“They really are the most isolated tribe in the world,” says Sophie Grig, senior researcher and advocacy officer at Survival International, which has run a campaign specifically helping to protect North Sentinel Island since the 1990s. The Sentinelese were unaware of such conversations, but after the news broke of Chau’s death, as police boats circled the island and helicopters buzzed overhead, they must have sensed they’d created some sort of disturbance. Trying to promote a false god to an ancient tribe and he gets killed - the irony of it.” One typical comment from a critic: “A martyr? An asshole who endangered people.” Another one: “Arrogant/self-centred/naive/deluded - the list of adjectives that could be attributed to this guy are endless and none of them complimentary. It’s a comfort to know you’re with the Lord, but we’ll miss you.” The post has attracted nearly 800 comments, many of them critical. John Middleton Ramsey, a friend who has also done missionary work, posted an Instagram tribute as well, a photo of the two of them with a caption that reads, “Our dear friend John was martyred on the Andaman Islands, killed by bow and arrow. “He loved God, life, helping those in need, and had nothing but love for the Sentinelese people,” reads part of a statement his family posted to Chau’s Instagram account shortly after reports began to emerge. On the other hand, such a reaction must have seemed cruel and nearly unintelligible to his fellow evangelicals, including his friends and family.
Much of the coverage came to focus on that last issue, and many outside the evangelical Christian world reacted harshly, seeing Chau as hubristic, his visit an arrogant act of neocolonialism. Where and what is it? And who are these people? And could such a place really still exist in the 21st century? And if it does, why would someone risk not just his own life, but the lives of the Sentinelese, their isolation meaning that they have little built-up immunity to disease a common cold could wipe out the population? Particularly given their demonstrated history of not wanting to be contacted? Questions remain about Chau and his motivations, and of course questions about the island and the islanders: Was he a missionary or an adventurer? A pure-hearted emissary or an arrogant colonialist? Many readers, encountering mention of North Sentinel Island and its inhabitants for the first time, were left scrambling to understand a place seemingly sprung from the mists of history. (In a morbid metric of its popularity, Chau’s Instagram account has been racking up followers it had previously hovered at about 1,000, but at press time, it was nearly 22,000.) In the days since, some questions have been answered, but many others emerged. The story quickly gained momentum and fanned out digitally across the globe, interest heightened by the outlandish exoticism of it, by the details of Chau’s grisly fate and by the sheer number of unknowns, many stemming from just how little we know about the Sentinelese. On November 17, the fishermen saw the Sentinelese dragging his apparently dead body along the beach. On November 15, he assembled his foldable kayak and headed ashore, only to be met with arrows and forced to retreat the next day, he paddled in again. Last month, Chau paid five local fishermen 25,000 rupees-about $350-to break the law and take him close to the island on November 14 under cover of darkness in their 30-foot-long wooden boat. The entire island sits within a protected zone patrolled by the Indian government, and it is illegal to approach from as far as six miles away, let alone visit it.
It is one of the small pockets of mystery remaining in our increasingly known world. The island’s population, unique genetically, linguistically and culturally, isolated for millennia, is notably unfriendly to outsiders. And yet, in their seeming anachronism, the reports were entirely in keeping with the place where American missionary and adventurer John Allen Chau had chosen to go preach the Gospel: North Sentinel Island, a 20 square-mile speck of Indian territory in the Andaman archipelago, 30 miles west of Great Andaman in the Bay of Bengal, and home to one of the world’s least-contacted and least-understood groups of indigenous people, known as the Sentinelese.
The news reports, when they began to emerge, seemed like something from another time, or perhaps a Conrad novella: young Christian missionary, 26, killed on remote island by hostile islanders armed solely with bows and arrows.
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