Last days of US missionary John Allen Chau, killed by Andaman tribe he was trying to convert
- Diary, family and friends reveal what drove the American to sneak onto forbidden North Sentinel Island in attempt to convert an isolated tribe
First contact
For 11 days in November last year, John Allen Chau lived mostly in darkness. While a cyclone thrashed the Bay of Bengal, Chau quarantined himself inside a safe house in the tropical backwater of Port Blair, the capital of India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands, never stepping outside. The 26-year-old American missionary hoped to rid his body of any lingering infections so he wouldn’t sicken the Sentinelese, a hunter-gatherer tribe he dreamed of converting to Christianity. Isolated on their remote island, they had never developed modern antibodies. The common cold could devastate them.
During this retreat, Chau kept fit with triangle push-ups, leg tucks and bodyweight squats. But it was primarily his soul that he fortified, with prayer and by reading a history of the tribulations faced by pioneering American missionaries in Southeast Asia, who were an inspiration to him.
“God, I thank you for choosing me, before I was even yet formed in my mother’s womb, to be Your messenger of Your Good News,” he wrote in his diary. “May Your Kingdom, Your Rule and Reign come now to North Sentinel Island.”
LORD is this island Satan’s last stronghold where none have heard or even had a chance to hear Your Name?
When the storm finally passed, a crew of local Christian fishermen hid Chau on their 10-metre-long open wooden boat and struck out under darkness for a westerly outcrop of the Andaman archipelago, on a route presumably meant to resemble that of a normal fishing expedition. As they dodged other craft, Chau recorded, “The Milky Way was above and God Himself was shielding us from the Coast Guard and Navy patrols.”
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.
