1. First Contact

For 11 days in November 2018, John 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, India, never stepping outside to enjoy sunlight. The 26-year-old American missionary was hoping his body would ﬁnish off any lingering infections so that he wouldn’t sicken the Sentinelese, a hunter-gatherer tribe that he dreamed of converting to Christianity. They’d been isolated on their remote island for enough centuries that they’d never developed modern antibodies. Even the common cold could devastate them.

During this retreat Chau kept his mountain climber’s body hard with triangle push-ups, leg tucks, and body squats. But it was his soul that he primarily 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. “God, I thank you for choosing me, before I was even yet formed in my mother’s womb, to be Your messenger of Your Good News,” he wrote in his diary. “May Your Kingdom, Your Rule and Reign come now to North Sentinel Island.”

After the storm ﬁnally passed, a crew of local Christians hid Chau on their 30-foot open wooden boat and struck out under darkness for the most extreme outcrop of the Andaman archipelago, on a route presumably meant to resemble that of a normal ﬁshing expedition. As they dodged other craft, Chau recorded, “The Milky Way was above and God Himself was shielding us from the Coast Guard and Navy patrols.” The Indian government bans contact with the Sentinelese as a way of protecting them from outsiders—and outsiders from them. The Sentinelese have maintained their independence by frequently repelling foreigners from their shoreline with eight-foot-long arrows.

Bioluminescent plankton illuminated ﬁsh jumping “like darting mermaids” as the boat motored more than 60 miles. Sometime before 4:30 a.m., the crew noted three bonﬁres on a distant beach and then anchored outside the island’s barrier reef. While resting, eyes shut but not asleep, Chau had “a vision as I’ve never had one before,” of a meteorite—possibly representing himself—streaking toward a “frightening city with jagged spires,” seemingly Sentinel Island. Then “a whitish light ﬁlled [the city] and all the frightening bits melted away.” He couldn’t help wondering in his diary: “LORD is this island Satan’s last stronghold where none have heard or even had a chance to hear Your Name?”

Dawn soon revealed a hut on a white-sand beach, backed by primordial jungle. Chau off-loaded from the ﬁshermen’s boat a kayak and two waterproof cases jammed with wilderness survival supplies. He paddled a half mile in shallow water over dead coral, and as he approached shore, he heard women “looing and chattering.” Then two dark-skinned men, wearing little, if anything, ran onto the beach, shouting in a language spoken by no one on earth besides their tribe. They clutched bows, though they hadn’t yet strung arrows onto them.

From his kayak, Chau yelled in English: “My name is John. I love you, and Jesus loves you. Jesus Christ gave me authority to come to you.” Then, offering a tuna most likely caught by the ﬁshermen on the journey to the island, Chau declared: “Here is some ﬁsh!” In response, the Sentinelese socketed bamboo arrows onto bark-ﬁber bowstrings. Chau panicked. He ﬂung the gift into the bay. As the tribesmen gathered it, he turned and paddled “like I never have in my life, back to the boat.”

By the time he reached safety, though, his fear was already turning to disappointment. He swore to himself that he would return later that day. He had, after all, been planning for this moment since high school. It was his divine calling, he believed, to save the lost souls of North Sentinel Island.

2. The Calling

On the surface, John Chau enjoyed a normal 1990s childhood in a suburb of Portland, Oregon, playing soccer and performing charitable work with his church. Family photos show a chubby-cheeked boy grinning with his Chinese psychiatrist father in national parks, his American lawyer mother presumably behind the camera. But it wasn’t just those vacations that inspired his love of the wild. One day, while still in elementary school, Chau found a book in his dad’s downstairs study and wiped dust off its cover to reveal: Robinson Crusoe. The story of a solitary castaway on a tropical island hooked him on adventure tales.