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

From left: the Sentinelese, an isolated tribe that lives on North Sentinel Island, in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands; a picture of American missionary John Chau from his Instagram page.

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.

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