Islanders Who Killed American Have a History of Guarding Their Isolation

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The North Sentinel Island in India’s southeastern Andaman and Nicobar Islands.CreditCreditGautam Singh/Associated Press

By Kai Schultz, Hari Kumar and Jeffrey Gettleman

Nov. 22, 2018

NEW DELHI — In the late 19th century, a British naval officer described stepping onto a remote, coral-fringed island in the Andaman Sea and encountering one of the world’s most enigmatic hunter-gatherer tribes, an extraordinarily isolated group of “painfully timid” people who ate roots and turtles and stored a heap of wild pigs’ skulls.

Fascinated, the officer, Maurice Vidal Portman, basically kidnapped several islanders. He took them back to his house on a bigger island, where the British ran a prison, and watched the adults grow sick and die. After returning the children to the island, he ended his experiment, calling it a failure.

“We cannot be said to have done anything more than increase their general terror of, and hostility to, all comers,” Mr. Portman wrote in his 1899 book.

Over the next century, few outsiders ever returned. The island, called North Sentinel, was a bushy, hilly world unto itself, about the size of Manhattan. Just about anyone who dared to visit was greeted by flying arrows. In the 1970s, the director of a National Geographic documentary took one in the leg.

[Read about T.N. Pandit, an anthropologist who spent time with the Jarawa and Sentinelese tribes.]

Maybe the islanders were traumatized by that original kidnapping. Maybe they feared foreign disease. No one has ever figured out exactly why they are so hostile to outsiders and their language remains a mystery.

Over the years, North Sentinel faded back into obscurity. That is until Wednesday, when the Indian government revealed that a young American had paddled to shore in a kayak and tribesmen killed him with bows and arrows.

The episode appeared to be a culture clash between an open, adventurous foreigner who may have been trying to teach the islanders about Christianity and the local group. But he sought to win over one of the most impenetrable communities in the world.

Last week, John Allen Chau, a 26-year-old from Washington state, paid a group of fisherman $350 to take him to North Sentinel under the cover of darkness. Fishermen had warned him not to go.

Nevertheless, Mr. Chau paddled to shore with a kayak and a Bible, according to Dependra Pathak, the police chief in the area.

He tried to speak to the tribes people, who were small in stature and wore yellow paste on their bodies, in their own language. Some were friendly, others were not, according to Mr. Pathak, who cited a long note Mr. Chau gave the fishermen just before he set out in his kayak in case he did not come back.

John Allen Chau, an American from Washington state, was killed on the Indian island of North Sentinel.CreditSarah Prince/Associated Press

In it, he wrote that Jesus had bestowed him with the strength to go to the most forbidden places on Earth, police officials said.

His father, Patrick Chau, said Thursday that his Christian faith provided solace after hearing of his son’s death. He said he was particularly comforted by a biblical passage: “There’s time and seasons for everything under heaven.”

Missionary organizations said Mr. Chau died for the ultimate cause and friends called him a martyr.

“John was a gracious and sensitive ambassador of Jesus Christ,” said a statement from All Nations, an international Christian missionary group. “The privilege of sharing the gospel has often involved great cost. We pray that John’s sacrificial efforts will bear eternal fruit in due season.’’

According to the fishermen who helped Mr. Chau, they motored for several hours from Port Blair to North Sentinel. Mr. Chau waited until the next morning, at daybreak, to try to get ashore. He put his kayak in the water less than half a mile out and paddled toward the island.

The fishermen said that tribesmen had shot arrows at him and that he had retreated. He apparently tried several more times to reach the island over the next two days, the police say, offering gifts such as a small soccer ball, fishing line and scissors. But on the morning of Nov. 17, the fishermen said they saw the islanders with his body.

The seven people who helped Mr. Chau reach the island have been arrested and charged with culpable homicide not amounting to murder and with violating rules protecting aboriginal tribes. In an Instagram post, Mr. Chau’s family asked for the release of the seven and said he had “ventured out on his own free will.”

India strictly monitors access to tribes, which are given protected status and the indigenous groups living on the islands of Andaman and Nicobar are some of the most carefully guarded.

The islands are more than 700 miles from the mainland. And the Indian government has taken the decision that any contact with these islanders, whose lifestyle has changed very little over the centuries, could destroy their culture and maybe even their lives. Their immune systems may be no match for modern microbes.

But some officials say this approach is outdated and paternalistic.

The islanders, whom Mr. Pathak described as a cultural treasure to be protected, wear loin cloths and live in simple huts. They are thought to number between 50 and 100, and hunt with spears and arrows fashioned from scraps of metal that wash up on their shores. Their island is heavily forested.

T.N. Pandit, an Indian anthropologist who visited North Sentinel several times between 1967 and 1991, said their hostility is simple: they want to be left alone.

“They are not wanting anything from you. We are coming to them,’’ he said. “They suspect that we have no good intentions. That’s why they are resisting.”

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A Sentinel tribesman aims with his bow and arrow at an Indian Coast Guard helicopter as it flies over the island in 2004.CreditReuters

Anthropologists believe the people on this island descended from migrants from Africa who came to the Andamans thousands of years ago. North Sentinel is among a shrinking handful of Andaman Islands home to people who still, in 2018, have had very little contact with the outside world.

In the years since India won independence from the British, groups of anthropologists have tried to study them.

But no one has managed to get through. Several times, Mr. Pandit said, the Sentinelese have turned their backs on anthropologists and squatted down, as if they were defecating.

In 2006, two Indian fishermen who accidentally washed up on their shores were killed. When a military chopper flew low over the island, some men fired arrows at it. These days, the Indian authorities aren’t taking any chances. The Navy enforces a 3-mile buffer zone around North Sentinel. But police suspect Mr. Chau went at night with the intention of circumventing the authorities.

It is unknown what the Sentinelese call each other, or whether any other group in the world understands their language. When an expedition brought members of another indigenous tribe to North Sentinel, thinking they may share linguistic similarities, neither side understood one another.

The farthest anyone has gotten was in 1991, when some anthropologists stood in waist-deep water near the shore and gifted coconuts to smiling tribesman. A few years later, though, these “gift giving” expeditions stopped.

A.K. Singh, a former lieutenant governor in Andaman and Nicobar, said friendly encounters were rare. He said there were two schools of thought about how to govern these islands, which, after all, are part of India.

One end of the spectrum holds that “any contact is detrimental to their interest and therefore leave them alone,’’ he said. “The other end of the spectrum says who are we to deny them the fruits of development. Why shouldn’t their children go to school? They aspire to a more modern way of living.”

“There was always conflict in these views,’’ Mr. Singh explained.

As for what the Sentinelese want, experts say it is very difficult to know. Some years back, after a young man from another once-hostile tribe, the Jarawa, was treated for a broken leg at an Andaman hospital, some attitudes in the Jarawa community began to change.

But not all. In 2015, a Jarawa man was accused of killing a lighter-skinned baby born to an unmarried Jarawa woman and apparently an outsider. A tribal leader said that if the baby’s body was handed over to investigators “the world will start shaking, and we will all die.” The police did not arrest the Jarawa man for the crime.

The same thing could happen now. Indian officials are weighing whether to pursue murder charges or even retrieve Mr. Chau’s body, which police believe may be buried on the beach.

Some police officials worried about where the investigation would lead. If they went to the island to get Mr. Chau’s body, they said, they might be killed as well.

Follow Kai Schultz, Hari Kumar and Jeffrey Gettleman on Twitter: @Kai_Schultz, @HariNYT and @gettleman.