I don't want to die!

‘I don’t want to die!’ The missionary John Chau wrote this in his diary shortly before his death in November 2018. He was trying to convert the inhabitants of a remote island to Christianity. They shot him dead with arrows. The story of a driven man and an isolated people.

November 14, 2018, Port Blair [capital of the Andaman Islands, India]

I’ve been in a safehouse in Port Blair for the past eleven days! Being stuck in the safehouse meant that I hadn’t seen any full sunlight till today and my nice tan I had acquired started to fade, as well as my thickly calloused feet. I stayed fit by doing pushups, leg tucks and triangle pushups. Much time was spent in prayer and reading.

I met last night with the fishermen who are all believers. The meeting went well – I trust them although I am the only English speaker so there is quite a language gap; I’m relying on the Holy Spirit to direct us.

God, I thank you for choosing me to be Your messenger of Your Good News to the people of North Sentinel Island.

The plan is to link up with the crew and depart tonight, arriving at the shore around 0400. From there we make progressive contact with fish as gifts over the next four days.

Soli Deo Gloria!

- John Chau [1]

A ten-lane highway on the outskirts of Kansas City in the United States. A low, flat-roofed stone building with the word ‘Church’ in white letters on the façade. Women in evening dresses and men in suits are getting out of their cars and joining a long queue. It’s April 5, 2019. Four hundred people have registered to attend the memorial service for John Chau, who was killed less than five months ago at the age of 26.

You would expect to see mourners. Instead, there's loud laughter, hugs, joyful reunions. Inside is a darkened room with a big stage, loudspeakers, a spotlight. A stall is selling T-shirts, as if it were a pop concert; the logo on them reads ‘Jesus is worth it – defy fear’. Flyers have been put out with registration details for workshops on topics such as ‘How to reach your Muslim neighbors’.

A couple walks onto the stage. They both spent a few years living as missionaries in Jordan. The man says: ‘John Chau defied fear to go to North Sentinel Island. He wanted to go and live among the North Sentinelese and become their friend and their brother. But soon after he arrived, John paid the ultimate price.’

The woman says: ‘We were so honoured to be able to train him and send him. John was the most successful man I’ve ever known.’

For the people meeting here, John Chau is practically a saint. They see it as no coincidence that his initials are the same as those of their Saviour. JC.

After his death, newspapers around the world wrote about John Chau, fascinated by this story that sounded like something from another century. Indigenous Indian tribespeople kill American missionary with bows and arrows. The guests at the memorial service in Kansas were invited by All Nations, an evangelical mission agency. You could say it was John Chau’s employer: it took him on as a missionary.

All Nations doesn’t like talking to journalists. Representatives of the media aren't welcome this evening, either. Hopefully no one will notice that a German journalist is present.

This evening is very much about John Chau – but not only him. It’s also about collecting $250,000 in order to send more missionaries out into the world: to the ‘unreached’, as All Nations calls those who have never heard of Jesus Christ. Indigenous tribes in the Amazon, pastoral peoples in West Africa, nomads in the Asiatic taiga. John Chau had picked the supreme mission: he wanted to convert one of the most isolated peoples on Earth. A hunter-gatherer people who live on a remote island in the Indian Ocean, subsisting on a diet of fish and wild boar. A people who have the reputation of killing anyone who sets foot on their island. A people about whom almost nothing else is known: no one can say what language they speak, what gods they believe in, how many of them there actually are. Setting foot on their island is prohibited by law. It is one of the last unexplored places in a world where almost every metre has been mapped. For anthropologists, the existence of the Sentinelese is a miracle. For an evangelical missionary like John Chau, it was the ultimate challenge.

Diary, November 15, 2018, North Sentinel, 0530

Currently on the [fishermen’s] boat, waiting to make contact. Left last night around 2000 and arrived around 2230 or so but as we went north along the eastern shore, we saw boat lights in distance along the north shore and turned around.

God Himself was shielding us from the coast guard and navy patrols. At 0430, we entered the cove on the western shore and as the sun began to light the east above the island, me and two of the guys jumped in the shallows.

The dead coral is sharp and I already got a slight scratch on my right leg. Now we see a Sentinel islander home and are waiting for them to come out.

On November 21, 2018, a few days after John Chau’s death, John Middleton Ramsey posted a photo on Instagram. It shows him and John Chau, arm in arm, both with sunglasses in their hair, behind them the arid, open landscape of the Golan Heights in the Middle East. Underneath, he wrote: ‘Our dear friend John was martyred […]. It’s a comfort to know you’re with the Lord, but we’ll miss you.’

In the hours and days that followed, more than 600 people commented on Ramsey’s photo. He and John Chau were abused as ‘zombied Christian robots’, ‘ignorant Americans’, ‘fucking morons’. Scrolling through the comments, there are two obvious camps. One, the smaller of the two, consists of people defending John Chau. The other, much bigger one consists of those – including Christians – who despise and condemn him.

They stand on opposite sides of a debate that has flared up over and over again for decades, even centuries: what is the right way to approach peoples who are cut off from industrialized civilization? Should they be shielded from contact, like museum exhibits – do not touch! – in order to preserve their culture? Or is that irresponsible, because it denies them a modern life, a life with education and medical care?

John Ramsey opens the door to the apartment he shares in the north of Cologne, where he's been living for the past few months. He’s wearing a white shirt and a jacket, and has just had a long day at work. Ramsey’s mother is German, his father American; both are deeply religious Christians. He grew up in Japan and the United States, and never went to school because his mother taught him at home; he started his university education at the age of 15, and his first job, as an estate agent, at 20. He’s now 23, and works for his German uncle’s estate agency.

Ramsey got to know John Chau in the summer of 2015, on a tour of Israel for young American Christians. When they met at the airport, Ramsey thought Chau saw himself as a pretty cool guy. ‘He wasn’t very open to begin with,’ says Ramsey. Then he realized that Chau was just rather shy. Tall John Ramsey and short John Chau became friends; they rode bikes along the promenade in Tel Aviv and visited the Sea of Galilee, Jerusalem, the Golan Heights.

Later, after this trip, Chau often came to visit Ramsey, who was living with his parents and siblings near Seattle at the time. On one of these visits, Chau confided his plan to the Ramseys. He told them about the Sentinelese, how hostile they were towards strangers, and that he wanted to save them.

Chau said at the time that his own family was critical of his plans. This was why he asked Ramsey’s mother for help. He had compiled his curriculum vitae and written up everything he knew about the Sentinelese in a report covering about ten pages. Ramsey’s mother, a trained editor, revised the text, and Chau sent it to Kansas City.

It was his application to All Nations.

Letter from John Chau to his brother and sister and parents, written on North Sentinel Island.

Brian and Marilyn and Mom and Dad,

You guys might think I’m crazy in all this but I think it’s worth it to declare Jesus to these people. Please do not be angry at them or at God if I get killed.

This is not a pointless thing – the eternal lives of this tribe is at hand and I can’t wait to see them around the throne of God.

I love you all.

John Chau grew up in the American north-west, in Vancouver, a town in Washington State. Portland, the nearest big city, is about a twenty-minute drive away. It’s a region with a lot of forests and national parks, not far from the ocean.

The Chau family home is at the end of a wide street in a neighbourhood that, in spring, is full of cherry blossom. Two floors, three garage doors, a fountain playing in the well-kept front garden. A doormat with the words ‘As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. Joshua 24:15’. The doorbell is covered in cobwebs; it seems no one has visited for some time. Even after several rings, no one answers.

Through the big windows, a still-life portrait of affluence: fireplace, piano, framed family photos on the walls, of smiling parents with smiling children. It’s an if-only idyll. If only there were not the knowledge of John Chau’s death.

Patrick Chau, the father, responds to an e-mail request asking whether he and his wife might want to meet and talk: ‘Thanks but l don't.’

Even if it’s not possible to speak to John Chau’s parents about his childhood and adolescence and how he came to be obsessed with the Sentinelese, it is possible to reconstruct large parts of his life, from conversations with friends and fellow travellers, and from the many traces he left online – his blog, all his videos, his Facebook and Instagram posts.

John Chau grew up as the youngest of three children. He has a brother, Brian, and a sister, Marilyn. Their parents are Lynda and Patrick Chau: a deeply devout American lawyer, and a Chinese psychiatrist who fled China during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. John Chau posted photos of his childhood on his Instagram account: family trips to the mountains, a holiday in Yellowstone National Park, himself with his parents and siblings at the seaside.

John attended a Christian private school. As a child, he read Robinson Crusoe, the story of a castaway who spends decades on a desert island – where he meets a native man and converts him to Christianity. Apparently, the ten-year-old John told his father he wanted to live like that, later on.

At 16, John and a schoolfriend travelled to Mexico to help build an orphanage. There’s a video of him talking about this trip, which must have been something of a revelation for him.  An athletic young man in polo shirt and jeans, he stands before his audience, slightly nervous, saying, ‘We can’t just call ourselves Christians and then the next day just be like, “Yeah, you know, let’s go to a party and get drunk and get high, whatever, get wasted,” and live a lifestyle that’s totally against what Christ has called us to do.’ Then he quotes from the Bible: ‘“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”’

These words from the Gospel of St Matthew are referred to as the Great Commission. For evangelical Christians like John Chau, they are a justification, even an instruction to convert people all over the world to Christianity.

John Chau was still at school when he started searching online for the remotest places in the world. He first came across the Sentinelese on a website that published a list of ‘unreached peoples’. He told friends he saw it as his vocation to go to this island and tell its inhabitants about Jesus Christ.

At the time it probably sounded like a teenage fantasy. Today, it seems more as if, back then, John Chau was seized by an idea that never lost its hold over him, until finally, in November 2018, he tried to make it a reality.

After school, John Chau attended an evangelical college in Oklahoma, where he studied health sciences and sport. He travelled twice to South Africa to help out with a football project in the townships. Later, he worked with Syrian refugee children in Iraq.

A lot of John Chau’s free time was spent exploring nature. He went fishing, hiking, kayaking; he camped in the snow, survived being bitten by a rattlesnake.

Chau had two great passions, and the planned mission on North Sentinel combined them both: travelling to remote regions, and faithfully serving his God.

In retrospect, the extent to which Chau focussed his life on this one particular adventure becomes apparent. He trained to become a wilderness paramedic so he would be able, if necessary, to treat his own wounds. He attended a nine-week course that taught students how to pick up unfamiliar languages in the shortest possible time. He worked as a ranger, living for months in an isolated hut in the forest. He travelled several times to the Andaman Islands, the archipelago in the Indian Ocean to which North Sentinel belongs, and established contact with people in the small Christian community there.

The climax of his preparations was a roleplay exercise organized by the mission agency All Nations. Chau was dropped off in a remote forest somewhere in Kansas. He walked for hours through the trees before encountering people who spoke to him in an incomprehensible language and threatened him with spears. This exercise, featuring Americans in disguise, was supposed to prepare him for what might await him on North Sentinel.

Before travelling on to India, John Chau spent his last few weeks with a friend in South Africa, a sort of mentor of his who was also a missionary. Their leave-taking after that visit was very different to others, the friend says on the phone. ‘That’s what it must have felt like in war periods, when parents sent their kids off to war.’

In mid-October 2019, several months after our initial e-mail exchange, Patrick Chau, John’s father, sends another mail, saying that he’s prepared to talk after all – but only about the philosophy he believes in: Confucianism. Preferably in the form of text messages on WhatsApp.

He writes that he raised his children in the Christian faith, and unfortunately spoke only occasionally with John about Confucian philosophy. The evangelical ideology was too dominant, he says.

His messages betray a tremendous anger. Patrick Chau criticizes the colonialist character of Christianity; he criticizes the Great Commission. He compares his son with a jihadist who has died fighting a holy war on behalf of ‘Islamic State’. ‘All extremes are evils,’ he writes. ‘The extreme of Evangelical is equally dangerous as the extreme of Muslim.’

Did he argue with his son when he heard about his mission? Did he ever try to stop him? He writes: ‘[We] agreed to disagree. No more discussion about John.’

Diary, November 15, 2018, North Sentinel Island, 1000

Around 0830, I tried initiating contact. I got two large fish (one barracuda and one half of a tuna). I put them on top of the kayak and began rowing to the house we had seen. As I was about 400 yards out, I heard women chattering.

Then I saw movement on the shore. Two ARMED Sentinelese came rushing out yelling at me. 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!’

I saw them string arrows in their bows. I picked up the half tuna fish and threw it toward them. They kept coming. Then I slid the barracuda off, but my thoughts were directed toward the fact that I was almost in arrow range. I backpaddled facing them and then when they got the fish, I turned and paddled like I never have in my life, back to the boat. I felt some fear but mainly was disappointed they didn’t accept me right away.

‘Please wash your hands before you greet my father,’ says the woman who opens the door in the south of the Indian capital, New Delhi. Her father, Triloki Nath Pandit, is 84 years old; he has early-stage Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, heart problems. He greets women with a kiss on the back of the hand. Pandit has parted his white hair neatly and donned a collarless linen shirt.

Triloki Nath Pandit is an anthropologist. From the mid-sixties to the early nineties he lived on the Andaman Islands, not far from North Sentinel. There’s probably no one in the world who knows North Sentinel better than him, other than the Sentinelese themselves. Pandit is the only researcher who has ever set foot on the island. He wrote a short book about his visits, called The Sentinelese. A yellowed copy lies before him. ‘I never wanted to go there,’ he says.

In 1966, after graduating from university, Pandit got a job with the Anthropological Survey of India, and was sent to the Andaman Islands.

There was no airport back then, and the ship from the Indian mainland took four days to reach the main island. The governor assigned Pandit to take a group of police and navy officers and go to North Sentinel to establish ‘friendly contact’ with the inhabitants.

They approached the island, which is the size of Manhattan. Through their telescopes they could see the beach, with thick forest behind it. They also saw people. They transferred onto rubber boats and steered closer, but the people had disappeared.

They landed on the island, and found a narrow path leading into the forest. ‘After about one kilometre it opened out into a clearing. It was like something in a dream! I can still remember how the sun shone in,’ says Pandit.

There were 18 simple huts of branches and leaves, several small fires burning, and painted wild boar skulls lying around. Not a single person was to be seen; the islanders had probably hidden in the forest.

The visitors left behind a few gifts: plastic buckets, fabric, sweets. Only as they rode away in their rubber boats did they see figures on the shore again.

Pandit was overwhelmed. This tiny tribe had managed to withdraw from the course of human history. Ancient Greece; the Chinese Han dynasty; the Persian empire; the discovery of America; the Industrial Revolution; the First World War; the Second World War; the invention of the light bulb, the car, the atom bomb – these people knew nothing of any of this. The Sentinelese had remained the Sentinelese. A people who still lived as they had done when sabre-toothed tigers walked the Earth.

Outwardly they look like Africans: black skin, curly hair. Scientists have proven that the Sentinelese are descended from the people who left Africa more than 50,000 years ago and populated the Asian region.

Other indigenous peoples lost their habitats because at some point they stood in the way of progress; because someone started felling trees, building roads, mining minerals. But the ships sailed past North Sentinel. The island has no natural harbour; it’s surrounded by reefs that can only be crossed in small, flat-bottomed boats. A piece of land that was never attractive to the outside world – until it became an attraction for precisely that reason, as one of the last untouched corners of the Earth.

After the first expedition, in the mid-sixties, the government of the Andaman Islands sent Pandit the anthropologist to North Sentinel every few months. ‘But we were never allowed to set foot in the island’s interior again,’ he says. ‘Whenever we came, the Sentinelese would patrol along the shore, sometimes with axes over their shoulders, sometimes with drawn bows.’

Pandit and his group brought gifts, which they would quickly put down on the shore before disappearing again. Once they brought a live pig with them. The Sentinelese, who were only familiar with their dark-coloured wild boar, found it so suspicious that they shot it full of arrows and buried it on the shore.

In 1974, Pandit accompanied a film team that insisted on sailing closer and closer to the island – until suddenly the director caught an arrow in his leg. ‘The Sentinelese celebrated the archer; they laughed out loud and were pleased,’ says Pandit.

He thinks he knows one of the reasons why the Sentinelese are so hostile to all intruders. In the late 19th century, when India was still a British colony, British soldiers landed on North Sentinel. They captured a Sentinelese family – father, mother, four children – and brought them back to Port Blair. The parents very quickly became very ill, and died. The British sent the children back to the island with many gifts, but perhaps with some new pathogens as well. It’s quite possible that many more Sentinelese died as a result. Their immune system has few defences against the viruses and bacteria of the outside world.

The British officer in charge later wrote in his memoirs: ‘This expedition was not a success. We cannot be said to have done anything more than increase their general terror of, and hostility to, all comers.’

Triloki Nath Pandi continued to visit the island for more than two decades. It wasn’t until 1991 that he succeeded in doing what he had been tasked with all along: establishing ‘friendly contact’. He spreads out photos of that day before him on the living room table: here he is, up to his hips in the water, arms outstretched, holding coconuts in his hands. And the Sentinelese accept them from him. He is beaming, they are beaming. It was the first proper encounter – and it would be the last.

Was it really necessary for the world to become acquainted with the Sentinelese? There were once more than ten different indigenous tribes living on the Andaman Islands. Then came the British, and later the Indians; modern life arrived. There was no place in it for people who, although able to use a bow and arrow, didn’t know what a car was. Hunters became beggars. Human safaris to see the last savages were offered. There are films that show Indian tourists ordering naked aboriginals to dance for them, and throwing a little food into the road for them in exchange.

Perhaps it was better just to leave the Sentinelese in peace.

This was precisely what Pandit advised the Indian authorities to do. ‘I told them the Sentinelese are lacking nothing. And if they need us, they will come and find us.’

People were in fact starting to think differently about this issue in other parts of the world as well. Countries like Brazil, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia had already passed laws protecting their indigenous peoples from unwanted outside contact. The Indian government established a protection zone around North Sentinel. Since then, the waters have been patrolled by the navy and the coastguard. No one is allowed to go within five kilometres of the island. Anyone who violates this is liable to be fined and imprisoned.

Triloki Nath Pandit was glad about the new law, even though it meant he never saw his new friends again.

Diary, November 15, 2018, 1350, North Sentinel Island

Well, I’ve been shot by the Sentinelese… by a kid probably about ten or so years old, maybe a teenager. Let me first back up: after a meal of dal and rice, I swam back to the cached kayak (after first going poop in the water – we’re about a mile from the Sentinel house so I wasn’t worried they’d see).

We put the two big fish on top of my kayak, and my small Pelican case that held my initial contact response kit (for arrow wounds) such as hemostat/Quikclot, abdominal pads, chest seal, and dental forceps for arrow removal …and unfortunately it also contained my passports; plus I had my waterproof Bible and some gifts: scissors, tweezers, safety pins, fishing line and hooks, cordage, and rubber tubing.

Then seeing no one from the water, I waded my kayak through the shallows of the dead coral reef. I fixed some gifts to the fish and then proceeded around the cove toward the hut I had been chased from on initial contact. I heard the whoops and shouts from the hut. I got a little closer and as they (about 6 from what I could see) yelled at me, I tried to parrot their words back to them. They burst out laughing most of the time, so they probably were saying bad words or insulting me.

I sang them some worship songs and hymns, and they would often fall silent after this. A child and a young woman [appeared] with bows drawn and I kept waving my hands to say ‘no bows’ but they didn’t get the memo I guess.

The little kid with bow and arrow came down and I figured that this was it. So I preached a bit to them starting in Genesis and disembarked my kayak to show them that I too have two legs. I was inches from the unarmed guy and gave him a bunch of the scissors and gifts and then they took the kayak… and the little kid shot me with an arrow – directly into my Bible which I was holding in front of my chest. I grabbed the arrow shaft as it broke in my Bible, and I felt the arrow head. It was thin but very sharp. I stumbled back and I recall yelling at the kid.

I had to swim almost a mile back to the [fishermen’s] boat. Although I now have no kayak, or my small Pelican and its contents, I’m grateful that I still have the written word of God.

It’s weird – actually no, it’s natural: I’m scared.

There, I said it. Also frustrated and uncertain. I DON’T WANT TO DIE! Would it be wiser to leave and let someone else continue? NO. I don’t think so – I’m stuck here anyway without a passport and having been off the grid. I still could make it back to the US somehow as it almost seems like certain death to stay here.

Looking out of the plane window as you approach the Andaman Islands, you see white beaches and turquoise water. There are hundreds of islands, only a few dozen of which are inhabited. The plane is full of Indian couples travelling there on honeymoon. The Andamans are the Maldives of India. Incredibly beautiful. And severely endangered. The 2004 tsunami hit the Andaman Islands particularly hard, including North Sentinel. But when the authorities sent a helicopter to the island to see if the Sentinelese needed help, they fired arrows at the intruder. The authorities concluded that their help was not needed. The Sentinelese had clearly managed to survive, while on the islands round about thousands of people had died.

The police station sits on a hill above Port Blair, the capital of the Andaman Islands. The chief’s office is wood-panelled; arrows hang on the wall as decoration. Dependra Pathak, 56, is the most senior policeman on the archipelago.

Pathak normally deals with a lot of thefts; he has solved murders, and sometimes has to tackle poachers. On November 18, 2018, an e-mail appeared in his inbox from the American consulate in the southern Indian city of Chennai. Pathak started reading, and quickly sensed that what he had before him was the most complicated case of his career.

The e-mail said that the Sentinelese were presumed to have killed an American citizen. John Chau’s mother had informed the consulate.

Pathak launched the investigation. The police found five fishermen and two fixers who had helped John Chau, and arrested them. Pathak impounded the boat they had used. And he read the diary entries and letters of farewell that John Chau had written in the last three days of his life, a total of thirteen pages, handwritten.

He opened two files. In the first, he investigated ‘unknown Sentinelese’ for murder. In the other, he investigated the fishermen and helpers.

Pathak approached North Sentinel twice with a team of officials and experts on a coastguard boat. They saw people on the shore, but kept their distance. ‘Any outsider who has contact with them is putting their health at risk. They haven’t encountered the germs and viruses we carry,’ says Pathak. Scientists had told him about the British officer who had kidnapped that Sentinelese family whose parents had died, and about the countless other instances in the rest of the world when isolated groups had not survived contact with modern pathogens. From a distance, Pathak and his team took photos, made sketches, reconstructed the incident. They had with them one of the fishermen they had arrested, who told them what had happened.

He said that John Chau had given them 25,000 rupees, around 315 euros. That they had disguised him as a fisherman. That he kept asking them to catch fish so he could bring them to the Sentinelese. That they had maintained a safe distance from the island. That he used his collapsible kayak to paddle back and forth between the fishing boat and the island. That when he was sitting in their boat he spent most of the time writing his diary. That on the morning of the third day he gave them the diary and asked them to convey it to his friend Alex. That he had said to them ‘go-go’ – and that day they had gone out onto the open sea. And that they had indicated to him that they would come back in the evening to check on him.

That’s what it says in the summary, in the thick file Pathak is now reading from in his office.

When the fishermen returned to the island in the evening, they didn’t see John Chau again. They waited all night, but John Chau didn’t appear. What they did see, early the next morning, was a group of Sentinelese on the shore. A man was pulling something behind him – something lifeless. The fishermen looked more closely and recognized the body of a light-skinned man in black underpants. John Chau. The Sentinelese dug a grave and buried the body in it.

‘Seeing this incident, the fishermen left from North Sentinel,’ Pathak reads aloud from the file. The next day the fishermen went to Port Blair, where they fulfilled John Chau’s last wish and gave his diary to his friend Alex. They were arrested not long afterwards.

Dependra Pathak says it was his duty to implement the law of the land – and that this also applied to North Sentinel. Even if the Sentinelese didn’t know that there was a country called India, he says, they were still inhabitants of that country. However, the fact is that, in this case, the law contradicts itself.

On the one hand, it is forbidden to set foot on North Sentinel. On the other, it is forbidden to kill another person. Couldn’t the Sentinelese have driven John Chau away instead of killing him?

But was it really murder, as it says in the file? Or was it self-defence? And isn’t there a law in the United States, of all places, that says it is permitted to shoot someone who invades your house without permission?

In the end, Pathak didn’t arrest any Sentinelese, far less drag them into a courtroom. He believes that in this case the only ones who should be punished are those who intentionally broke the law. ‘The fishermen knew it was illegal. They did it anyway. And they knew they were sending John Chau to certain death.’

The fishermen spent several weeks in police custody. At the moment they are out of prison and awaiting the trial, which is due to begin soon. They are charged with involuntary manslaughter.

Diary, November 15, 2018, North Sentinel Island

Watching the sunset and it’s beautiful – crying a bit… wondering if it’ll be the last sunset I see before being in the place where the sun never sets.

I miss my parents, my mom and my dad and Brian and Marilyn and someone I can talk to and be understood.

I’ve never felt this much grief or sorrow before. WHY! Why did a little kid have to shoot me today? His high pitched voice still lingers in my head. Father, forgive him and any of the people on this island who try to kill me, and especially forgive them if they succeed!

LORD is this island Satan’s last stronghold where none have heard or even had a chance to hear Your Name?

LORD I need your strength and protection.

The plan for tomorrow is to drop me at the cache and then the boat will leave for the day, returning at night. If it goes badly, the fishermen won’t have to bear witness to my death.

The fishermen’s lawyer suggests that we could drive out to their village if we want meet them. However, he warns that they’re very nervous after their time in prison.

Webi, which means ‘hidden village’, is twelve hours away by car and ferry. It consists of a few streets, several huts, and three churches, surrounded by rainforest and rice fields. The people who live here don’t look like Indians, but more like the people of Myanmar. They belong to the Karen, a people who settled on the Andaman Islands ninety years ago and who live mainly from rice cultivation and fishing. Visually, John Chau would not have stood out among them.

The Karen speak their own language and are very religious. American Baptists converted them to Christianity in the early nineteenth century. According to police chief Dependra Pathak, when the fishermen brought John Chau to North Sentinel, they knew what they were doing. It wasn’t just about money for them; it was also about the Christian faith.

In the nearby cove, a dozen wooden boats are just returning from the sea with full nets. The boats are long – ten, fifteen metres – and brightly painted. John Chau was ferried across in a wooden boat like this.

Men wade ashore. Do they know the fishermen who took John Chau to North Sentinel?

‘We don’t know them,’ says one.

‘They might be out at sea for a few days,’ says another.

‘They’re at the other end of the cove.’

‘They’re on another beach.’

Many answers, none of which lead to the fishermen. But they give us a phone number. It’s the number of a man they all just call Alex. He lives in Port Blair and was a close friend of John Chau. The police chief called Alex the ‘mastermind’ of the operation.

Letter from John Chau to Alex, written on North Sentinel Island

Alex – I’m so grateful to you and to your simple obedience to God, and how you’ve served this mission with your very best. I think I might die, and I wish I could have had more time to express my thanks to you.

I’ll see you again bro – and remember, the first one to heaven, wins.

‘I knew you’d call,’ said Alex. ‘Let’s meet. It’s not safe to talk on the phone; I don’t know if they’re listening to us.’

A restaurant in Port Blair. Even before we order, Alex starts talking as if he’s been bottling it up for months. It’s the first time he’s met with a foreign journalist. He had a lot of requests; he didn’t answer any of them. Now, though, he says, he can’t stand it any more, the way people are speaking so badly of John Chau online.

Alex’s full name is Alexander Kalluthundil Sam. He’s Indian, late twenties, born and raised in Port Blair. With his full beard, glasses and short, curly, gelled hair, he could also be a start-up entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. He has a cosmopolitan air, even though he’s never left India.

Sam is a computer programmer by profession – or was, because after the business with John he lost his job. Like the fishermen, he too was remanded in custody. And he too will soon stand trial.

Alexander Kalluthundil Sam is a devout Christian. He got to know John Chau three years ago, during one of his return visits to the Andaman Islands.

Sam and Chau had grown up in very different parts of the world, but they had one thing in common: for years they had both been nursing the idea of saving the Sentinelese.

Sam believes it’s an illusion to think it will be possible to permanently seal these people off from the modern world. Sooner or later, he says, the world will come to them, in the form of tourists, adventurers, poachers. And they don’t care about the indigenous people; they’re only interested in their own advantage, their own profit. John Chau, by contrast, wanted to introduce the Sentinelese to contemporary life slowly and carefully. Sam says Chau would really have been able to help them.

John Chau and Alexander Kalluthundil Sam went fishing and hiking together on the Andaman Islands. They also attended church together. Sam became Chau’s most important helper; without him, Chau would never have got to North Sentinel. It was Sam who rented the safehouse for Chau, where he hid for eleven days before setting off. And it was Sam who convinced the fishermen to take Chau with them in their boat.

‘We were well prepared,’ says Sam. They had worked up a number of different scenarios. If the Sentinelese had accepted John Chau, he would have stayed with them, perhaps for two years, perhaps twenty, perhaps forever. There was also the scenario in which he died. Their aim, he says, was that no one outside should hear about the mission, regardless of how it ended. The Indian authorities were not supposed to know about it, and nor was the rest of the world.

But then, after Sam photographed the diary the fishermen had passed on to him and sent it to All Nations – as he and John Chau had agreed – and after All Nations informed John Chau’s mother about the death of her son, something happened that they hadn’t factored in. Chau’s mother contacted the American consulate and sent extracts from the diary to the Washington Post. Sam says that right now he doesn’t like to go out, where he would see people he knows. ‘I’m mentally preparing myself for the fact that I will soon have to go to jail.’ If he’s convicted of involuntary manslaughter, he could be given a ten-year prison term.

During the last few days in Port Blair, when he hid his friend in the safehouse, he says he noticed that John Chau was worried – that he was under tremendous strain. ‘He had been preparing himself for nine years. Many people were involved. And he knew how important it was.’

On the day of his departure, they packed up together. Sam took Chau to the shore where they had arranged to meet the fishermen. ‘We hugged each other, and he said: Goodbye, bro, I love you. We prayed. Then he walked slowly over to the water, where the fishermen were already waiting.’

Alex Kalluthundil Sam says, ‘I pray that in my lifetime I will see the Light brought to the Sentinelese.’

John Chau’s mentor in South Africa had said, on the phone, ‘I hope that John’s story lights a flame and that other people will want to go to this place.’

And in Cologne, John Middleton Ramsey had said, ‘A few people wrote to me with the words: John has inspired me, and now I want to go to this tribe.’

Diary, November 16, 2018, 0620

Woke up after a fairly restful sleep, heading to island now. I hope this isn’t my last notes but if it is; to God be the glory.

I’m heading back to the hut I’ve been to. Praying it goes well.

- John Chau

 

[1] The extracts quoted here from John Chau’s diary and final letters have been abridged.