![]() ![]() (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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