•A U.S. missionary was convinced his purpose in life was to convert an “unreached people” to Christianity. He stopped to train in Israel and South Africa before meeting his gruesome death on the island “stronghold”.
•John Allen Chau’s lifeless body was last seen being dragged across the shores of North Sentinel Island in November 2018 before his killers buried him on the beach.
The 26-year-old university graduate from Scottsboro, Alabama, spent years training and preparing for his fateful visit to the Andaman Islands, but was killed within three days of his arrival.
However gruesome Chau’s end was, he escaped the grim fate of two fishermen who previously made contact with the isolated tribe, whose dead bodies were displayed on poles on the beach. It is believed Chau was shot to death by arrows.
However, social media showed little sympathy for the self-styled evangelical saviour – branding him a “deluded idiot.” Trained by U.S. Christian organisations, who responsible for sending 127,000 missionaries abroad in 2010, according to Reuters, the resources were certainly in place for Chau to realise his dreams.
One missionary organisation, the Joshua Project, has an interactive map displaying the wealth of “unreached peoples”. The Joshua Project entry for the Sentinelese describes them as “extremely isolated” and notes that the Indian government bans access to North Sentinel. The website suggests praying for the Indian government to allow Christians “to earn the trust of the Sentinelese people” and “live among them”.
One training exercise Chau took part in before venturing to his final destination saw him navigating a mock village peopled by missionaries pretending to be hostile natives, with fake spears. All Nations’ leader, Mary Ho, told the the New York Times that Chau was one of the best trainees the program ever had.
For Chau, the seed was planted as a child. He was not just seduced by evangelical “hell-based ethics”, but also by adventure stories. “When I was a little kid,” he reminisced in 2015, “my family went camping”; during “that time of my life, I had a habit of eating wild things not meant for humans to eat, like bright red or stark white berries”. As a result, he “destroyed several sleeping bags that night. My family stopped going on camping trips after that.”
He was captivated by survival stories, such as Hatchet, Gary Paulsen’s gripping young adult novel about a boy forced to survive in the Alaskan wilderness after a plane crash. A mission trip to Mexico during high school had a significant impact on him. Upon his return, he delivered a brief sermon on his experiences. “We can’t be lukewarm. We need to know how to defend our faith. When we go out in our world, there are people that’ll just come and oppose us, and they’ll have questions, and they’ll have arguments … We can’t just, like, go out there unprepared. We need to know what we believe and why we believe it.”
On Facebook, he often quoted Jim Elliot, one of five missionaries killed by a tribe in Ecuador in 1956. He believed that the Sentinelese needed more than “basic medical care”. His father, Dr Patrick Chau, also an Oral Roberts graduate, had different views. In an email, he referred to religion as “the opium of the mass[es]”. He expressed his disinterest in hearing anything positive about religion. The father-son duo had agreed not to discuss John’s missionary work due to their differing beliefs. “John is gone because the Western ideology overpowered my [Confucian] influence,” Dr Chau said.
He blamed evangelicals’ “extreme Christianity” for pushing his son to a “not unexpected end”. He was particularly bitter about the Great Commission, Jesus’s command to spread the gospel to all peoples. Justin Graves, a pastor and friend of Chau’s from linguistics school, also blamed evangelical culture for his death.
“John Chau was a good man,” Graves wrote in a Facebook post. “He was a loving, passionate individual I was blessed to befriend, and the loss of his light on this earth was devastating. But it cannot be left as a mere tragedy. His death brings to light a multitude of issues with Evangelical views” and “hell-based ethics”.
However, John Middleton Ramsey, a friend of Chau’s and fellow evangelical, defended his actions. “His motivation was love for the [Sentinelese] people,” he shared. “If you believe in heaven and hell then what he did was the most loving thing anyone could do. A lot of people have said these people obviously want to be left alone, so we should respect their wishes.
“Well my ancestors were also savages that wanted to be left alone. I’m sure glad missionaries like [Saints] Kilian and Boniface stepped up and were willing to give their lives, and that I don’t live in a society like that any more.” Chau, like his father, attended Oral Roberts University, and was more deeply involved in evangelical culture than ever before. The conservative university forbids smoking, drinking, swearing, and any kind of sexual relations outside of heterosexual marriage.
Chau then spent one summer during college at a Christian soccer academy in South Africa. After graduating in 2014, he embarked on a trip to Kurdistan to do outreach to refugees, as well as a trip to Israel sponsored by Covenant Journey, an organization founded by rightwing Christian activist Mat Staver. Ramsey met Chau in Israel. He described him as relaxed and “easy to connect with”, adding that Chau “preferred one-on-one conversation as opposed to larger groups”.
He was “good-looking and received a fair share of female attention, but very humble”. Chau steered clear of romantic involvement, believing it irresponsible given the risks of his mission to North Sentinel. He often remained unemployed to focus on his task.
He completed a National Outdoor Leadership School course, trained as an emergency medical technician, and maintained his physical fitness. He spent three summers at Whiskeytown national recreation area in California, working as a ranger and emergency nurse while living alone in a small cabin. He began to attract a social media following. A beef jerky company even approached him to sponsor him as an influencer, and he still boasts 23,000 Instagram followers today.
On one occasion, he nearly lost his life due to “a gnarly bite from a rattlesnake and a subsequent platelet count of 10”. In another instance, he and two friends got lost during a 14-day trek and were forced to climb down a frozen waterfall to get back on track. In 2017, he was accepted into a boot camp run by All Nations, a Kansas City organization that aims to see Jesus “worshipped by every tongue, tribe and nation”.
All Nations encourages Christians to adopt a “wartime mentality” and “make strategic decisions in the battle we’re waging against a real enemy”. That year, he also enrolled in a program at the Canada Institute of Linguistics, a missionary language school. It was there that he met fellow student Ben S, who was impressed by his “quiet determination” and “confidence”. Pondering the source of such traits, Ben reflected in a tribute to his friend, “Was it his faith?” He speculated. “Was it his years of mountaineering and extensive emergency medical training? Probably all of this factored in.”
He said Chau “was just the kind of person who inspires your confidence and trust”. During one late-night session in the computer lab, Chau confided in Ben about “his burden” to reach out to the Sentinelese people. Ben recalls being struck by the depth of Chau’s conviction: “I was impressed immediately that this was something no one but God alone could relieve him of,” he wrote.
Despite knowing the risks and criticisms, for Chau: “He had already heard all the arguments of why this was a fool’s errand and would jeopardize any mission associated with it, let alone the [lives] of the individuals involved. ” To Chau, this mission “was a sacred trust for him that no amount of reasoning would wrest from his grasp”.
In October 2018, a month before his death, Chau journeyed to Port Blair, the capital of the Andaman Islands, on a tourist visa and set up in what he referred to as a “safe house”. Here, he put together an “initial contact response kit” – complete with picture cards for communication, bandages and dental forceps for arrow removal – and gifts for the Sentinelese: tweezers, scissors, cord, safety pins, fish hooks. He meticulously recorded his actions in a handwritten diary.
The resulting 13-page document narrates his final days in captivating and heartbreaking detail. To reduce the risk of unintentionally infecting the Sentinelese, he entered a self-imposed quarantine. For 11 days, he avoided direct sunlight. He spent his time praying, exercising, and reading The Lives of the Three Mrs Judsons, a 19th-century missionary account. On the night of November 14, he and some Christian fishermen who had agreed to assist him, embarked on their journey to North Sentinel under the cover of darkness, carefully evading coastguard vessels.
Their voyage was lit by bioluminescent plankton, Chau noted, and surrounded by fish leaping “like darting mermaids”. They arrived at North Sentinel late at night and anchored nearby. The following morning, November 15, he made his first approach. The fishermen declined to get any closer to the island, so he stripped down to his underwear – he thought. In an attempt to make the Sentinelese more comfortable, the man paddled a kayak towards the shore. He spotted a hut and some dugout canoes. As he approached the beach, several Sentinelese with faces painted yellow and speaking in “high-pitched sounds” rushed out. “My name is John,” he yelled from his kayak. “I love you, and Jesus loves you.”
When the islanders started stringing their bows, he panicked, threw them some fish he had brought as a gift, and according to his diary, “turned and paddled like I never have in my life”. Later that day, he made another attempt, this time landing on the island. He laid out more gifts and approached the hut he was chased from earlier, staying out of arrow range. About half a dozen Sentinelese emerged and began to “whoop and shout”. He walked closer to try to hear what they were saying. He tried to “parrot their words back to them”, and the Sentinelese burst out laughing. They were probably “saying bad words or insulting me”, he concluded. He sang worship songs and preached from Genesis.
For a while the Sentinelese seemed to tolerate his presence. Then a boy shot an arrow at him. The arrow struck the waterproof Bible he was holding. He pulled it out, gave it back to the boy, and hastily retreated. The Sentinelese had taken his kayak, so he was forced to swim almost a mile to the fishing boat.
“I’m scared,” he wrote that night in his diary, saying he was “crying a bit”. Chau wrote about the sunset, “wondering if it’ll be the last sunset I see before being in the place where the sun never sets”. Then came his final fateful encounter on November 17, 2018 when he was struck down by arrows. Local fishermen, who illegally ferried Chau close to the island for a sum of $390, claimed they witnessed natives dragging and burying a body along the sandy shores. These fishermen were later apprehended by authorities.