The Indian government has banned contact with the Sentinelese as a way of protecting them from outsiders – and outsiders from them. The islanders have maintained their independence by repelling foreigners from their shoreline with bows and arrows.

Bioluminescent plankton illuminated fish jumping “like darting mermaids” as the boat travelled more than 100km. Sometime before 4.30am, the crew noted three bonfires on a distant beach and anchored outside the island’s barrier reef. While resting, eyes shut but not asleep, Chau had “a vision as I’ve never had one before”, of a meteorite – possibly representing himself – streaking towards a “frightening city with jagged spires”, seemingly North Sentinel Island.

Then: “A whitish light filled [the city] and all the frightening bits melted away.” He couldn’t help wondering in his diary: “LORD is this island Satan’s last stronghold where none have heard or even had a chance to hear Your Name?”

Dawn revealed a hut on a white-sand beach, backed by primordial jungle. Chau offloaded from the fishermen’s boat a kayak and two waterproof cases jammed with wilderness survival supplies. He paddled more than a kilometre in shallow water over dead coral, and as he approached shore, he heard women “looking and chattering”. Then two dark-skinned men, wearing little, if anything, ran onto the beach, shouting in a language spoken by no one on Earth besides their tribe. They clutched bows, though they hadn’t yet strung them with arrows.

From his kayak, Chau yelled in English: “My name is John. I love you, and Jesus loves you. Jesus Christ gave me authority to come to you.” Then, offering a tuna most likely caught by the fishermen on the journey to the island, Chau declared: “Here is some fish!” In response, the Sentinelese socketed bamboo arrows onto bark fibre bowstrings. Chau panicked. He flung the fish into the bay. As the tribesmen gathered it, he turned and paddled “like I never have in my life, back to the boat”.

By the time Chau reached safety, his fear was already turning to disappointment. He swore to himself he would return later that day. He had, after all, been planning for this moment since high school. It was his divine calling, he believed, to save the lost souls of North Sentinel Island.

The calling

On the surface, Chau enjoyed a normal childhood in a suburb of Portland, Oregon, playing soccer and perfor­ming charitable work with his church. Family photos show a chubby-cheeked boy grinning with his Chinese psychia­trist father in national parks, his American lawyer mother presumably behind the camera. But it wasn’t just those holidays that inspired his love of the wild. One day, while still in elementary school, Chau found a book in his dad’s downstairs study, wiped dust off its cover and discovered Robinson Crusoe. The story of a solitary castaway on a tropical island got him hooked on tales of adventure.

Chau grew up Pentecostal, a charismatic Christian movement that is considered intensely evangelical and conservative. During his junior year at a small Christian high school he underwent that American evangelical rite of passage: a mission trip to Mexico. Sermonising months later, as seen in a video uploaded to YouTube, Chau said the trip helped him realise, “We can’t just call ourselves Christians and then the next day just be like, yeah, you know, let’s go to a party, and get drunk and get high, whatever, get wasted, and live a lifestyle that’s totally against what Christ has called us to do. We actually have to do something.”

The skinny teenager in an American Eagle polo shirt reminds his listeners that one of Jesus’ commands was: “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” This passage comes from what is known as the Great Commission, and it is a primary biblical justification for missionary work.

Though overseas missions might seem a relic of the past, the United States dispatches a significant number of missionaries abroad each year – about 127,000 in 2010, according to the Centre for the Study of Global Christianity. This number had grown for decades because of American Protestantism’s emphasis on every believer’s responsibility to proselytise and the increasing ease of air travel, which meant spreading the word internationally could be done during spring break.

These factors have contributed to an explosion of self-regulated missionary groups that can seem practically freelance compared with the bureaucratic Catholic missionary orders of old. Chau would have likely believed missionary work “to be a divine obligation”, says his friend Joshua Chen, who was raised with similar beliefs.

Among some evangelicals, few missionaries are as celebrated as those who work with remote tribes. After his high school trip to Mexico, Chau was surfing the Joshua Project website, which catalogues unconverted peoples, and stumbled upon an entry for the Sentinelese. Today, the site describes them as a “hostile” tribe that “need to know the Creator God exists”. Before long he was conjuring up the island on Google Maps, promising he was going to bring the Sentinelese the Good News. His father, Patrick Chau, overheard him telling others this was his “calling”. But Patrick later wrote, “I hoped that he would be mature enough to rectify the fantasy before [it was] too late.”

Satan’s last stronghold

Records of Roman, Arab and Chinese traders, dating from the second century AD, tell of Andamanese murdering sailors who put ashore looking for fresh water. In the 13th century, Marco Polo passed nearby and recorded second-hand accounts that “they are a most cruel generation, and eat everybody that they can catch, if not of their own race”, though he was almost certainly wrong about the canni­balism. Consequently, most people who knew about the Sentinelese were happy to avoid them – until the British established Port Blair, a penal colony for rebellious Indians, on nearby South Andaman Island in the 18th century.

Following India’s independence, anthropologist Triloknath Pandit led a series of expeditions to the island starting in 1967, when the Sentinelese hid as his team visited their village.In 1974, a team of Indian anthropo­logists attempted to befriend the islanders. They were guarded by policemen equipped with shields and shadowed by a film crew. The scientists had brought three Andamanese from a friendly tribe to interpret.“We are friends!” they shouted through a loudspeaker from a boat offshore. “We come in peace!”

Evidence suggests the Sentinelese language has diverged so much from those of nearby tribes that they are mutually unintelligible. From about 80 metres away, an archer bent so far back that he seemed to aim at the sun, then launched an unmistakable reply. In the film crew’s recording of that moment, a 2.4-metre-long bamboo shaft, with an iron nail lashed to its tip, plunges out of the heavens, ricochets off the boat’s railing and falls into the water. When the camera refocuses, a Sentinelese man is pumping both fists in what is obviously a victory dance as the boat retreats.

The anthropologists motored up the coast, leaving coco­nuts, bananas and plastic buckets on a deserted beach, and later watching as the Sentinelese carried away the offer­ings. But even that did not win over the tribe. The expedition was halted when the film director was wounded in the thigh by an arrow. When the anthropologists subse­quently tried to leave more gifts, including a bound live pig, the tribe speared it with their long arrows and buried it in the sand. A cotton doll left to test whether they would let a human-shaped object cross into the island’s interior met with a similar fate.

In 1991, the first friendly contact occurred when female anthropologist, Madhumala Chattopadhyay, broke the ice with gifts of coconuts.

An incredible adventure

“My life becomes an incredible adventure when I follow the call of God,” Chau captioned an Instagram photo of himself riding a motorbike down a busy street in October 2015, on his first visit to the Andaman Islands. “I’m excited to see where He leads!” Foreigners are mostly only allowed to shuttle between seedy Port Blair and a handful of resort beaches, as much of the island chain is reserved for four hunter-gatherer tribes, which include the Sentinelese. But Chau quickly began testing the archipelago’s security.

“John knew it was illegal,” says his friend John Ramsey. “His facade was just that he was a travelling adventure tourist.”

According to the director general of police in Andaman and Nicobar, Dependra Pathak, “He built the logistical support and friendships he needed during those trips.”

Chau stayed in a US$13-a-night hotel, with only a fan to stir the tropicalheat, and rode packed public buses to scuba-diving excursions, where he would question guides for information that might help him get to North Sentinel. Acquaintances of Chau – whose identities have been with­held, since Indian police have asked them not to speak to journalists – describe him as “enthusiastic” and “friendly”.

He cultivated a network of contacts, from tourist guides to fishermen, and strove unsuccessfully to learn Hindi. Most importantly, he connected with the local Christian commu­nity, a religious minority in the mainly Hindu nation. He preached at a local church and in social-media posts thank­ed his alma mater, Oral Roberts University – a Christian college in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where as a student he had worked in the missions and outreach department – for teaching him to always have a sermon handy, tagging one of them “#relationshipbuilding #missions”. His former boss at the department, Bobby Parks, responded: “Praying for you Chau boy. Proud of you. Keep loving big.” (Parks did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Chau was correct in his assumption that locals would eventually show him the way to North Sentinel Island, but after several weeks his path there wasn’t yet clear. He would have to return the next year.

Killing of US missionary Sentinelese exposes the main flaw of tribal tourism

For four years, Chau made annual visits to the Andamans, bringing gifts for a widening circle of friends until it felt like a “home away from home”. According to the Indian police and two local sources, he became close to “Alex”, a 28-year-old engineer who lived in Port Blair. Alex is Keralese, descended from a small sect of intensely Christian Indians who, tradition has it, were converted about two decades after the crucifixion of Jesus by the apostle Thomas, who had sailed on a spice trader to southern India.

Now that he had an idea of how to get to the island, Chau began to prepare with characteristic relentlessness for what he might do once he set foot on shore. A list he wrote shows that, in 2017, Chau read 47 missionary and anthropological books. In 2018, he read 65. He con­tacted several missionary organisations with reputations for supporting attempts to reach uncontacted peoples as well as missionaries who had actually done so, plumbing them for information.

Finally, last autumn, Chau said goodbye to his two siblings and parents, knowing it could be for the last time. His final plan was probably similar to a 27-step one he had laid out in a document he shared with confidants earlier that year. In the section “Initial Contact (2018)”, Chau wrote he would overcome the Sentinelese’s mistrust with gifts and then communicate “my desire to stay with them […] using pictures, drawings in sand, and/or drawings in a water­proof notebook”.

Once he had sufficiently learned the language and culture, he explained in the section “Long-Term Contact (2018-?)”, he would use “oral storytelling” to find “culturally applicable stories” that would “translate the Gospel into a context [the Sentinelese] can understand without Western cultural additions”.

According to the earlier plan, he had hoped to identify and convert a few influencers in the tribe, who would help him win over everyone else and lead an indigenous church. He even envisioned eventually dispatching them as missionaries to the Jarawa. “After all of the evangelism and discipleship has been passed on to local tribal believers,” he wrote in the “Exit Plan” section, he might paddle a “dugout canoe/kayak” to a beach near Port Blair. But if leaving the tribe seemed too likely to get him caught and expose everything, “I could potentially reside for the rest of my life on the islands.”

The biblical shield

“I felt some fear, but mainly was disappointed they didn’t accept me right away,” Chau wrote in his diary on returning to the Karen’s boat. After a quick meal of freshly caught fish, rice and dal, he paddled a couple of kilometres up the coast.

Once he was out of sight of the Sentinelese, he buried his larger waterproof case so he would have a secret stash of supplies should the tribe accept him. Then he returned to the fishermen’s boat and outfitted his kayak with two more gift fish, a waterproof Bible, a smaller waterproof case and an “initial contact response kit”, which included dental forceps for pulling arrows from his body and a chest seal dressing. Then he paddled back to the island.

As he neared the beach, he heard shouts and drumming. From the sand, about six Sentinelese began yelling at him in a language full of high-pitched “b”, “p”, “l” and “s” sounds, seemingly led by a man wearing a crown of flowers and standing on a tall coral rock. Chau stayed offshore, trying to keep out of arrow range, and parroted their words. Most of the time, they burst out laughing, suggesting to Chau that the phrases were bad or insulting.

Eventually, two men traded their bows for paddles and approached him in a dugout canoe. Chau dropped the fish into the water and backed away. The men detoured to grab them. Discerning increasing friendliness from the tribes­people, Chau paddled close to land as more Sentinelese arrived. Most were unarmed. One boy, though, wielded a bow with an arrow nocked.

Chau waved his hands to signal, unsuccessfully, for the boy to disarm. The wind nudged his kayak into the shallows. The dugout canoe slid in behind him, cutting off his escape. Chau threw the two paddlers a shovel as a gift, but one still clutched a bamboo knife. The boy with the bow and arrow approached. This was it. Chau disembarked. Then he preached to them from Genesis, likely reading from his waterproof Bible.

Chau found himself inches from an unarmed Sentinelese man, who stood about Chau’s height – 1.7 metres – and had yellowish clay smeared in circles on his face. Chau noticed a fly land on the man’s cheek. Hastily, he handed over his gifts, in his rush, giving the tribespeople almost everything he had. Surely, the Sentinelese couldn’t help but be moved by his good intentions?

Then things started happening fast. Tribesmen grabbed the kayak and made off with it. The boy fired his arrow. Miraculously, it struck the waterproof Bible that Chau was holding, saving him.

Chau grabbed the arrow and felt the sharpness of the nail-like arrowhead. He retreated, shouting and stumbling. The Sentinelese let him wade over the submerged dead coral and swim the more than 2km back to the boat. In his panic, he mistook rocks in the bay for pursuing canoes. Back on board, he confronted the fact that he had lost his kayak and had no access to his supplies.

“I’m grateful that I still have the written Word of God,” he wrote in his journal. But he now had to make a momentous decision alone. In increasingly agitated hand­writing, he continued: “It’s weird – actually no, it’s natural: I’m scared. There, I said it. I DON’T WANT to Die! Would it be wiser to leave and let someone else continue?”

The first one to heaven

The sun smouldered on the waves. Chau prayed. Most would have asked the fishermen to return to Port Blair. But from Chau’s point of view, the Sentinelese were living in “Satan’s last stronghold” and destined for hell unless he rescued them for heaven. To him, there could have been no greater act of love than risking his life to save them from eternal torment. Furthermore, according to Pathak, he indicated to the fishermen that the arrow striking the Bible was a sign of God’s protection.

“John assumed that they wouldn’t automatically welcome him and that the only way to win them over was to be like, ‘I’m here, and I’m not going away,’” says his friend in South Africa, Casey Prince, with whom he had worked on a soccer programme. Besides, if Chau gave up now, he was unlikely to get another chance.

Chau knew he might perish if he returned to shore and he was prepared for that. As Jim Elliot, a 1950s missionary whom Chau idolised, once said: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” Like many evangelicals, Chau grew up celebrating Elliot, whose widely publicised story helped launch the missionary boom that is still ongoing.

It is uncanny how closely Chau followed in Elliot’s footsteps. They grew up miles from each other, hiked the same mountains and formed convictions as teenagers that they were called to uncontacted tribes. Elliot was lanced to death in January 1956 by an Ecuadorean tribe infamous for killing outsiders.

A few years later, however, Elliot’s widow and other missionaries converted some of the tribesmen who slew Elliot – leading many evangelicals to declare the original mission a success. Should he die at the hands of the Sentinelese, Chau may have reasoned, he would be simply following Elliot’s example – and that of the original missionary, Jesus Christ.

But it also doesn’t seem that Chau viewed confronting the Sentinelese again as seeking martyrdom. “I can say explicitly that John wasn’t on a suicide mission,” says Jimmy Shaw, who taught the history of missions class taken by Chau at Oral Roberts University, remained close to him and was privy to his plans. “He was a person of faith. If he died, then he died. But he was a believer and he believed he was going to get the chance to share the gospel with those who would never otherwise have a chance to hear it. And that was the risk worth taking.”

The 27-step mission plan he had shared with supporters had included his return. And not long before, he had told Prince’s wife, Sarah, he hoped one day to have children and a family like hers, “if God wants it for me”.

Though the odds of success may have seemed slim, after overcoming so many challenges, Chau may have thought he could beat this one, too, by himself. Or he may have hoped for a miracle.

Pentecostalism gets its name from the miracle of the Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit empowered the apostles to convert foreigners by preaching in their languages. After baptism, many Pentecostalists speak in what they believe are divinely inspired “tongues” and they celebrate stories of modern missionaries performing Pentecost-like miracles. According to another of Chau’s friends, Pentecostal minister Danny McCarthy, “He definitely had the gift of speaking in tongues.” Though it is unclear if Chau thought that gift would manifest in this context.

Whatever Chau’s final reasoning, as afternoon turned to evening, he wrote in his diary, “LORD let Your will be done. If you want me to get actually shot or even killed with an arrow, then so be it. I think I could be more useful alive though, but to You, God, I give all the glory of what­ever happens.”

Watching the sun burn out, Chau was moved to tears and wondered if “it’ll be the last sunset I see before being in the place where the sun never sets”. He described intensely missing his family, friends and Parks, and wished there was “someone I can talk to and be understood”. He finished his thoughts for the day: “Perfect LOVE casts out fear. LORD Jesus, fill me with Your perfect love for these people!”

The next morning, after a “fairly restful sleep”, he wrote, “I hope this isn’t my last note but if it is, to God be the glory.” Then he stripped down to his black underpants, so as not to spook the naked Andaman tribe, and swam towards land.

The fishermen carried away Chau’s diary and two letters, one to his family and the other to Alex. “I think I might die,” Chau confessed to his friend. “I’ll see you again, bro – and remember, the first one to heaven wins.”

The next day, the fishermen returned to the island. They motored along the coast, searching for signs of Chau. Eventually they spotted something on the beach. They looked closer. It was a body in black underpants. And it was being dragged by the Sentinelese, with a rope tied around its neck.

A strenuous case

When I met Pathak in his office this summer, he described the situation as “a very, very strenuous case”. According to him, after discovering the body, the fishermen had rushed back to Port Blair and, crying, turned over Chau’s journal and letters to Alex. The latter contacted Parks, who informed Chau’s mother. She alerted the US consulate in India, which in turn contacted the Andaman police.

In the subsequent investigation, Pathak had to decide: could people who didn’t recognise laws be prosecuted under them? Should Chau’s remains be recovered? As Chau had written “don’t retrieve my body”, and his family had posted on his Instagram account, “We forgive those supposedly responsible for his death”, Pathak decided the rights of the “uncontacted group needed to be respected”.

Chau may have been beyond the laws of this world, but the fishermen and Alex were not. They were soon imprisoned, then released on bail. Their lawyer says this treatment is “not fair”, as Chau had gone to the island of his own free will, and notes Chau must not have thought about how the subsequent legal troubles would “badly affect” their lives. Pathak says the Indian police had also begun the bureaucratic process to request American assistance to talk to Parks.

The suffering of Alex and the fishermen was the last thing Chau would have wanted: he worried deeply that they could be harmed should his mission go awry. In his final email to supporters, he wrote that, if he perished, they should tell the media “I am simply an ‘adventurer’ […] and please do not mention the real reason for why I went to the island”. This was to lessen the chances of “persecution of local area Christians, [and] the imprisonment of the local team members”.

He explained he had built a website and Instagram account that looked like those of an adventurer to throw people off the trail. Instead of desiring posthu­mous Elliot-like fame, he preferred to be remembered as a fool.

As Chau had predicted, when the story of his death spread, in November last year, criticism of him was fierce. Much of it followed the red herrings he had left, but information about his missionary purpose soon came out, once the fishermen confessed.

Beyond North Sentinel: five other isolated tribes

Panditsays, “I felt sad that the young man should lose his life, but this was a foolish thing to do.” In the news, some commentators characterised his attitude as “puritanical, prejudiced and patronising”. Survival International, an NGO that advocates for uncontacted tribes, declared, “The Sentinelese have shown again and again that they want to be left alone, and their wishes should be respected.” The organisation warned that, by supposedly saving the tribe, Chau might have ended up destroying them.

This was “the danger of contact” that worried Pandit, who led the acculturation of a Jarawa clan. In the mid-70s, he felt he had no choice; they were fatally ambushing settlers on the outskirts of Port Blair. He won their trust with gifts and lived with them for periods of time before imposing government oversight. When I interviewed him this year, however, he clearly believed they had suffered from the decades of contact. “Once, they laughed so much more than us,” he says.

He believes the Sentinelese probably led happy lives, similar to the Jarawa, before his arrival, easily fulfilling their needs in their tropical Eden. Hunter-gatherers are often called “the original affluent society”, as anthro­pologists have found they average only three to five hours of work a day, are more egalitarian and have fewer mental health issues. (Although it is important not to romanticise their shorter lifespans and other disadvantages.)

Ultimately, it’s not that Pandit thinks the Sentinelese should be barred from modernising, only that they have the human right to choose to do so – and they have conscientiously objected. “Change should be for the better,” Pandit says. “But if we as an external force bring the change, are we sure we are helping?”

As harshly as some individuals have criticised Chau, it is striking how often people who knew him described him as a considerate, capable young man. Many evangeli­cals were outspoken in celebrating his sacrifice. Ramsey says: “There was no colonial intention. [John’s] motivation was love for these people […] I think he’s up there in heaven.”

Oral Roberts University released a statement that con­cluded: “We are not surprised that John would try to reach out to these isolated people in order to share God’s love. We are deeply saddened to hear of his death.” Parks wrote on social media that Chau was “one of the best and most self­less human beings there ever was”. Many Christians spoke of being inspired to do missions themselves – missions that might reach all the way to North Sentinel Island.

Yet not all Christians supported Chau’s actions. Ben Witherington III, a professor at Asbury Theological Seminary, in Kentucky, says: “Christian missionary work has evolved over the ages, and it is now profoundly important for missionaries to be sensitive to the culture of the people they are sent to. Chau is a pretty classic example of how not to do missions in the 21st century.”

Some field missionaries criticised Chau as insensitive, ineffective and even ignorant of biblical directives. As Mark 6:11 commands: “And if any place will not welcome you or listen to you, leave that place and shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them.”

We can’t know what happened when Chau encountered the Sentinelese for the final time. Soon after reports of his death, his mother, Lynda Adams-Chau, told The Washington Post she still believed he was alive because of “my prayers”. She declined my interview requests, explaining to acquain­tances that she preferred to let Chau tell his own story when he returned. His father concluded his essay memorialising John: “This is [the] riddle of life I cannot see through now.” Then he paraphrased a verse from the Book of Job: “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Chattopadhyay has speculated that when Chau emerged from the lagoon, the tribe would have likely warned him with “utterances and hand gestures” to go away, fearing “he would try to enslave them”. And Pandit says, “The Sentinelese don’t go out of their way to do violence […] But of course he couldn’t understand.”

And so Chau crossed a line in the sand that the Sentinelese hadn’t even let a foreign doll transgress. And they shot him.

A skilled hunter doesn’t aim for an instant kill with a relatively fragile bamboo arrow tipped with an iron nail – the human brain and heart are small targets encased in bone. Instead, the projectile would have been aimed at Chau’s large, soft gut. Once he was crippled, the Sentinelese would have charged in, wielding their long arrows like spears.

But before then, Chau would have had time to confront the fact that he was going to die.

And I have faith that he welcomed his killers with Christlike love.

Text: GQ