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NEW DELHI (AP) – The young American, paddling from his kayak to an isolated Indian island, whose inhabitants have withstood the outside world for thousands of years, believed that God had helped him dodge the authorities.
"God has protected me and camouflaged me against the Coast Guard and the Navy," wrote John Allen Chau before being killed last week on North Sentinel Island. Indian ships monitor the waters around the island, trying to ensure that strangers do not approach the Sentinelese, who have repeatedly indicated that they wish to remain alone.
When a young boy tried to hit him with an arrow on the first day of his stay on the island, Chau returned to the fishing boat that he had planned to wait off. The arrow, he writes, struck a Bible that he carried.
"Why did a little kid have to shoot me today?" he wrote in his notes, that he left it to the fishermen before coming back the next morning. "His shrill voice still sounds in my head."
Police said Chau knew that the Sentinels resisted any contact with strangers, throwing arrows and spears at passing helicopters and killing fishermen drifting on their shores. His notes, reported Thursday in Indian newspapers and confirmed by the police, clearly indicate that he knew he could be killed.
"I do not want to die," wrote Chau, who seemed to want to bring Christianity to the islanders. "Would it be wiser to leave and let someone else go on?" No, I do not think so. "
The Indian authorities are trying to find a way to find Chau's body after he was killed last week by islanders who apparently shot him with arrows and took him out. buried on the beach.
Even the officials do not go to North Sentinel, where people live as their ancestors did thousands of years ago. The only contacts, occasional "gift" visits in which bananas and coconuts were passed by small teams of officials and scholars who remained in the waves, took place years ago.
Police are consulting with anthropologists, tribal welfare specialists and specialists to find a way to recover the body, Dependera Pathak, chief executive of the police in the Indian islands of Andaman and Nicobar, said on Thursday. find North Sentinel.
Chau paid fishermen last week to bring her near North Sentinel, using the kayak to row ashore and bringing gifts, including a soccer ball and a fish.
Scholars know almost nothing about the island, the number of its inhabitants to the spoken language. The Andamans once had similar groups, long-term migrants from Africa and South-East Asia who had settled in the island chain, but their numbers have declined considerably in the last century due to illness, intermarriage and migration.
Chau estimated that there were about 250 inhabitants on the island, with at least 10 people living in each hut.
"The language of the tribe has a lot of high-pitched sounds like ba, pa and as," he writes.
It is unclear what happened to Chau when he returned to the island the next morning. But the next morning, the fishermen observed from the boat the men of the tribe dragging Chau's body along the beach and burying his remains.
Seven people were arrested for helping Chau, including five fishermen, a friend of Chau and a local tourist guide, according to the police.
In a post on Instagram, her family said she was crying like "her beloved son, brother, uncle and best friend". The family also claimed to have forgiven his killers.
The authorities claim that Chau arrived in the area on October 16 and stayed on another island while he was preparing to travel to North Sentinel. It was not his first time in the region: he had visited the Andaman Islands in 2015 and 2016.
With the help of the friend, Chau paid fishermen $ 325 to take him there, Pathak said.
After the fishermen realized that Chau had been killed, they left for Port Blair, the capital of the chain of islands, where they announced the news to a friend of Chau, who informed his family, said Pathak.
Police inspected the island by air on Tuesday, and a team of police and forest officials used a Coast Guard boat to return there on Wednesday. It was not clear if they have come back since.
Chau, whose friends have described him as a fervent Christian, studied at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Previously, he had lived in southwestern Washington State and had gone to Vancouver Christian High School.
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Associated Press Editor Tim Sullivan contributed to this report.
