ABSTRACT
In March 1862, J. C. Haughton ‘discovered’ an island at the entrance to the Middle Straits. He soon found, however, that the island was frequented by Malay collectors of birds’ nests, runaway convicts and aborigines, none of whom paid the slightest attention to him. This, in other words, was one of the ‘secret camps’ that fascinated Britons in the Andamans. As such, it could be imagined but not acknowledged, and Haughton left the area at once. The unnamed and unmarked island was literally forgotten by the British in Port Blair until 1883, when it was ‘rediscovered.’ It was then retroactively connected in the history of the colony to Haughton’s explorations, given a name (Spike Island) and located at the mouth of another new feature in the map of the colony: Kwang Tung Harbour, named after the settlement’s expeditionary steamer.1 Evidently, the world-making function of counterinsurgency and discovery broke down when the regime could not control or interpret the interaction of natives and savages, and could resume only when confidence was restored.
