In 1602, Captain Lancaster, commander of an English ship, passed ten days on the Nicobars, during which he hardly visited the southern islands, Great and Little Nicobar, but kept to the small island of Sombrero, of the northern cluster, now called Bampoka. He there found trees of such circumference and height, as would serve for the construction of the largest ships. Towards the middle of the seventeenth century, Koeping, a Swede, made his appearance at the Nicobars. Happening to be on board a Dutch vessel, which touched in 1647 at one of the islands, he thought he perceived among the inhabitants certain men furnished with caudal appendages, whereas it was their peculiar clothing, which consists of a long narrow piece of woven stuff, wound round the body and then left to hang loosely, which gave rise to such a report. With the arrival in Indian waters of Dampier, that daring but most trustworthy of navigators, the information respecting these islands first becomes more definite. He landed in the north-western Bay of the largest of these, to which he assigned the latitude 7° 30' N., and gave a most extensive narrative of his adventurous career from the moment he abandoned the corsair-craft he had brought from Europe to seek for assistance on the Nicobars, to the period when, after braving a tremendous storm in a canoe, along with seven of his companions in misfortune he landed half dead on the northernmost point of Sumatra about 1706. In 1708, Captain Owen, another English shipmaster, paid an involuntary visit to this Archipelago, his ship having been stranded on the uninhabited island of Tillangschong, whence he escaped with his crew to the islands Ning and Souri, only four miles to the westward, apparently what is now known as Nangkauri. For the first time history now records an outrage of which the natives were guilty towards the strangers. It would appear that the captain, after having experienced an exceedingly friendly reception, laid down his knife, upon which one of the islanders, very possibly out of curiosity, laid hold of it, pushed the owner aside, and ultimately possessed himself of the knife. On the following day, as Owen was taking his mid-day meal under a tree, he was set upon and killed by several of the natives, who shot him down with their arrows; on the other hand the crew, consisting of sixteen persons, were furnished with canoes and provisions, so that without experiencing any further ill-treatment they were so fortunate as to reach Junkseilan. The first essay towards a settlement of the Nicobar Islands was made by the Jesuits in 1711, upon the most northerly island of the group, Kar-Nicobar. They succumbed however to the noxious influences of the climate, and the few neophytes speedily sank back into heathendom.