Secure Contain Protect
Fun Fact #674
Secure, Contain, Protect
The world’s largest collaborative Speculative Fiction website (IE: Crowdscourced fiction) is a website called “The SCP Foundation” which follows the exploits of The Fictional Foundation’s attempts to secure, contain and protect the world from anomalies which defy physics. However there is a running gag in the series where they send in D-class personnel into any dangerous environment only to abandon them, and this part surprisingly is based on a real event in history.
You see in real life, on North Sentinel Island is a tribe of (mostly) uncontacted people known as the Sentinelese. After the confirmed discovery of the Sentinelese (suspected to exist on the island since 1771) by the shipwrecked crew of The Nineveh in 1867, The British began working with The local islanders (The Adamese) who were confirmed to be in semi regular trade with the Sentinelese (which continues today) since its the only Andaman island with natural metal deposits. After learning their language, and the basic rules of contact The British Navy then deposited a number of Convicts and Adamese Trackers to survey the interior of the island (Portman Survey). With the exception of kidnapping 6 Sentinelese the survey went well, and followed this up with another 7 missions of the same profile –now with a rule against kidnapping.
However if you look at the records kept at nearby Port Blair there are no names associated with the convicts instead being just listed as “D-Class personnel” or referred to as “Convict-Orderlies”. The reason for this relates to how The British Raj adopted the traditional Caste based system which had been used in India for almost 2,000 years prior. Yet they refused to use the traditional caste names for records, instead listing them by letter with A standing for the highest caste while D was the lowest caste. Upon India’s Independence in 1947, this system of record keeping was abandoned leading to its fall to obscurity, until it resurfaced in a meme in the early 2000s.
As a side note: The Sentinelese are officially not an uncontacted tribe but listed as Self-Isolationist. This is because there is infrequent indirect communication with them through the larger Adamese trade network through the Andaman Island Chain. This is actually how we learned most of what we know about them including their language –while never documented in person- is known to be a variation of the Onge language, with their closest tribe in trade and culture being the Jarawa. It is notable that both The Jarawa and Sentilenese have both turned more aggressive ever since The Jarawa were attacked by Imperial Japanese forces in WW2.
