John Chau’s deluded mission to ‘save’ a remote community is no laughing matter
The slowly unravelling story of a man’s deluded, deadly mission is no laughing matter.
Nine months after an American missionary died at the hands of the remote Andaman island tribe that he had hoped to convert to Christianity, the anger, scorn and dismay that initially greeted his death has given way to bow-and-arrow jokes.
“If you are into body piercings they are masters,” begins a spoof Google review of the island of North Sentinel in the Bay of Bengal, where John Allen Chau, 26, was killed last November as he tried to initiate contact with an elusive group of hostile bow-wielding tribesmen.
“Expert archery exhibitions on the beach,” noted one of more than 1,000 fake reviews of supposed island attractions posted online since John’s death. “Be sure to request the 5 spear treatment!” added another.
In one sense, it might seem easy to chortle at the only too predictable fate that awaited an earnest young American as he waded ashore, with his waterproof Bible in hand, spouting verses from Genesis, only to be greeted by a volley of arrows. “Lord, is this island Satan’s last stronghold where none have even had a chance to hear Your Name?” John wrote in his diary after his first attempt to reach the island was repelled.
Yet the slowly unravelling story of John’s sad and deluded mission to the home of one of the world’s most isolated, vulnerable and yet unyieldingly hostile communities is, for the most part, no laughing matter.
As a fuller understanding emerges of the warped religious convictions that propelled John to his death, there is more at stake than one American’s messiah complex. The Sentinelese bowmen who shot John are facing a much graver long-term challenge. In the Instagram age of adventure tourism to exciting places with exotic locals to enliven your selfies, how much longer can one of the world’s last - and most picturesque - tribes of indigenous hunter-gatherers hope to be left in peace?
North Sentinel, a 37 kilometre patch of dense tropical jungle fringed by coral reefs, turquoise shallows and white sand beaches, lies about 30 miles west of the main Andaman archipelago and its capital, Port Blair. The island’s only residents for the past 60,000 years or more have been members of a small indigenous tribe - more African than Asian in appearance - living mainly off fish and turtles.
Nominally governed by India, the Sentinelese survived the short-lived attentions of inquisitive British colonialists and have been fighting off intruders ever since. Estimates of their numbers vary - there may be anywhere between 20 and 200 of them left. It was in this untouched island paradise, with its ghostly echoes of earliest humanity, that a 5ft 6in American adventurer who called his friends “dude” and “bro” discovered the meaning of his life.
“Around 0830, I tried initiating contact,” John wrote in his diary of the first time he paddled his kayak into North Sentinel’s Southwest Cove. “Two armed Sentinelese came rushing out yelling at me - they had two arrows each, unstrung, until they got closer. I hollered ‘My name is John. I love you and Jesus loves you. Jesus Christ gave me authority to come to you. Here is some fish!’”
What was he thinking, this bright, bold, solitary outdoorsman with an outwardly successful Chinese-born father, a psychiatrist, and an American mother, a lawyer? He knew full well the Sentinelese had previously terrorised the crew of a freighter that ran onto an island reef in a storm. They had fired arrows at a passing helicopter and killed two fishermen whose boat had drifted ashore.
Was John brainwashed, as some have suggested, by a group of Christian fundamentalists determined to “rescue” uneducated natives from supposed savagery? Was he living out a fantasy that took root at the age of 10, after he read Daniel Defoe’s castaway epic Robinson Crusoe? Or was there something at home he was trying to escape, something that extinguished his fear of death and drove him to knowingly risk his life?
Some fresh clues emerged recently in a striking new account of John’s doomed mission by an American writer with a special interest of his own in the fate of the Sentinelese. As a freelance foreign correspondent based in India in the early 2000s, Alex Perry encountered an anthropologist who had studied the Andamans and “told me about essentially a Neolithic tribe - or in fact, several tribes living on these islands”.
When Perry learnt that one of the tribesmen had spent six months in an Indian hospital and acquired some Hindi, he saw a way of pulling off a journalistic coup. “I just became quite obsessed with the idea of … an interview with a Stone Age cave man,” he told an American radio interviewer this month.
He travelled several times to Port Blair and made “frequent, furtive” but ultimately unsuccessful attempts to reach so-called “uncontacted” tribes. The Indian government recently lifted a blanket ban on travel to islands inhabited by protected tribes, but it remains illegal for foreigners to approach them without official permission.
Perry eventually gave up in 2006 after four years of annoying local officials who eventually asked him to leave the islands. When he first read of John’s ill-fated odyssey, “I recognised the giddiness in John’s journal, the way the islands seemed to offer something big and difficult and dangerous and extraordinary.” Perry’s own experience of the Andamans opened doors to John’s family and friends, some of whom had previously been reluctant to talk to the media about his death.
The result, just published by Outside magazine, was a startling portrait of a solo explorer with an unswerving belief in his godly mission, all described in the language of a millennial tourist eager to share his epic treks with an audience online. “On Instagram, he presented himself as the consummate trail bro,” writes Perry. “He was almost always ‘super stoked’ by the prospect of a ‘super rad’ hike with a fellow ‘wild man’ or ‘legends’. ‘Dang,’ his followers would comment. ‘Legit, bro’.”
What emerges most strongly from Perry’s account and John’s own writings is how early John’s obsession with the Andamans took hold, and how many of his subsequent adventures turned out to be merely preparation for what his father, Patrick, feared had become a warped and menacing obsession.
“In my observation, [John] was selectively collecting whatever preacher’s doctrines were in favour of his self-directed, self-governed, self-appointed plan,” according to Patrick. In 2016 father and son quarrelled, and Perry reveals Patrick “was never able to shake the feeling that he was watching his son walk calmly and confidently towards his own death”.
Soon after John read Robinson Crusoe, the family went on holiday to Hawaii, where the 10-year-old John announced that one day, writes Perry, “he wanted to live in a place exactly like that, swinging through the trees, jumping into the water, and spearing jellyfish. Patrick had laughed.”
In a post to an adventure website, John wrote that he was also inspired by The Sign of the Beaver, a 1983 adventure novel about a teenage boy who finds himself alone in the wilderness. As he grew up, he turned to a different source of inspiration. He was fascinated by David Livingstone, the Scottish missionary obsessed with finding the source of the Nile. John’s family lived not far from the former Oregon home of Jim Elliot, a missionary who travelled to the Ecuadorean Amazon in 1956 and was speared to death aged 28 by the Huaorani tribesmen he was hoping to convert. John regarded him as a hero.
In 2009, when John was 17, his father overheard him telling friends that reaching North Sentinel was the mission for which God had created him. Few of his friends had heard of it, so he would click onto Google Maps and show them the speck of jungle protruding from the northern reaches of the Indian Ocean. “I’m going there,” he confidently told his friends. He had learnt of the Sentinelese from a missionary website called the Joshua Project. “Patrick’s heart sank. He knew that his son’s calling was based on fantasy,” writes Perry.
Several months before John left America for India last year, he found the perfect place to prepare for his secret mission. He made contact with All Nations, an evangelical group that claims to “train leaders to ignite church planting movements among the neglected peoples on earth”. The group runs missionary training camps in Kansas. Part of John’s training involved a mock encounter with hostile “natives” - other missionaries dressed in ragged clothes and pretending not to understand a word he said. Some of them carried fake spears.
After John’s death, an All Nations spokeswoman described him as a “martyr” and “one of the best participants in this experience that we have ever had”. Indian authorities remain keen to interview a pair of Americans who are believed to have visited John in Port Blair shortly before he left for North Sentinel. An island officer said the pair belonged to the All Nations group.
There was one more factor that Perry uncovered in his conversations with 67-year-old Patrick Chau. In 2009 the psychiatrist’s career collapsed when he prescribed opioid drugs to undercover agents “without a legitimate purpose and outside the usual course of professional practice”. Three years later, his certificate to prescribe drugs was revoked. It was at about the time he ran foul of the law that his son started hiking into the mountains on his own.
“I was like a drowning man, busy [with my own] self-rescue,” Patrick wrote to Perry. “Unwittingly [I] let John be sucked towards a whirlpool - the radical to fanatic extreme Christian faction.” There was no turning back for John, not even when he first encountered the Sentinelese and a child shot at him with an arrow. It hit the waterproof Bible he was clutching to his chest, and he fled.
“Why did a little kid have to shoot me?” John wrote in his journal as he willed himself to return the next day. “Father, forgive him and any of the people on this island who try to kill me, and especially forgive them if they succeed! What made them this defensive and hostile? Why does this beautiful place have so much death?” The next morning he added a few final lines. “I hope this isn’t my last note, but if it is: to God be the glory … praying it goes well.”
The US government has let it be known that it is not pursuing criminal charges against the tribesmen who killed John. “It’s a tragic situation and a tragic case … but that’s not something that has been asked,” said Samuel Brownback, ambassador at large for international religious freedom.
While the Indian government continues to investigate John’s death, it has other interests in the islands. It recently launched a large development project that may ultimately open more than 100 inhabited and uninhabited islands in the Andaman and Nicobar chain to visitors. Tourism to the area has increased sharply over the past four years, driven at least in part by Indian government websites promoting islands “shrouded in mystery for centuries because of their inaccessibility”, where “the beat of tribal drums haunt the stillness”.
Can the Sentinelese hope to survive uncontacted much longer? Vulnerable to disease and the lure of westerners bearing “gifts”, they face the same fate as their island cousins the Jarawas, the Onge, the Great Andamanese and other tribes - driven to the edge of extinction by relentless intrusions of the civilised world.
John believed that the Sentinelese were damned to “eternal fire” if they were not introduced to the Christian gospel. But his efforts to “save” them may have hastened their demise.
The Times
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