Robert Evans and Andrew T. dissect the accidental genocide of the Andaman Islands, tracing British colonialism from the 1771 East India Company arrival to the 1857 penal colony. They detail how introduced diseases like cholera, syphilis, and gonorrhea devastated the Negrito population between 1864 and 1879, causing a generation where 150 babies died before age two. The hosts critically examine Maurice Vidal Portman's exploitative photography and forced assimilation policies, arguing that while his records offer cultural insights, they mask a history of violence, sexual exploitation, and systemic neglect that nearly erased an entire people. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Hey, everybody, I'm Robert Evans, and this is once again, Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history.
Now, this is a story, or this is a podcast, I should say, where I read a story about someone terrible about something terrible that was done, and then get really, deep into it.
And today, my guest who is coming in cold to this tale is Andrew T. How you doing, man?
Oh, great.
You know, this is my second time on the show, but it is.
After the first time I learned, fucking steal yourself.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Buckle in.
Dark as fuck.
Get ready for the roller coaster.
Well, your last episode with us was our epic two-parter on King Leopold of Belgium.
Oh, yeah.
Who killed like 13 million people, half of all of the people in Central Africa.
Yep.
Because he wanted rubber, sweet, sweet rubber dollars.
The reward is always so ludicrous.
Even when you think of it as money, you're like, really?
No, he didn't really intend to kill that many people, but he knew.
Yeah, yeah.
He accepted that was the cost of his.
Today we're talking about another genocide, but one that was accidental, done by well-meaning, nice people who thought that they were making the world a better place.
So that's going to be really fun.
Great.
Yeah.
Now, on November 17th, 2018, a young emergency medical technician and Christian missionary named John Ellen Chow traveled to North Sentinel Island, an isolated island in India's Andaman Islands, and tried to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ to the natives therein.
Unfortunately, the Sentinelese people had no desire to hear this gospel and even less desire to let some stranger onto their island.
They shot him to death with arrows and shortly thereafter, his story went viral on the internet.
I'm going to guess you ran into this at least.
Oh, yeah.
I was going to say, without marking this too close in time, when I talked about this on Yo as this racist, I half-assed so many of the facts because I just didn't.
I was like, I think I know what's happening here, so I'm actually very glad to be with someone who did research and knows what the fuck they're talking about.
I read a lot about John Ellen Chow, but this episode is not going to be particularly about him.
It is about why I think it's fair to call him a bastard.
But this is actually about, we're talking about the tales of the Andaman Islands, this entire island chain where he was, North Sentinel Island is located.
And the history that I think John knew going into this.
Right.
Or even else should know.
Not like, yeah, you can still just be like, hey, maybe leave people alone.
If they shoot at everyone who lands on their island, maybe leave them alone.
I guess that's just the devil telling you you need to talk to these people extra hard.
Well, he did say the devil was, this was like one of his last strongholds.
Really?
Yeah, something like that.
Oh, like the writing he did before he...
Yeah, yeah.
Let me just take the opportunity because I figure this is the time.
He's one of the worst Asian people.
I always feel like bad when Asian folks take on this white saviory colonialist type of role.
And this guy is extra in it.
The last strongholds of the devil.
Yeah, something.
I know that was his exact phrasing, but something similar to that.
I guess to be fair, if Homeboy had come to one of the other ones, my apartment, I would have shot him with an arrow too.
So, you know, about the same idea.
You're famous for that.
Yeah, yeah, that's what I do.
Yeah, that's actually why we brought you on.
There's going to be a lot of talk of arrows today.
Cool, cool.
So the immediate response for much of the internet to John Chow's journey and death was distaste and even hatred for his actions.
People called him a colonizer.
Some people attacked him as a bad person for recklessly risking the lives of everyone on that island by exposing their Stone Age immune systems to his 21st century pathogens.
In the days since his death, the Indian government has failed to recover his body and announced that they will no longer attempt to do so.
His religious compatriots, who we'll talk more about later, have been kind of torn.
There have been, in total fairness, a lot of Christians and even a lot of Christians in the missionary community who have been like, it's really clear these people don't want to talk to us.
This was a bad call.
Yeah, yeah.
But a lot have also risen up to defend him and have written articles for Christianity Today and the Washington Post, pointing out that John Chow was hardly some thoughtless adventure.
They note that he trained as a wilderness EMT before going.
They note that he took linguistics training.
They note that he got heavily vaccinated and spent time in what is vaguely described as a quarantine before going over there.
So their argument seems to be that, no, no, no, he's not.
This was an act of love and this was something he prepared for heavily.
And I think the fact that he prepared for it so heavily is kind of what condemns him in my eyes, because he will have known the history that we're about to get into today.
So, wait, as far as let me just reach back into a tiny bit of biology training, too.
It's like, if he made himself heavily vaccinated, that makes him more likely to be carrying the pathogens that these people are not vaccinated.
No, because that's the great thing.
That's why vaccines are helpful is that there's people who can't get vaccinated with bad immune systems, and then you can't spread the flu to them.
Okay.
It's one of those things.
It sounds like he put in a lot of work to try to be safe to them, but also I went through EMT training.
It does not include how to do a quarantine on yourself so that you can contact Stone Age people.
It's not a public health thing.
That's not part of the EMTB.
Yeah.
Jesus.
So the first European to describe the Andaman Islands was Marco Polo.
He said that the people there were, quote, a brutish and savage race, having heads, eyes, and teeth like those of dogs.
They are very cruel and kill and eat every foreigner whom they can lay their hands upon.
Now, old Marco was not one for actual field research.
Historians suspect that he basically heard some vague rumors and then reported on them as if they were his own findings, which was kind of how the whole Marco Polo thing.
Yeah.
That's the brand, so that's okay.
It's what you do.
And as a hack and a fraud, I appreciate a hack and a fraud.
So there is clearly a nugget of truth there.
And I think he probably did talk to some people who had been around the Annaman Islands, some like Indians who had been in that area, because what he says about them murdering every foreigner they can get their hands on is one of the through lines of this story.
Because in the centuries before they were contacted, anytime someone got close to the Andamans, it was just shooting.
That has been the whole island chain's policy for quite a while.
Now, the Andaman Islands are located in the Bay of Bengal, which is to India what the Gulf of Mexico is to the United States.
Only while the Gulf of Mexico has been turned into a floating pile of garbage and flesh-eating bacteria by the filthy, filthy people of the East Coast, the Bay of Bengal is not one endless oil spill.
Although I'm sure it has its problems.
It will be.
It will be.
Everything will be.
Yeah.
Don't worry.
Once we catch them up to our cool society.
We'll get them on the same train.
Yeah.
You guys should see what we did to the Gulf of Texas.
People lose their skin.
They all deserve the luxury of the worst that nature can do.
That is the beauty of our system.
Now, the Andamans are kind of in the middle of the bay, closer to Thailand than the mainland of the Indian subcontinent.
In other words, geographically speaking, they're in the middle of nowhere, east of Jesus, isolated as fuck.
So it's easy to understand why it wasn't until 1771 that the grasping hand of colonialism first realized that there was shit worth stealing there.
So this is one of the latest parts in the globe that colonial people start to explore a little bit.
Because it's such a pain in the ass that resources are probably relatively small, if I'm recalling.
It's very small.
It's a screenshot of a map I saw in CNN.
You got to have pretty good boats to get out there.
People aren't doing this in the 1500s.
White people aren't.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So 1771 is not enough sweet, sweet rubber.
Although that was later than this as well.
We weren't in the Congo at this point.
Sure.
Not enough.
I mean, the Portuguese one.
It's like copper.
Yeah, definitely not enough copper for our desires.
I don't know that actually, but I assume they don't have much copper.
I feel like.
You know, in terms of ease of boat murder.
Yeah.
Not worth it.
I've known a couple people from the Andamans, and they didn't look like they had a lot of copper.
Okay.
Yeah.
Individually.
I mean, but neither do any of us.
I think we have copper.
So that may be a bad way to judge that.
I literally... I haven't had a copper in years.
So 1771 is the year that the East India Company frequent bastards.
Yeah, I was going to say characters.
Do you guys have a musical sting for them?
We should.
There should be like a dun-dun-dun.
For the recurring characters, East India's got to be right up there.
Because, yeah, as soon as the British East India Company comes into a story, you know there's going to be some genocide.
You know there's going to be some genocide and it's going to be really half-assed.
That's their number one brand.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
It's half-assed genocide.
Yeah, the British Empire could best be described as slow Nazis.
Yeah.
In terms of like their death toll, like they didn't do it out of hate.
It was just like, oh, we accidentally fucked up all the agriculture in India and 30 million people died.
Our bad.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like the accidental Nazi.
The accidental, slow Nazi.
So the East India Company survey ship, Diligent, first sailed past North Sentinel Island in 1771.
It reported, and that's the island, of course, where John Chow was killed with the Sentinelese tribe and such.
It reported, quote, a multitude of lights upon the shore.
So it seemed to be heavily populated at this point.
The ship rolled on without stopping because when it got too close to other islands, people had shot arrows at the boat.
For a long time, the Annamans in general were too far away and too dangerous to be worth exploiting.
So the East India Company finds it.
It's exploding.
Yeah, or either.
They find it in 1771, but the British don't really do anything about it.
So like this is in the fucking middle of nowhere.
Everybody's shooting at us.
Take that stress on.
Yeah.
You have to be a pretty small island for the British to be like, eh, not worth murdering everyone here.
They really were not good at leaving tiny island chains around.
They love it.
They love that shit.
So it was not until December 31st, 1857, when colonialism actually started to take an interest in the Andamans.
That's when another ship from the East India Company, a steamer named the Pluto, came barreling through the waters of the Andaman Islands.
The boat had been sent from the capital of company-controlled India, Calcutta, to study the islands and see if they might be a good place to put one of the penal colonies the British were so very fond of.
Cool.
They love them.
If you've ever talked to an Australian, you'll know the British love some penal colonies.
Yeah.
I mean, we got the Mad Max movies out of that, so it's not all bad.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There was some genocide.
A lot of genocide, actually.
Yeah.
Huge amount of genocide ongoing up to the present moment.
But Mad Max?
But it's pretty good movies.
It's a push.
You got to take what you can out of history.
Yeah.
The bright shining lights.
Yeah.
And, you know, Foster's isn't a good beer, but I have been places where it's the best beer.
And those are sad places, but they're places where you need beer.
Yeah.
I guess they do those meat pies where they pour soup on them.
Oh, so that's cool.
I don't know about that, but I feel like you could have done that in Newcastle, too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I feel like that's probably a British thing.
Yeah.
They just stole.
Well, they're British basically.
They took along with them.
Yeah.
So at that point in history, 1857, the Indian subcontinent was busy being convulsed by the Sepoy Rebellion, a bloody mutiny of the East India Company's Hindu and Muslim troops, sparked by the fact that the British had not told these very religious colonial soldiers that they relied on in order to keep control in their colonies that the ammo cartridges they used were soaked in pig and cow fat.
So they went out of their way to not tell Hindu and Muslim soldiers that the act of using the bullets that they were being issued would require them to violate their relationship.
So there was a little bit of a rebellion and such.
Which is so funny too, because it's like, hey, that shit is fucking superstition, man.
Like you would risk your already tenuous hold on these fucking murder sellouts by having them violate their.
I guess the trick there was to have Muslim troops kill Hindu civilians and vice versa.
I mean, that's what they did in the whole empire.
You would try to get troops, like, that's how Idiamin came from, is like his tribe.
And you're like, oh, we can send them to other parts of Africa and I don't give a shit about it.
Just let the sectarianism continue.
That's colonialism in a nutshell.
But they were not always good at it, as the Sepoy Rebellion is evidence of.
We'll talk about that in more detail in another episode.
But, you know, today, that's what's happening.
That's why they need penal colonies.
Yeah, sure.
So, that day in 1857, the Pluto comes, you know, rolling through the Andamans.
The journey had been pretty good for most of its length.
The crew was very multinational, not just British people, but a lot of Indians and stuff.
I've read a lot of detail about their ship had a band and stuff.
They didn't have a cat, but they had a dog.
Cool.
Cool.
It's kind of like the Nostromo if the alien was the one that you wound up sympathetic for.
Well, you don't?
We got to rewatch this movie.
Okay.
So, yeah, the crew had been sailing around the islands looking for places to put a penal colony.
And then when they were near the end of their expedition, the Pluto ran smack dab into a group of several Andamanese fishermen hanging out in canoes doing their thing.
Now, this was the first interaction any East India personnel, and I think any Europeans, had ever had with Anaminese people.
They'd spotted a few tribesmen and women during their voyage from the water, but always at a distance.
And what glimpses they'd usually had ended in an Anamine shooting arrows at them.
Not a bad word.
When was this?
This was the 1857.
So what were arms like for European folks?
Pretty good, pretty decent rifles at that.
Yeah.
You're talking like Civil War-level technology.
Yeah.
So a rifle is a pretty formidable thing.
Yeah, yeah.
So it's still a rifle and a sword.
Yeah.
So a lot of flintlock rifles and stuff like that.
Yeah.
So maybe they had muskets or whatever.
I don't know how advanced the firearms the company was issuing, but there was rifle head guns at that point.
They had guns and they were probably pretty decent.
So the Pluto saw the fishermen as an opportunity to make first contact, which they thought was really exciting.
They were like, oh, we get to talk to these.
And it seems like there were probably good intentions with these guys.
They're like, oh, it's exciting.
We'll get to meet other human beings.
That's a really cool thing for us to be able to do.
So they sent out a couple of longboats filled with men, including the chairman of the Andaman Committee, which was the group of people running this boat, which is the Andaman Committee, because it's a corporation.
So you've got your board of directors for the boat.
It's a little bit like a SpaceX board member.
This is exactly like how SpaceX would have explored the alien planet.
Yeah, exactly.
This is exactly that sort of situation.
What could go wrong?
What could go wrong?
So they get out on their boats and they're sailing towards these Andaman fishermen who are just in little dugout canoes.
And like the canoes that these people use, they're taking like trees that they chop down, tropical hardwoods, and for months carving out the center of the tree to make a canoe.
So these are pretty primitive boats, pretty low-tech people.
And so, yeah, they sail out to them with like a couple of dozen dudes, and the chairman of the Andaman committee waves his white handkerchief the fishermen and hopes that they will know that this means peace, even though they're an uncontacted Stone Age tribe who does, in most cases, I don't think most of these tribes even had writing.
The Brutal History of the Andaman People00:08:45
So kind of a stretch to assume they'll knew what a white flag means or a flag because they don't have nations.
I mean, I guess they have cloth?
They do.
They don't wear anything.
They're naked.
They wear jewelry and stuff.
Yeah.
But they don't really wear clothing.
Right, so they're not making much in the way of cloth.
They sure don't have flags.
Sure.
Sure, sure, sure.
So this guy waves his white handkerchief at the fisherman, and they have no idea what he's doing.
So they just start shooting at them, which is what they do.
And why, in 1857, they're one of the only people who have not been fucked with by colonialism.
Right.
Because they try to murder everyone.
It's a smart strategy.
Yeah, yeah.
So they do the thing that's always worked before, and they start shooting at these guys.
But the company men fire back with, you know, pretty modern guns and stuff.
So they kill three Andamanese, including the chief.
And he's described by the men who were there as having fallen back in his canoe, quote, almost with the dignity of Caesar.
So they're sad that they have to do this.
But they open fire.
I don't think the Annamanese kill any, but a bunch of these guys get injured by their own men because one of the boats fires on the other boat in a panic.
Sure.
Because they're not, you know, the East India Company is getting the cheapest soldiers.
They generally can.
Gunfire, even with good soldiers.
Yeah.
Gunfire.
Guess what, folks?
To this day, gunfire is insanely unpredictable.
Well, and yeah, I mean, you look at like Desert Storm, and we probably lost more men to our own rockets hitting them than the Iraqis.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's pretty common today.
Yeah.
So no one seems to know how, but during this brief fight with the Andamanese, one of the Anamanese fishermen wound up on the company's boat or in a company longboat.
I want to quote from a tremendously fine article in the American Scholar titled, quote, The Last Island of the Savages, which is the best thing anyone's written on the Anamans, on this aspect of the Anemans that I've come across at least.
It is not clear how he got there.
The only sources we have are two different accounts by the Anamin Committee chairman.
One says that the man was seized as he tried to swim away.
The other that he grabbed a leather strap thrown to him from the longboat.
Willingly or not, he fell into enemy hands and was brought back to the Pluto.
Once aboard the steamer, at least, he does not seem to have struggled.
The sailors promptly named him Jack and dressed him in an old coat and trousers.
The clothes must have belonged to one of the cabin boys, since Jack, though a full-grown adult, was well under five feet.
One of the crewmen gave him a plug of chewing tobacco, which he swallowed.
Another tried to teach him, unsuccessfully, to smoke a clay pipe.
So, we murdered this guy's friends and abducted him from the only life he's ever known.
I guess we'll give him drugs.
Oh, my God.
I mean, I guess that as good a chance of any as like when we first encounter aliens, that's the shit that's going to happen.
I mean, the first thing I'm offering an alien is either a joint or sex.
Yeah, I guess.
And I have a standing offer.
I'll fuck any alien.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Anything from another planet that's sentient?
Yeah, you can't say no.
Yeah.
You got to give that a shot.
You have to.
Which is why I'm going to bring Space Syphilis back to the world.
Yeah.
Probably wipe out two-thirds of the planet, but it'll be worth it.
Oh, yeah, especially for us.
Yeah.
So we didn't need that two-thirds.
So, the Andaman Commission report from the time does make a claim as to how Jack wound up on board.
Quote: One of the natives, went in the water, seized a strap thrown to him from the second cutter and was taken on board.
The committee deliberated anxiously as to the disposal of this man, whether to release or to carry him to Calcutta.
They ultimately decided on the latter course is the one required by the interests of humanity, although attended with hardship to the individual, until he can be instructed sufficiently to know the reasons which led to his removal from his country and his kindred.
So in the interest of humanity, these business guys are like, we got to abduct this guy.
Obviously.
I'm not 100% clear, but it sounds like from some of the reports I read, they took the skulls of a couple of the people they killed, too.
So it sounds like they may have skeletonized his friends and brought them on the boat too, and then been like, Jesus.
Let's take this guy.
Yes, that's kind of more common practice of the day.
That is.
It's a very what you do with phrenology and stuff as a thing.
These are new people.
Am I mishearing?
It felt a little bit like the alternative they were offering was just dumping him overboard and killing him?
No?
I mean, I'm going to guess these are island people.
I'm going to guess he's a decent swimmer.
They could have dropped him off on an island and been like, sorry.
Yeah, dogs.
Yeah, yeah.
We didn't want a gunfight to happen.
Yeah.
Probably shouldn't have.
Anyway, they abduct him instead.
Now, there is one heartwarming detail in today's entire terrible story, and I'm going to drop it now.
Yeah, good.
Good.
While Jack was languishing on the smelly, weird, smoke-belching boat filled with aliens and probably the corpses of his friends, he encountered a type of creature he had never seen before.
Neptune, the ship's dog.
Ah, yes.
There were no dogs or wolves on the Annaman Islands, and yet Jack instantly recognized that dogs are good.
He hugged the animal and started petting it, and the two became best friends for the duration of their voyage home.
That is so cute.
Yeah, Neptune was Jack's only solace on his long abduction from Calcutta.
So that's pretty cool that this guy has never seen a dog before, winds up in the most terrifying situation a person can be in, and immediately is like, oh, but that thing's cool.
Yeah.
Like, clearly, that's my friend.
Wow.
Yeah.
What a good boy.
Dogs are good.
Nice.
Yeah.
I do want to note that as bad as all this sounds, it was being done with the most humanitarian of intentions by company personnel, or at least that's how they justified this to themselves.
At this point, the nigh obliteration of the Native Americans in North and South America was well known and considered to be a horrific cautionary tale by the British.
These guys would...
Really?
Yeah.
Oh, I mean, because it was terrible what was done.
I mean, there were people who recognized that at the time, maybe not in America, but a lot of people around the world.
And there was a lot of sympathy.
This is a long-running thing in Europe.
Like, it's why Hitler was always obsessed with Native American novels and stuff.
Yeah, yeah.
Like, it's a thing, this sort of like fetishization of Native cultures.
But it was very much that attitude that it was a tragedy isn't new.
People at the time, because in 1857, we were still fucking with the Native Americans.
Yeah, yeah.
People in like Europe and other parts of the world at the time knew that was messed up.
Yeah.
The fact that a lot of these guys, you know, they didn't have the detail now that we have about how many people were in North and South America before colonial contact and how many died from the disease.
But they knew that a lot of them had died from disease.
They didn't have germ theory, but it was pretty clear.
Right, right, right.
And tended to end badly.
So these guys would not be considered woke by modern standards, but by the standards of the time and of the British Empire, a lot of the people involved in these decisions were pretty progressive people.
Yeah, right.
Well, the alternative was murdering everyone.
Yeah.
So anything shy of that, pretty good article.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So there was no desire to enslave Jack or put him in a cage.
This isn't like a Christopher Columbus thing where like we find these people and let's own some of them.
But they did take him back to Calcutta and he was kept in the mansion of the Andaman Committee chairman.
He was given fine suits of tailored clothing and taken around to all the high society Calcutta had to offer.
He met the viceroy, Lord Canning, and greeted his wife by trying to, quote, blow into her hand with a cooing murmur.
This was apparently a traditional greeting of his people, and I have trouble picturing it myself, but that's how it's described.
I don't.
Yeah, I don't know how that works.
I'm doing it.
Oh, everyone.
Do you think that's the sound?
So Jack did eventually seem to get into the swing of things, and it seems like he even started to enjoy being the talk of the town and taken care of food and stuff, you know, compared to, say, again, like Christopher Columbus' first contact with the Andaman people was relatively less terrible.
Yes.
Still exploitative, still gross in a lot of ways.
But again, you can see the difference.
You can see these people know it's fucked up to do what Columbus did, and they don't want to be that.
Right, right, right.
So, worth pointing out, in some ways, those people are more woke than a lot of Americans living today.
Well, yeah.
Just to be fair.
That's not unfair.
Yeah.
It's always been a curve.
So, and it was still pretty gross in their time, too.
I don't want to cover that up either.
At one point, a picture of Jack was taken to be sent to Alexander von Humboldt, the German naturalist who became the namesake for my favorite county in America.
Jack was asked to pose naked for this photo, and he'd gotten used to wearing clothes at this point and kind of realized it was weird that they wanted him to be naked.
So he refused, but eventually they needled him until he agreed to strip.
I only bring this up because it will not be the last time that we talk about creepy force nudity and the Andaman people.
Yeah.
I saw some of the news reports.
Yeah.
So we are going to continue talking about what happens to Jack.
Not great.
And we're going to continue talking about the accidental genocide of the Annaman Islands.
But first, something intentional that's not genocide is the products and services that support this podcast.
Continuing the Conversation on Jack's Fate00:03:18
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
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And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Sherry stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Moda.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
Treating Humans Like Animals and Pathogens00:15:15
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Olespi and Michael Marancine.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
We're talking about Jack, the first animan to meet white people and how that goes, which did he ever manage.
Maybe you're getting to this.
Did he ever manage to leave behind anything written?
No.
Yeah.
No.
And I don't think that was a priority of people.
Right, right, right.
There was clearly some communication that they were able to work out, but I mean, it's one of those things.
If you grow up in a society without writing to adulthood, the odds of you.
And it's not that they're any less intelligent because I've been reading about some of these tribes and the average people in these will be able to recognize something like 400-something different plants, many of which individual medicine, like three or four hundred different animal species.
Like there's a lot of knowledge in these places, but they don't focus on the same things.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's hard to imagine someone picking that up writing at adulthood without the concept.
And I'm sure there was not a priority to teach him anything.
No, no.
I mean, I'm sure there was prototype to teach him how to behave in public.
I don't think people were like, oh, and he should probably read The Rights of Man.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right, right, right.
So after about two weeks in Calcutta, Jack got horribly ill with cholera.
Surprise.
Company doctors gave him medicine, but since medicine back then was mostly nonsense and whiskey, it didn't do much to alleviate things.
Jack got over the cholera, but wound up with severely inflamed lungs, so maybe he didn't really get over the cholera.
Company panicked because public relations was a thing now, and Jack had become something of a sensation.
It would not look good if he died in their care.
Right.
They agree that the most ethical way to deal with this limbing tragedy was to ship Jack back to the Andamans so he could die far away from the press.
Sure.
Oh, and be back with his family.
Yeah, The viceroy ordered him sent back.
He was given presents, many presents, and shipped back to his home on South Reef Island.
He'd gotten sicker the whole time he was on board because that's how dying works.
By the time they dropped him off alone, naked on the shore with a bunch of pots and pans and tailored clothing, the ship's surgeon noted, quote, it could not be ascertained whether he was pleased or not at being restored to his home.
Jesus.
Right.
Yeah, he's the upgraded version of smallpox blankets right now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
They take this guy to their thing, they give him some clothes, they get him sick, and then they drop him off when they don't know what else to do with him.
Back on this island covered with modern industrialized nation pathogens.
Yeah.
One presumes Jack died.
One also presumes that he may have spread his super fun diseases to his fellow Andamanese people who had never been exposed to them before.
So we don't know exactly how many people were in the Andamans prior to the British coming, prior to Jack being sent back.
We can presume from the context clues that British contact with the islands was just as virulent and devastating in the Andamans as it was basically everywhere else, regardless of their good intentions.
Whether or not Jack spread cholera or whatever to his fellows, disease quickly tore through the islands as the first European and Indian settlers landed because they were going to build that fucking penal colony.
Company established Port Blair in 1789.
It became the empire's capital in the Andamans until rampant sickness and death forced them to move it in 1796.
Oh, even sickness and death amongst the because they're also the jungle.
Yeah, it's the jungle.
Medicine is whiskey.
Yeah, like they don't have a lot of British people dying too.
Yeah.
And I guess for what it's worth, I mean, we always talk about modern pathogens, but it's more just like different pathogens, right?
Like, that's part of it is like you can just have different stuff.
I mean, the odds are not as high, I guess.
The biggest thing is that we live around animals.
Yeah.
Everyone in even in India, too.
Which I think is probably why you didn't hear about like the same sort of diseases sweeping through them because like, well, they already lived domesticated animals.
I vaguely remember that part of guns, germs, and steel.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So there's a lot of reasons this goes badly.
So the author of that wonderful American scholar article, Adam Goodhart, actually traveled to the National Archives of India in New Delhi and looked over some of the books from the records of the company and the British Raja's rule in the Andaman Islands.
Entries in these notebooks include titles like, quote, Flogging to check a natural crime in the settlement of Port Blair.
Mortality Among the Sheep Sent from Calcutta.
Branding of life prisoners.
Sentence of death passed on Biallio, alias Philip and Andamanese.
Port Blair superintendent applies for a large ice machine.
Okay.
This is the kind of stuff going on.
It's not all bad.
They got that ice machine.
That's pretty sweet.
I mean, I assume.
That's a genentonic machine.
Branding people is not nice, but I do support ice.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Not the department, but the concept.
And the flogging thing, I guess.
That's just data you're collecting.
Yeah.
Flogging to unnatural crime, which I am curious about what probably having whatever the British considered wrong sex.
Yeah.
Yeah, that would be my guess.
Yeah.
Now, according to Goodhart, the number one topic of discussion between the authorities in Calcutta and their officers in the Andamans was what was to be done with the Andamanese Aboriginal people.
Quote: The British arrived in the islands determined that their contact would be above reproach.
They did not behave like the Americans on the upper plains or the Belgians in the Congo, raping and butchering for sport, nor had they any desire to repeat the unpleasant experience of their compatriots in Tasmania, whose careless expansionism had led to the accidental extinction of an entire race.
British have a history of that.
Rather, then the first superintendent was dispatched to the Andamans in 1858 with the unequivocal instructions that the natives be treated with the greatest forbearance and humanity, and that they be promptly informed that our intentions towards the people of the Andamans are of the most friendly character.
So, again, we're your buddies.
We're just here to help out.
You're not using all of the land.
Yeah.
Prisoners.
We do have prisoners.
We might mine some stuff.
That's all.
That's all.
Just a little bit on mining and prisoners.
A little hit of the British Empire.
We swear it won't become a problem.
How likely is that?
At least they're trying.
Good for, you know what?
Good for them.
Good for the British Empire.
I say that all the time.
So the Andamanese people, by contrast, made it clear that they wanted not one fucking thing to do with the British Empire.
The standard response by these people was to flee, if there were too many British people, or to try and murder them in self-defense.
Repeated ambushes of royal and company troops eventually sparked a war and a great battle wherein men with spears charged a modern British warship and its modern British guns.
Jesus.
This did not end well for the Andamanese people.
In fairness to them, if you're at their level of technological sophistication and you see a steamboat with cannons on it, you probably think that's a monster.
Yeah.
We just have to all charge it and killed it.
It's like a dinosaur what that's why.
It's what you would do.
Anyone would act that way.
Something that looked similar, just this giant monster coming on.
What do you do?
Yeah.
What do you do?
Anyway, once they were beaten and subdued by rampant disease, most of the Andamanese survivors eventually appeared to decide if you can't beat them, join them.
They stopped fleeing, started hanging out in British settlements and asking for coconuts and liquor and cigarettes.
The British, in response to this, set up Andamanese homes where volunteers would be allowed to live if they let the Englishmen try to civilize them.
By British estimation, they took pretty good care of the Andamanese natives.
One official at the time noted, quote, The government of British India has adopted a policy towards the Aborigines of the Andaman Islands, which has made them, above all races of savages, the most carefully tended and petted.
That's not nice.
It doesn't give you a little shiver, right?
Yeah.
When you read what colonialist colonizers wrote about what they were doing, even the ones who aren't like outwardly racist and say, fuck the Indians.
It's like Andrew Jackson level.
It's all just so gross.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, it's still like the phrenology level of classifying humans.
Yeah.
It's like, races of savage.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, many Aboriginals were adopted temporarily by company officials who spent time in the islands.
They would like live in their houses and work as servants and stuff.
Some nicknames for these people, because the British could never learn their real names found in documents include, quote, Topsy, Snowball, Jumbo, Kitty Boy, Ruth, Naomi, Joseph, Caruso, Friday, Tar Baby, King John, Moriarty, Tollis, Punch, Jacko, Jingo, Sambo, and Queen Victoria.
Jesus Christ.
I mean, I guess what it is is they were treating them like animals.
I mean, I can't blame him for tolless, because if I knew a guy with no toes, I would call him tolless.
Or a bunch of extra toes.
Yeah, I would call him Toefel.
Yeah.
That one's okay.
You see someone without toes, you call him tolless.
Can't blame a man for that.
I mean.
All the others, though.
Yeah, it's like they're treating them like pets.
So.
Yeah, they're treating them like a snowball.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Queen Victoria.
That is literally the name of the cat in The Simpsons.
Yeah, yeah.
That's pretty bad.
Yeah.
Pretty bad and yet.
Better than they've ever done it before.
Yeah, pretty bad, and yet the best of this sort of thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because at least they're not whipping them to death for rubber.
Yeah.
Well, not often.
Not often.
They whip them to death, but not for rubber.
Correct.
The British love.
They whip them.
Yeah.
And if they happen to die, they whip them too hard.
They whip them too hard, and that's regrettable.
And they know that.
Yeah, and they feel bad.
Yeah.
They do.
The Animan people became briefly something of a meme around the British Empire.
Hundreds of books and photographs were passed around England with images of naked tribesmen fishing and dancing and worshiping.
Now, you have to remember that white people at this time were just as fascinated by stories of native tribes as we've always seen.
But this was the first example, you know, in sort of this modern era of photographs being available of an uncontacted tribe being really reached so that they're able to like, oh, we can show people what it would have looked like in North America back before we killed all.
Right, right, right.
Yeah, you know, that's kind of the attitude here.
And so that's why people are just fascinated with all these pictures they can get of the Andamanese.
Now, one thing that helped to spread the popularity of the Andamanese people was the fact that, oddly enough, they seem to be slowly dying out.
Weird how that works.
Now, between 1864 and 1879, 150 babies were born by the women living in the Andamanese home.
None of these babies lived past two.
It was noted by observers at the time that it seemed as if the will of the Andamanese people to continue existing had been broken.
Sure.
Yeah.
Now, beyond that, is there any...
It's just disease, probably, or not.
It's just disease, but they were noted as all being depressed, maybe because all their friends had died.
Yeah.
And the STDs didn't help.
Europeans had instantly, as soon as they started establishing settlements in the islands, began fetishizing the Anamanese women.
And so syphilis and gonorrhea tore through the unprepared immune systems of the Aboriginal women like wildfire.
This came as a real surprise to the British government.
They'd assumed that, quote, excessive development of fat around the gluteal region that had been noted in Aboriginal females and the animals would stop the British soldiers and sailors from finding them attractive.
Yeah, that's pretty gross, right?
That's pretty rough.
That's literally the open to Baby Got Back.
Yeah, but with genocide.
Yeah.
Baby Got Back, but genocide.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it was into this environment that we have just been painstakingly setting up in 1879 that a man named Maurice Vidal Portman was made officer in charge of the Andamanese.
Now, Portman had joined the Royal Indian Marine at age 16 and risen quickly through the ranks until he found himself basically the guy in charge of the dying Andamanese race.
I'd like to quote from his obituary because it really gives you a sweet, sweet hit of that British Empire flavor that we've all come to love.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, get ready here.
Now, this was written in 1935, by the way.
Whoa.
Yeah, for the Times of London.
In many parts of the islands, the natives were either still ferocious enemies or at best half-tamed, and his work consisted in making contact with them and very gradually bringing them to recognize the value of British rule.
Above all men, he had the native touch, that rare, mysterious gift that attracts and makes friends at once with natives.
And slowly, through a long period of years, he made his gift prevail.
Work of extraordinary difficulty, for most of them were as shy as wild animals and often of extreme danger.
He would frequently have to land on their beaches, standing up in an open boat, amid a shower of poisoned arrows.
But in course of due time, he won them by sheer personal magnetism.
He doctored them.
They were very rapidly dying out from venereal disease.
He judged them, and, if necessary, he hanged them.
Oh, yeah.
That's a 1935!
Jesus.
Oh, also.
They were dying out.
Also, he hanged them.
Yeah.
Well, you know, that's the good and the...
I don't feel so bad about all the shit I wrote about John McKay and shit.
No, it's fine, man.
Fuck it.
Wow.
There's plenty of funning obituaries.
Yeah.
Be a dick.
It's good.
Now, that's from his Between the Times.
No.
Obviously, his obituary in The Times of London is not an unbiased account of Mr. Portman's life short.
I did find a more balanced description of his life in the book Lonely Islands, The Negrito People in the Out of Africa Story of the Human Race.
And I should pause here to say.
That is where the comedy group got their name from.
Oh my God, is that a name of a comedy?
Oh, yeah, Lonely Island.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, yeah.
I mean, maybe.
The aboriginals of the Annaman Islands are called the Negrito people because they are black-skinned.
And they were essentially 60-something thousand years ago, people from Africa figured out how to get boats up to the Annaman Islands, which I can't even comprehend what kind of courage that journey would take.
That just sounds insane.
But they made it.
Storms and an accident, and like you fucking survive, and that's where you live now.
I mean, but that's a long time.
That feels intentional.
People were looking for something.
I don't know.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know how else.
Yeah.
And the name, calling them the Negrito people was a name given to them by racists in a racist time.
Sure.
But that's one of the terms you'll hear for these people.
I feel uncomfortable saying it because it tough.
It feels gross.
But anyway, here's a quote from that book, Lonely Islands.
Racist Terms for Indigenous Island Dwellers00:05:18
Quote, this is about Portman.
He was very popular with the Anamanese, enough to attract his predecessors' envy.
Yet he could be a stern, even brutal colonial administrator, not hesitating to burn down Andamanese villages who had somehow offended, to, quote, show them who was the master, as he put it himself, and to hang the insane son of a chieftain.
He was also personally brave, repeatedly facing down armed Andamanese war parties without flinching.
So Portman is sort of the best case scenario for an officer of a brutal colonial empire because he does seem to have at least genuinely cared about the Anamanese people and their culture.
He learned 12 local languages during the time he worked there.
So he was not like an oblivious guy.
He cared about communicating with these people.
And he wrote several anthropological histories of tribes in the area that did include really useful information about their culture.
So he was not just a guy who burned down villages, but he was a guy who burned down villages.
Unfortunately, Portman also almost certainly possessed an unquenchable desire to fuck the men of the Andamanese Islands.
And since he was a good servant of the crown, he seems to have sublimated that desire into dozens and dozens of unsettlingly erotic photographs and detailed descriptions of their genitals.
And that's what we're going to be talking about after some ads.
None of which will contain detailed descriptions of genitals.
Some of our ads are randomly slotted.
If I don't read an ad, it's a random ad.
People got angry at us because one came on for the Emirates airline.
Oh, shit.
We've complained about that.
Should be removed from the thing, but we don't know what comes up.
So it is possible.
I was going to say fairly reasonable given the state of podcast advertising today.
There's going to be a genital mention in that ad.
I hope not.
It's possible.
You never know.
If an ad comes on that's advertising detailed depictions of genitals, I apologize.
It was not my intention to lie to you.
I could be an EDN.
You could be an EDN, but that's a little different.
Ed Break!
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shari, stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Moda.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
Consent Issues Behind Naked Pictures00:15:38
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancine.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
We just got finished with a shrieking loud fire alarm.
This has been quite the day over at the offices.
But now it's time to talk about the Andamans more.
When we were last talking, we were talking about that guy Portman.
And we're about to start talking about his erotic photographs and detailed descriptions of the genitals of the native Andamanese people.
Sure.
Yeah, let's get back into it.
Who among us has not taken erotic genitalia photos in the name of science?
Yeah.
Who among us has not committed colonialism via pictures of dicks?
By the 1890s, basically the only thing that Portman did anymore, he'd given up all the other aspects of his job, and he pretty much just took pictures of Andamanese people.
Cool.
Now, not just pictures.
He also described their bodies in deeply uncomfortable detail.
Great.
He made a lot of money doing this.
At the time, it probably looked like a scheme to pat out his salary by selling photographs.
But historical perspective makes it seem like something else was at stake here.
So I'd like to quote from a fabulous historical study published by Satadru Sen of Queen's College depicting Portman's photographs.
Quote, In one image, a robed Portman poses regally on an improvised throne with a group of semi-naked Andamanese standing beside him.
The names of the islanders who are given as a group of Andamanese chiefs are given in the caption.
All have authentic Andamanese names.
They do not inhabit the frightening and alienating tropical jungle of the colonial imagination that savages renamed Caruso and Friday inhabited in the early days of the settlement.
One man, a 35-year-old named Riyala, is described elsewhere in the archive as the titular king of the Andamans and is said to have been given this title by the British in 1878.
Portman himself was instrumental in these kinds of appointments, having installed Aboriginal men as chiefs after 1879.
Several other Aboriginal men wearing white robes marked with crosses stand formally among them, but they are external to the pictured community, identified only as staff.
In another image in the same file, Portman is dressed in a kind of white safari suit.
He reclines on the ground, surrounded by the principal chiefs of the South Andamans, who wear nothing.
In a third picture, probably taken in the same session, he steps forward aggressively from the center of a line of naked Aborigines.
So again, Portman dressed to the nines, everyone else naked.
Sort of like all of his pictures.
A closeted, genocidal Dan Bilzerian.
He's like, yo, this is the life.
Yeah.
He is doing this for the Graham at the time.
The closest Graham.
And it's also unsettlingly and exploitatively sexual.
Just like the Graham.
Just like the Graham.
Still tracks.
Satadru identified much of Portman's photography as, quote, quite conventionally erotic, more specifically, homoerotic.
He goes on to note that this is to be expected in the art of imperialism in India in the 1890s.
So it is.
Cool.
Okay.
Yeah.
That's the best is what scholars are like, well, of course.
And all the British guys did this.
Yeah.
There was a lot of weird homoerotic photography and sexualizing of native bodies done throughout the British Empire.
It was a capital A, capital T thing.
Yeah.
So we don't precisely know that Portman was gay.
There are no references in the historical record to any lovers he may have had, but we do know he never married.
And Satadru notes that his chosen photographic subjects are almost all male and almost always nude.
Portman himself regularly praised the attractiveness of Andamanese men, writing at one point that, quote, many of the men are good looking, as they have none of the thick lips, high cheekbones, and flat noses of the Negro type.
So, cool.
What a weird dig.
Who even needs that?
He's a weird dude.
Wow.
Yeah, here's another quote.
At the center of his gaze is a particular sort of Andamanese who is typically young, male, and muscular.
Whereas his photographs of heads capture equal numbers of males and females, the other images, especially those that might be described as casually posed, are overwhelmingly pictures of males.
Few show individuals younger than 14 or older than 40, and none of those depicted as wrinkled by age or illness, even in an era where it had become common for British observers, including Portman, to comment on the devastation of the Andamanese by syphilis, measles, and pulmonary disease.
When behind his camera, Portman sought to record not the decrepitude brought on by civilization, but the beauty of a savage body that he had recuperated in the clearing.
The discourse of imminent extinction provided a context and an urgent justification within which a vanishing aesthetic asset could be showcased and preserved.
So he took a bunch of naked pictures of people and justified it by saying, Well, they're all dying out, so we got to otherwise we won't have naked pictures of them.
I mean, I guess he's right.
He's right.
Here's an example of the pictures.
We'll have this up on the site behind the bastard.
Yeah.
That's porn.
Yeah.
That's porn.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like, I'm not a big guy where any naked picture of someone is porn.
This is specifically, I think it seems like he's getting his rocks off a little bit.
Yeah, it's like what you would imagine like a playgirl.
Yeah.
It's like if you're the National Geographic and you go to a place where people don't wear clothes and you just take pictures of them doing their thing.
Yeah.
Nothing special about that.
This is a point in time in which many of the Andamanese do wear clothes because the British are in charge.
He's not going out into the uncontacted tribes and making them take he's getting people who live in towns who are Andamanese aboriginals and he's making them strip and put on traditional jewelry and then he's taking pictures of them because he thinks it's hot.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's making nudes.
Willingly.
Unwillingly.
He's forcing people to take nudes.
Yeah, I don't think he's forcing them.
He's forcing them.
That's true.
But also, he burns down villages that don't do what the British want.
So maybe you're like...
That's a type of force.
We probably can't say no to this.
That's a type of force.
I'm back to being comfortable saying he forced them into the children.
Yeah, I think there's not.
Consent is not clear in this case.
I have no problem with people taking naked pictures of whoever, if there's consent.
I don't think these people can really consent because of the consent can't really be freely given.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, Portman is gross.
His pictures are gross.
He clearly has a lot of grossness in him.
But one of the confusing and frustrating things about this sort of anthropological study is that we as students are indebted to him for providing us with crucial details about Andamanese culture.
And in a little bit of fairness to him, it was clearly important to him that these details be preserved.
So it was not pure exploitation.
Sure.
And I think that's what I'm saying.
I mean, we learned shit from Nazi experiments, too.
And that's also very fair to say.
That said, I did come across some cultural details in his writings in this study that I read that I really wanted to read because I think it provides a little bit of fascinating insight into sort of the culture that was being wiped out at this point.
Quote, When the Andamanese meet after a long separation, they cry.
This custom applying to both sexes.
For about half an hour, and sometimes till the dusk after they actually meet, they sit about a foot apart, or I'm not sure how far apart.
It just says about apart.
Take no notice of each other and do not speak.
Then one approaches the other.
They throw their arms around each other's necks and, sitting on the ground, cry demonstratively.
Others join, and one may see a heap of ten Andamanese crying and howling in a way that can be heard a mile off.
In the case of men and women, and particularly of husbands and wives, the man sits on the woman's legs as shown.
The crying may continue for an hour and generally ends in a dance.
That is by far the most healthy way to deal with.
That seems like a really healthy thing that I've ever heard of.
A really healthy way to deal with seeing someone for the first time after a long absence.
Yeah.
Sitting in their presence and yeah, crying and making it clear.
Yeah, it's kind of beautiful.
But it's also like one of those things where it's like, this is written as like, oh, this is the custom.
And it also equally could be, this was the custom reserved for terrible tragedies, and it's just that we have done nothing but visit terrible tragedies on these people since we saw them.
Yeah, it's impossible to know exactly the context of this because we just have Portman's recitation.
But it's a tantalizing glimpse of a very complex culture that was mostly wiped out, as we will continue to talk about.
And again, healthier than ours.
In some aspects, for sure.
I mean, I'm sure they did a lot of, they like they did the thing that a lot of native, like, they killed babies and stuff.
Like, if your baby's sick, they're going to kill that baby.
Like, that's a pretty normal thing for tribes at that sort of technological level.
Yeah.
There's ugliness.
They had wars.
They did fucked up shit.
Yeah.
Like, when we talk about native cultures, we shouldn't like idealize them either.
They weren't perfect.
But they're not worse than us.
They're sure as shit, not worse than us.
Yeah.
So there are a bunch of weird findings in Satadru Sen's study of Portman's writings on the Andamanese.
He notes that Portman went to great effort to record details about the exact shape and size of these people, measuring their skulls, probably some phrenology up there, and measuring their other bodily dimensions and writing detailed descriptions of men and women.
He describes one 27-year-old woman named Bia as very cheerful, pleasant woman, intelligent and bright, docile and not quarrelsome, breath sweet, and no offensive smell from body.
Satadru notes that in almost all cases, almost all of the women described as pleasant by Portman are also described as smelling good.
Women described as mean or irritable are always described as smelling bad.
The vast majority of Portman's descriptive efforts, however, took on heavily neurotic dimensions and focused on genitalia.
Rewa, a 44-year-old man, is described as very intelligent, government interpreter for the North Andaman group of tribes, fond of gaiety and dancing, violent-tempered, and hectoring disposition.
Penis and left testicle normal, right testicle small and atrophied.
Very lustful.
Oh, oh, oh.
What do you remember Anthro class that well?
But at some point, where did we leave lustful off on the scale?
It's got to be there somewhere.
It should be, right?
Yeah.
Portman describes another man, Woichella, as, quote, exceptionally plucky and brave.
Allowed me to fire at a small pot on his head with an iron-pointed arrow.
Very good-tempered, breath-sweet, not very lustful, penis unusually large.
Both testes well-formed.
What?
In the same breath, he let me shoot at his head.
His dick's big.
What?
This is like, I mean, it's like a John Waters movie at a certain point.
I keep bringing up quotes from, and will later in this podcast, Ruyard Kipling, but that quote from the poem Mandalay about the attitude the British had about places like this, where there ain't no Ten Commandments and a man can raise a thirst.
There's no rules out in the colonies.
You can shoot a thing off a dude's head if you want to.
Just ask him.
Fuck it.
Well, again, ask.
I mean, he asks.
Exactly.
It's like.
I mean, look at it from the other way, right?
You have an arrow trained upon this man.
Can I shoot you?
It's hard to make a request in that case.
It's like, hey, dude, I got this bow and arrow.
Can I try to shoot this thing off your head?
It's a pretty big dick, by the way.
Yeah.
I'm definitely making a note of that.
No?
Oh, I mean, yes.
Sorry, I definitely meant yes.
In fact, oh, you're burning down villages.
Yes.
It's always yes.
Yeah, it's never not been yes.
Now, Maurice Vidal Portman is an important figure in understanding what happened to John Chow, the young missionary who died on North Sentinel Island.
Because in addition to being a creepy weirdo who wrote extensively about the genitalia of strangers whilst shooting arrows at their heads, he was also the first European to make contact with the Sentinelese people.
But we will have to wait to tell that story until Thursday when we have part two.
Are you ready for part two, Andrew?
Yes.
That's the proper attitude to this podcast.
All right, Andrew, plug some pluggables before we roll.
Oh, sure.
Just, you know, Yosis Racist, please take a listen.
If you are going to be on the, you know, west north side of the west coast of the United States in early 2019, keep an eye open for some live appearances.
San Francisco, we can announce, and, you know, maybe some other cities.
Who knows?
San Francisco, city of angels.
The big apple.
Yep.
Yep.
All right.
I'm Robert Evans.
This has been Behind the Bastards.
You can find me on Twitter at iWriteOK.
I have a book called A Brief History of Vice, where I dangerously experiment on myself with ancient drugs.
Buy it if you want.
You can find this podcast on the internet at behindthebastards.com, where we'll have all of the sources for this episode and one pornographic picture.
That's the only one I thought necessary to include.
It is porn, you know, make a note of it.
We will also argue that it's not porn.
It's not look trashy because it's black and white.
So it's probably fine.
It's tasteful.
It's tasteful.
It's a tasteful nude.
Yeah.
A tasteful exploitative nude.
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You know, just like Behind the Bastards or anything like that, where you're like...
I do worry that our Firebomb a cop car shirts might be inciting that behavior.
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That may have been a poor choice.
You never know.
That may have been a poor choice.
We'll find out.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You let the lawsuits fall where they may.
I probably shouldn't have released those Rolling Cole as Kool bumper stickers for people's trucks.
That was also an error.
Oh, yeah.
No, looking at your page right now.
This is my...
We just released a shirt for advertising Go Back to Europe Airlines, which is appropriate.
Appropriate in the United States.
We had some European listeners say maybe not such a good look because that's almost like a neo-Nazi slogan.
It's not as far as it ought to be, maybe.
Yeah.
Yeah.
T-shirts are a dangerous game.
I know.
Oh, well.
Yeah.
Oh, well.
Fuck it.
U.S. only, baby.
You know, if I've learned one thing from the East India Company, you can't let the possible consequences of your actions get in the way of commerce.
Ever, ever, ever.
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Have a bastardful tomorrow.
Dangerous Games with Political Slogans00:02:27
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot in life.
Listen to Thanks Stat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.