Introduction to the feature 'Representing the Andaman Islands'

The Andaman Islands are a small and relatively isolated island archipelago in the Bay of Bengal, closer to Burma than to India. Following from Marco Polo’s travel writing in the thirteenth century there was a widespread belief that the Andamanese were at best savages and at worse cannibals. Uncolonized during the eighteenth century, by the turn of the nineteenth century the Islands were at the centre of increasingly important trading routes between India and China. In 1793, the East India Company moved to occupy the Andamans as a penal colony, directing that all Bengal life convicts be transported there to work on land clearance, cultivation, and other projects. It shipped about three hundred convicts to the Islands, but the settlement was ravaged by disease and within three years the British had abandoned it. The Company transferred the surviving convicts to its penal settlement in Penang. We know little more of this ill-fated attempt at colonization, and least of all about the nature and extent of contact with the Islands’ indigenous peoples. [Taken from introduction]