobar Islands, led an armed group of Europeans along with convict-orderlies and Andamanese trackers (whom they had already befriended) to North Sentinel Island. On their arrival, the islanders fled into the treeline. After several days of futile search, during which they found abandoned villages and paths, Portman's men captured six people: an elderly man, a woman and four children. The man and woman died of illness shortly after their arrival in Port Blair and the children began to fall ill as well. Portman hurriedly sent the children back to North Sentinel Island with a large quantity of gifts in an attempt to establish friendly relations. Portman visited the island again in 1883, 1885 and 1887. In 1896, a convict escaped from the penal colony on Great Andaman Island on a makeshift raft and drifted across to the North Sentinel beach. His body was discovered by a search party some days later with several arrow-piercings and a cut throat. The party recorded that they did not see any islanders. In an 1899 speech, Richard Carnac Temple, who served as chief commissioner of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands from 1895 to 1904, reported that he had toured North Sentinel island to capture fugitives, but upon landing discovered that they had been killed by the inhabitants, who retreated in haste upon seeing his party approach. Temple also recorded a case where a Sentinelese apparently drifted off to the Onge and fraternized with them over the course of two years. When Temple and Portman accompanied him to the tribe and attempted to establish friendly contact, they did not recognize him and responded aggressively by shooting arrows at the group. The man refused to remain on the island. Portman cast doubt on the exact timespan the Sentinelese spent with the Onge, and believed that he had probably been raised by the Onge since childhood. Temple concluded the Sentinelese were "a tribe which slays every stranger, however inoffensive, on sight, whether a forgotten member of itself, of another Andamanese tribe, or a complete foreigner". Other British colonial administrators have visited the island, including Rogers in 1902, but none of the expeditions after 1880 had any ethnographic purpose, probably because of the island's small size and unfavorable location. M.C.C. Bonnington, a British colonial official, visited the island in 1911 and 1932 to conduct a census. On the first occasion, he came across eight men on the