‘Satan’s last stronghold’: diary of John Allen Chau, US Christian killed by Stone Age Sentinel Island tribe, reveals his terror and sense of destiny
- The handwritten diary of missionary, provided by his mother, tells how he wept as he watched what he feared would be his last sunset
- But Chau believed ‘God Himself’ was guiding his illegal mission to take Christianity to the Sentinelese tribe, who shot him to death with arrows
The night before John Allen Chau returned for the last time to India’s remote North Sentinel Island, he struggled with a sense of fear that his death might be imminent.
“I’m scared,” wrote the 26-year-old American from Washington state, who had travelled to the island on a clandestine mission to convert its inhabitants to Christianity. “Watching the sunset and it’s beautiful – crying a bit … wondering if it will be the last sunset I see.”
His initial contacts with the Sentinelese, a tiny tribe of hunter-gatherers who reject contact with the outside world, had not gone well. One teenager shot an arrow at him, which pierced his waterproof Bible.
Yet Chau decided to return to the island and try again, galvanised by the feeling that he was God’s instrument.
“Lord, is this island Satan’s last stronghold where none have heard or even had the chance to hear your name?” he wrote in a diary of his last days provided to The Washington Post by his mother.
