Maurice Vidal Portman

Maurice Vidal Portman

Maurice Vidal Portman (born March 21, 1860 in Surrey , England , † February 14, 1935 in Axbridge ) was a British officer who was appointed administrator of the Andaman Islands in British India at the age of 19 . He is considered to be the first European to set foot on North Sentinel Island and make contact with the isolated Sentinelese people . In the following years Portman also studied the languages ​​of the indigenous island populations and put on a first ethnographic collection, which was transferred to the British Museum after his death .

Portman's visit to the Sentinelese and the subsequent deportation of six of their relatives to the Andaman capital Port Blair led to the rapid illness and death of the two adults; then the four children were brought back to their home island, possibly infected. Later, in a speech to the Royal Geographical Society in London , Portmann expressed his remorse about the extinction of the indigenous peoples in the Andaman Islands (see Portman's encounter with the Sentinelese in 1879 ).

Works

• Notes of the Languages ​​of the South Andaman Group of Languages. Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, Calcutta 1898 (English; archived on archive.org).
• A history of our relations with the Andamanese. Volumes 1 and 2. Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, Calcutta 1899 (English; Volumes 1 and 2 on archive.org).

literature

• Adam Goodheart: The Last Island of the Savages. In: The American Scholar. Volume 69, No. 4, December 5, 2000, pp. 13-44 (English; portrays Portmann as the 1st European in the Sentinelese ; online at theamericanscholar.org).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Adam Goodheart: The Last Island of the Savages. In: The American Scholar. Volume 69, No. 4, December 5, 2000, pp. 13-44 ( online at theamericanscholar.org).
2. ^ British Museum Collection: Search: Maurice Vidal Portman. Retrieved February 12, 2019.