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[waves lapping]
[John Allen Chau] I plan on arriving on the shores of
an island in which an unknown number of people live,
who have unknown religious beliefs
and speak an unknown tongue.
Some have called this the most difficult and impossible place
to reach on Earth.
Lord, is this island Satan's last stronghold?
Soli Deo gloria, John Chau.
[♪ dramatic music]
[John's Friend] My friend John paid some pirates
to go to an island to talk to people about Jesus,
when he knew that he had no business doing that.
My friend did something stupid and courageous and bold,
and I wish I was that bold.
I wish...
I wish my faith...
was that solid,
to where I believed, like, the Gospel is real.
Whoa.
[♪ dramatic music]
[cranking]
[engine rumbling]
[reporter] There are still many islands of which little is known,
many islands yet to be explored.
[♪ dramatic music]
We came at last to what is known
as the North Sentinel Island.
We wondered whether we would be able even to have
a glimpse of the inhabitants.
No one in recorded history had ever encountered anything
but arrows from the tribe.
[♪ dramatic music]
[Adam Goodheart] There are so many ways that the seductions
of this story can go wrong.
People whose language no one speaks,
whose culture no one knows.
And he's somehow going to get them to accept Christ.
It just seemed like madness.
To those of us not among the few hundred Sentinelese,
how can we really try to understand
their lived experience?
Talking about them reveals so much and conceals so much.
[Crew] I fear the same will be said about our film
when we're finished too.
[scoffs]
[Adam Goodheart] It's ultimately kind of an imaginative act.
[♪ dramatic music]
[Reporter] A remote Indian island,
an isolated tribe, and a suspected murder-
the saga of John Allen Chau's disappearance
has captivated people,
as authorities try to pinpoint what exactly happened.
[♪ dramatic music]
[drawer sliding]
[Patrick Chau] How this, as a predestined
suicidal mission commitment came about...
How it was seeded and germinated.
As a psychiatrist, I pick up my professional tool
to review and draw some conclusion
from our 26 years and 11 months
father-and-son relationship.
[♪ dramatic music]
40 feet below the summit of Bear Mountain.
Past this point, I don't have any protection.
We're not gonna risk it, so we're gonna head back down.
[Patrick Chau] How come such an intelligent,
seemingly well-prepared explorer
committed such a reckless mistake?
This is for the benefit of all parents
while raising their children
to learn some lessons from this ill-fated mission calling
that sacrificed God's given of life for nothing in return.
[♪ playful music]
[John Allen Chau] Whoo!
I'm sorry!
[screaming]
[grunts]
[laughter]
[John Allen Chau] I'm an explorer at heart.
Growing up, I remember dusting off
a massive tome in my dad's downstairs study
titled Robinson Crusoe.
After struggling my way through it,
I started reading easier, kid-friendly books
like Hatchet, My Side of the Mountain,
and Sign of the Beaver.
[Kid] Robinson Crusoe made out fine in the wilderness,
didn't he, Pa?
Of course, he did have to fight the savages.
Pa!
[John Allen Chau] The latter of which inspired
my brother and I to paint our faces with
wild blackberry juice
and tramp through our backyard with bows and spears
we created from sticks.
Since then, the outdoors have been my home.
[♪ playful music]
[Patrick Chau] I felt this boy has been enchanted
by the romantic spirit of the colonial era
of explorations and adventures.
He once sent me an online copy of
The Adventures of Tintin.
One of the comics called The Broken Ear
illustrated an English explorer who disappeared
into the primitive tribe for ten years.
John told me a weird wish for his future when grown up.
"I want to be a wild man,
living on the trees on the beach,
and jump into the water
to catch jellyfish with spear to eat."
[Boy] Yes!
[Patrick Chau] I was laughing at him.
However, to be a wild man fantasy
seemed rooting in his heart.
[John Allen Chau] I used to gaze constantly
at this large painting my dad did in '91.
After reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,
the first thing I did was put my hand on the painting
to see if I could enter into the world of Narnia.
[waves crashing]
[Drinian] We have sailed more than 400 leagues from Narnia.
Soon we'll be approaching the Lone Islands.
- And after the Lone Islands? - Nobody knows, ma'am.
It's years since anyone from Narnia went into those waters.
[Patrick Chau] John?
John absolutely said, God has adventure
out there for me, and I'm going to take it.
Why shy away from that?
If God is for you, who can be against you?
♪ What so proudly we hailed ♪
♪ At the twilight's last gleaming ♪
♪ Whose broad stripes and bright stars ♪
♪ Through the perilous fight ♪
♪ O'er the ramparts... ♪
[Levi Davis] John and I, we used to stand together in choir.
He always talked through a smile, like, just like...
[laughs]
'Cause he was so excited or something.
And he related to the fact that
I'm half Puerto Rican and half white, so I'm a biracial kid.
Like, I'm a blended baby.
John was a blended baby.
He was half Chinese, half American,
and, like, that was huge.
He was proud of his Chinese side and his heritage there.
I think that meant a lot to him.
[Dan Davis] His parents brought him up to be Christian.
Anybody, the five aspects of the First Amendment.
I was a teacher at Vancouver Christian High School.
Stand back while I part the Jordan Fourth Plain.
Can I just push this little button?
[Student] What's wrong with you, oh, ye of little faith?
Where's your courage?
Where's your sense of adventure?
[Dan Davis] Vancouver Christian had 120 kids.
They were probably 75% to 80%
from an Evangelical Christian background,
and John was one of those.
[♪ soft music]
[Levi Davis] He wanted approval from his parents,
specifically his dad.
He had so much respect for his dad.
[John Allen Chau] Happy Father's Day to my amazing Baba!
He came to the U.S. as a refugee
during the Cultural Revolution
and has overcome so many challenges.
He's an incredible artist, doctor, landscaper,
koi-pond builder, electrician, carpenter,
and, best of all, a father to me.
[Patrick Chau] God assigned me to play many roles.
The most difficult was a good role model for my children.
My two older children followed
my academic and career role modeling.
They are the gang of two,
but baby brother John
was left to search and form his own peer group
and role modeling.
[♪ soft music]
[Levi Davis] Our tiny little group of guys was, like, four or five of us.
We started the Accountability Group,
and the purpose of the Accountability Group
was just to be like, look, like, you have asked us
as your brothers in Christ to hold you to a standard,
and so we're gonna do that.
Proverbs 13:20 says,
"He who walks with the wise grows wise,
but a companion of fools suffers harm."
So none of us were wise.
[chuckles] We were all fools, honestly,
but the purpose of the Accountability Group
was just to make sure we weren't looking at porn.
Like, bottom line, don't look at porn,
so that was kind of the big thing, especially at a Christian school.
[Crew] Were you?
[Levi Davis] Well, yeah.
[laughs]
My God. I was doing all the things that we said
we shouldn't do, shamefully.
But John was not.
John was consistent. John was so consistent.
[John Allen Chau] I went on a mission trip with my school to Mexico.
Other than simply doing some manual labor,
I came back to the States with a desire to carry out
the Great Commission.
[Man] The examination of the Great Commission
can lead to but one conclusion–
"Go ye into all the world
and preach the Gospel to every creature."
[Jesus] Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father...
[John Allen Chau] And of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.
[Jesus] And lo, I am with you always,
even until the end of the world.
Let's pray.
[John Allen Chau] I prayed,
God, if you want me to become a missionary,
I'll become one.
[Daniel Everett] I find John's diary extremely moving.
This is the kind of guy that, when I was a young Christian,
he was who I wanted to serve with.
He was really one of the best.
For people who believe, for Christians,
you couldn't have asked for a better young man.
Reminds me of earlier journals of my own.
Growing up, I thought U.S. Christians
were superficial.
They were doing what everybody who's not a Christian does
but then going to church on Sundays.
And to me, the Christian life was a radical life.
It was a life where you gave up all your possessions,
and you obeyed what God said,
and you were a missionary.
If necessary, we will live and die in obscurity
there among them.
John, he's reading books that I read,
and he's drawing from them the same lessons
that most Christian believers draw from.
There's huge inspiration from these people
who aren't afraid of death and engaged in all this hardship.
One of the most important culture-changing stories
of the modern Christian missionary movement,
it's a story of five missionaries in Ecuador,
especially Nate Saint and Jim Elliott.
Jim Elliott was really good at aphorisms.
He wrote things like, "He is no fool.
He gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose."
[voice breaking] I still get emotional about that.
At the time, it was one of the main motivating forces
for my life.
[♪ drumming]
[Reporter] On Friday, January 6, 1956,
after three days of waiting on the beach,
three Aucas appeared.
The fellas called the young man George.
Of course, neither party understood the other
except for a few words that Jim had learned
from an Auca girl who had left her tribe.
Nate gave her a model, which puzzled her somewhat,
but she was quite delighted with it.
The fellas tried to explain visually
how to build an airstrip.
I'm afraid the message didn't get across.
[Dan Davis] There was a comic book even back in the day
that talked about these missionaries.
And that was a story that John found inspiring,
that there would be young men
that would devote themselves to
trying to share the love of Jesus with a tribe
that was in the Amazon,
and they gave their lives in doing that.
[Nate Saint] Missionaries?
[Levi Davis] The End of the Spear movie
was a big deal.
Like, you or I would go see
Star Wars or Lord of the Rings
or Avengers and come out, like,
blasting and swinging swords and everything,
that was End of the Spear for John.
And, like, he wanted to share it with me
and wanted to make sure I watched it again and again
and wanted to make sure I knew that it was a real story,
because he was trying to inspire me with it.
[♪ dramatic music]
[Daniel Everett] After the missionaries were killed,
Nate Saint's sister, Rachel Saint,
decided she was gonna go in.
And so the widow of Jim Elliot,
Elisabeth Elliot, decided she would go with her.
And they hiked in, and they were accepted.
And they converted the Huaorani.
[♪ dramatic music]
Rachel Saint would travel with some of the ones
that actually killed her brother and the others
and speak throughout the States,
and this showed a huge victory for God.
[Ralph Edwards] I know that your life tonight will be an
inspiration to the 30 million people watching,
Miss Rachel Saint.
[applause]
And her traveling companion, Dayuma.
[applause]
[airplane propeller whirring]
We all live by stories.
I heard powerful stories that led me to the Amazon.
John heard powerful stories
that led him to the Andaman Islands.
[typing]
[John Allen Chau] I remember spending time in prayer,
asking God where He wanted me to go.
I turned on the computer,
did a search for unreached people groups...
And somehow stumbled upon a brief paragraph
from the Joshua Project about the Sentinelese.
[♪ dramatic music]
I couldn't sleep that night...
as all that was on my mind was this specific people group
that no one ever had been to.
[thunder rumbling]
[Levi Davis] This is where I start getting chills,
because I can see him and hear him talking about it
and hear him looking me in the eye talking about this.
And he said...
"How are they to believe in Him
of whom they have never heard?
And how are they to hear without someone preaching?
And how are they to preach unless they are sent?
As it is written, how beautiful are the feet
of those who preach the good news?"
Racial equality is exactly what is being preached here.
I just remember him saying, "Levi, that's us.
There's no escaping from it.
The same God is God of everyone.
We have to go talk to those people in loincloths
and on islands that we can't get to."
[Dan Davis] And once he found out about that tribe,
that was something he couldn't turn away from.
It was almost like there was a mountain right here,
and the plane is coming.
There's a certain point where that plane
is not going to go over the mountain.
You know, pull up, pull up, but at this point right here,
he knew that...
he was gonna go all-in.
[Patrick Chau] He found the last frontier
of the unexplored land, an untouched people.
He was excited, as if the place and people
were specifically left for him.
My heart sunk,
for his 'calling' was based on his fantasy.
However, I hoped that he would be matured enough
to rectify the fantasy before too late.
[applause]
[pages rustling]
[Adam Goodheart] "Awake, mostly thinking about tomorrow,
wondering why I am doing it.
What do I do if I see any Sentinelese?
Wave, shout, take pictures, look through a telescope?
The dilemma finally of all those who have gone there."
I think John Chau was influenced by what I wrote.
I'm not sure how I feel about that.
Mostly I don't like it, of course.
But, you know, before his story went viral,
anybody Googling North Sentinel Island
would find my account.
It was one of the few detailed pieces of information
that was out there on the Internet.
It was just this sort of hubris of my 20-something self
that thought, "Well, of course I'm going to go there."
I guess I recognized that there was danger,
but danger seemed abstract and improbable,
in the way that it does to young people.
[map rustling]
There you see North Sentinel.
I learned that North Sentinel Island was a part of
this chain of islands called the Andamans.
You can feel the heaviness of the tropical air
just almost wafting off of that romantic name.
I didn't even know where the Andaman Islands were,
um, and then I looked them up in an atlas.
One of the earliest surviving maps, it's written in Latin,
and it gives the name of the islands as Isle Bone Fortune,
"the Islands of Good Fortune."
But then there's an annotation next to that,
and it says, "In these islands are the cannibals."
[Denham] Did you ever hear of Kong?
[Adam Goodheart] The Andaman Islands were portrayed in
King Kong.
They represented to the Western imagination
the heart of darkness.
There are various tribal groups of Andamanese
on the islands.
The Sentinelese, they're the last ones who resist contact.
[Denham] Well, every legend has a basis of truth.
I tell you, there's something on that island
that no white man has ever seen.
[♪ dramatic music]
[Adam Goodheart] This idea of Western civilization
sailing across the seas and hacking through the jungles
and having these moments of encounter,
and they would make war, or they would make love,
or they would do both,
that played itself out over and over and over again
for thousands of years.
And here was the place where maybe it was happening
for the last time.
The boat was barely more than a dugout canoe.
I'm in this boat, trying to focus
this ridiculous Edwardian telescope
that I found in a junk shop in Calcutta.
You know, I was trying to reenact
those adventure stories
that had entranced me when I was a kid.
I was sure all along I wasn't going to attempt to land.
I mean, it just seemed obviously foolhardy,
if not suicidal.
And then suddenly, at 6:10,
Bala says, "Look, tribal."
Then see three shifting shapes moving in silhouette.
Once you're there, and especially once I saw
these figures coming down onto the beach,
it's like Odysseus and the sirens.
I was pushing to get closer and closer.
[♪ dramatic music]
[thunder rumbles]
For me, the moment that broke the spell
was when a monsoon storm came blowing in.
It was as if the island itself had said, "Enough, back off."
[waves crashing]
In my weird nerdy-historian way,
I just became a little bit obsessive
about North Sentinel Island
and the multilayered story of this place.
I didn't know what it was going to turn into.
[clapping]
♪ Yes, Lord, yes, Lord ♪
♪ Yes, yes, Lord ♪
♪ Yes, Lord, yes, Lord, yes, yes, Lord, amen ♪
[cheers and applause]
[Teacher] John Allen Chau.
[cheers and applause]
[John Allen Chau] I graduated high school with a desire
to immediately go off to the mission field.
The only friction I've had has come from my father,
who, unfortunately, doesn't have the same view
of the Great Commission as I do,
and my mother, who wants me to go to medical school.
I decided to honor them by finishing my education
at Oral Roberts University.
[Oral Roberts] And now, friends, the Lord has
recently spoke to me on a world outreach
to win one million souls to Christ each year.
I know I cannot do it alone.
I beseech you for your earnest partnership and cooperation,
that for the first time
in mankind's long, sordid history,
one group will reach out their hands
and bring a million in to Jesus Christ.
Will you say "amen"?
[All] Amen.
[Jimmy Shaw] The first time I met John, uh,
he was a student in one of my classes,
I think my History of Missions class.
How does the Gospel spread from,
at the time of Jesus, no one hearing the Gospel,
to a point that 100 years, 200 years later,
1 in every 300 people is a Christian,
to the point that today, 1 in every 7 people
around the globe is a Christian?
The story of the Gospel spread is mostly anonymous people
doing day-to-day things and sharing the Gospel
with people that they're close to in their life,
but some of those jumps to new places are semi-dramatic.
And I think there's a group of people
that want to be doing a more tame version
of missionary work.
They want it to be, "Let's go to Mexico
and paint a house and call it mission work,"
which we do paint houses in Mexico.
And it is an important mission work.
But there's a part of this, too, that this–
I don't think they want to come to terms with the fact
that, like, the Gospel call might push you
to a place you don't want to go.
[Daniel Everett] When I was in Bible school, one of the things
we had to read is Foxe's Book of Martyrs,
to see those people as heroes,
somebody who could just be sewn up in a bag of
scorpions and snakes and thrown into the ocean,
knowing that was gonna happen
and still refusing to deny his faith.
And I don't know if that ever happened,
but we believed it happened at the time.
And I love that.
What motivates most
Fundamentalist Christian missionaries, all of them,
is that these people are going to hell.
What could be a greater gift that I could give to them
but than to do this?
[Dan Davis] There's also the prevalent belief among
Evangelical Christians that for Jesus to return,
you know, the rapture
or the second coming of Christ or whatever,
that every tribe, every nation needed to have
exposure to the Gospel.
[Patrick Chau] I am a Christian,
but I am not part of the radical Evangelicals
and don't agree on their views of the Great Commission,
the biblical-based slogan
distorted for the hidden colonial or imperialist agenda.
But my opposing rational influence
failed to counter the irrational religious
and glamorized adventures of exploration.
[Bobby Parks] See, what we're a part of is something bigger,
and that's Jesus's plan
and the hope that we have to bring to the nations.
Yes, we're gonna bring education.
Yes, we're gonna bring creative solutions and
ideas to end poverty,
but what we have to bring to the nations is Jesus.
[Jimmy Shaw] Bobby was the Director of Missions for
a long time.
And he and John became good friends,
and they worked side by side on lots of projects.
I think he looked at Bobby as a mentor,
like a little brother, I think, in some ways,
and he's a great mentor.
Bobby's an awesome guy.
[John Allen Chau] During my time at ORU, I yearned to just go,
to go spread the Gospel everywhere.
I kept wondering when I was going to get
to the Sentinelese.
[♪ dramatic music]
[Patrick Chau] As a father,
we have a gentlemen agreement
that was "agree to disagree"
in order to maintain peace between us.
Regretfully,
one of the important change in the family environment
was that my positive career role modeling
started a cliff-drop deterioration.
John is the one left to fully witness my struggle
to keep my profession license
and trying to pay for all the family expenses.
It took me 11 years to get out of the probation.
I believe this prolonged setback of my career
certainly caused John's doubt in life.
I was like a drowning man,
busy of self-rescue.
And, unwittingly,
I let John be sucked toward a whirlpool...
The radical to fanatic extreme Christian Evangelical faction.
[Bobby Parks] "Go to the cross and die to yourself and
die to your flesh and die to your own desires."
As I read the Bible, that's what Jesus says.
Those who lose their life will find it.
If you want to be great in the kingdom, what does Jesus say?
That you have to be a servant, a slave of all that.
Just like Jesus says He was willing to give his own life,
so do we even here in this room.
And I want to challenge us, if we be willing so much
to lay down our life, maybe lay down some of our dreams
and say, "God, not my will, but Your will be done."
[♪ dramatic music]
[typing]
[John Allen Chau] The Plan...
editor's note, this is not an official research paper
and is only distributed
to a limited number of people for security reasons.
[Jimmy Shaw] John said to me, this is it.
This is what the plan looks like.
I have it right here, where I'm sitting.
He felt like there's this vacancy of what it will take
to get this done.
These are the things I now need to do to get ready for this.
[John Allen Chau] To be clear from the onset,
this mission will be illegal.
If God enables it to succeed,
it will be among the most unique and amazing endeavors
in the history of missions.
[♪ dramatic music]
[Daniel Everett] Most Christian missionaries think of it
in terms of the vessel
and the thing to fill the vessel.
I think that I have the Truth with a capital T,
and the Indigenous person is there waiting
for you to give them this information
to change their life for the good.
We arrived in Brazil on October 25, 1977.
By December, I was in the Pirahã for the first time.
I simply wanted to go there,
learn their language, and convert them.
You know, I had this challenge.
No one has ever been able to understand their language,
the Pirahã people.
But I would look at the kids and say, "They can speak it,
so I should be able to speak it."
I had a goal of learning ten new words a day.
And I would write those words out with a translation.
And I would go try them out in different huts,
you know, walk around the village trying to talk to them.
[speaking Pirahã]
[♪ dramatic music]
[Pirahã Man] Dan came here. He wanted to learn Pirahã.
I speak to Dan, 'Pirahã is very difficult.'
[Daniel Everett] I spent my time in ways that made no sense
to them, just making marks on paper.
That's what they would explain to everybody.
What does he do?
He just makes marks on paper all day, and then he just–
And they call it "leaves," actually.
He just makes marks on leaves all day–that's all he does.
You just do that for a couple of hours every day
for about five years, and you learn the language.
I said, "There's no magic to it.
You know, it's just hard slog."
[animals chattering]
And every missionary, no matter what they say,
after they've been there for a while,
that frustration starts to come.
And they consider it part of the sacrifice for God,
because they never reach
this kind of friendship...
where you're both of the same culture.
It's a very different kind of relationship.
You know, so I asked the Pirahã one time,
I said, "Why do you think I've come?
Why have I come here?"
"It's the most beautiful place.
It's a beautiful place. We love it."
They couldn't comprehend that...
the jungle doesn't do it for me.
I couldn't appreciate them as hunter-gatherers.
Oh, my God, I'm getting to go to one of the last
hunter-gatherer groups on Earth
and all this stuff I can learn from them.
Those weren't the thoughts in my mind.
I'm trying to get gratitude and acceptance,
and they're just trying to figure out what I'm there for.
[Pirahã Man] The American spoke. 'I will bring medicine.
The kids won't be sick.'
The American spoke, 'I will talk to my God.
Your kids won't be sick.'
So we spoke. 'Okay. Talk to your God.'
[typing]
[♪ dramatic music]
[John Allen Chau] The Plan...
The Plan entails, one, intel gathering.
No complete survey of the island has been made.
The islands are ancient and have been known to travelers
and explorers as early as 200 AD.
[Adam Goodheart] Anybody who starts to research
the Andaman islands
almost immediately comes upon this bizarre
and complicated man, Maurice Vidal Portman.
In the 1880s, he was the only person
who documented the Andamanese.
This is a young man from one of the wealthiest
families in Britain.
He was going to live a life of balls and garden parties.
But, somehow, he'd ended up in the Andamans
while he was still a teenager,
in basically the worst job in the entire British Empire–
Officer in Charge of the Andamanese.
His great work is
History of Our Relations with the Andamanese.
Very early in his time,
Portman went to North Sentinel Island,
and he says, "While crossing the island,
Lieutenant Hooper and I met an old man
with his wife and child.
We caught the three unhurt and brought them on board.
The next day, we took the six to Port Blair,
where I kept them in my house for some days.
They sickened rapidly,
and the old man and his wife died.
So the four children were sent back to their home
with quantities of presents."
And, and wow... there is a lot there.
[♪ dramatic music]
Photography from the earliest years
used that word "capture"–
to capture an image, capture a subject.
With Portman, it was also about, of course,
this literal capture
represented by seizing this Sentinelese family.
He took thousands of pictures.
His photographs, you know,
they're aesthetically incredibly beautiful.
Some of them feel just so deeply empathetic.
But then you turn to the next photo,
and it's a naked person
kind of against this checkerboard background
because they're being measured
as an anthropometric specimen.
But, really, the most chilling thing for me about Portman
is the last paragraph
of this thousand-page history that he wrote.
And he says, "The Andamanese race,
so long as they were left to themselves
and not in any way interfered with by outside influences,
would continue to live.
But when we came amongst them,
they lost their vitality,
which was wholly dependent on being untouched,
and the end of the race came."
[♪ somber music]
This history is just so, so grim when I speak it
in a way that it doesn't even always feel when I write it.
You know, it's just...
it's harder and harder to sort of frame this
as a tale of adventure
when I sort of am listening to the words
that I'm speaking out loud.
[♪ goofy music]
[people grunting]
[John Allen Chau] Eagle Creek, September 2014.
The gang wanted to get their lift in.
♪ You work out? ♪
[John Allen Chau] So they did a quick wilderness workout
to get their blood flowing
before jogging down to Tunnel Falls.
We named it the Fountain of Youth
and marked its location on our map for future generations
to also come and be renewed.
[splashing]
[whooping]
[♪ soft music]
This was the beginning of the road to post-grad life.
One thing I learned for certain–
"Man was not made to be alone," Genesis 2:18.
[Patrick Chau] After graduating,
he was an avid marathon runner,
mountain and rock climber,
long-distance hiker of the Pacific Crest Trail,
certified wilderness technician,
outdoor school medic and instructor.
All these were for
his Sentinel Island missionary preparation.
[birds calling]
[Cassie Simons] I was hiring for, like, an EMT
wilderness first responder, and John applied.
Of course, I looked him up on social media
and saw all of his wonderful pictures and postings.
He was definitely the person I was looking for.
When he wasn't working,
he basically had this national park
where he could go and hike on trails in every direction.
We had nature names.
Most people would just do an alliteration.
Like, I'm Caddis Fly Cassie.
He was Jackalope John.
[chuckles]
[Arin Okada] We made buttons, um, for, like, our names–
Cassie's...
[chuckles]
Mine was the oak tree.
That's John.
Yep.
When I first met John, I was in, like, a very dark
part of my life.
And he messaged me, and he's like,
"Hey, you seem to be... uh, not doing so well
or, like, kind of down.
Like, I'm gonna go on a backpacking trip
with a couple of my friends. Do you want to join?"
And that was...
Like, yes. [laughs]
We went out on the Lost Coast Trail
on the coast of California
[laughing]
with two of his other friends that were girls.
It was, like, three girls and him.
[John Allen Chau] Ah.
[Arin Okada] We get to camp, and I, like, ask him
what he's gonna eat for food, and he's like,
"Oh, I'm just, I'm gonna go fishing."
I was like, "What?"
And then just, like, runs off into the ocean
and then comes back with this fish.
[John Allen Chau] All right.
[Arin Okada] One, two, three.
[All] We love you.
[Arin Okada] He was just, like, full of light
and knew so much.
To be completely honest,
I had a little bit of a crush on him, so I wrote him a note.
And I left it at his cabin.
And the next time I saw him, he was just like...
[laughs]
And I was like, "Hey."
Like, "I, like, was gonna talk to you and you weren't there,
so I left you a note."
He was very embarrassed.
I don't know, but I never really saw him with anybody.
So I wasn't sure
where his, like, relationship status stuff was.
He was just like, "Oh, well,
I'm focusing on myself right now,
so, like, I'm just not looking for anything."
He was so into, like, what he was doing.
What I call, like, horse-blinder focus.
You don't see what's going on around you
'cause whatever you're doing is so straight ahead.
[John Allen Chau] Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,
spring is here, and the weather is finally warming up
in NorCal.
This email is simply to start laying down the foundation
for a future support team, as I have yet to join
a mission-sending organization officially.
Pray about it, and then if you feel led to join,
please email me back or call me.
[Computerized Voice] Hello. My name is John.
[speaking foreign language]
I love you, and Jesus loves you.
[Patrick Chau] He seemed to be getting
more support from his mom
for his religious aspiration,
but he has never needed a single penny from parents
for his adventuring project.
He is totally independent from us.
[footsteps]
[door opens]
[Cassie Simons] John came up to me.
He's like, "Caddis Fly, I got a roommate."
It was this ringtail cat.
It was old, and it only had one eye,
and he was calling it One-eyed Willy. [laughs]
[Mikey Walsh] One-eyed Willy.
Yeah, he was the most famous pirate in his time.
My dad told me all about him once.
[Brand Walsh] Dad'll do anything to get you to go to sleep.
[Mikey Walsh] No, see, One-eyed Willy stole a treasure once.
It was full of rubies and...
[Cassie Simons] He told a lot of tales.
He was fun to listen to.
He told me his plan
was to go live in the middle of the jungle,
kind of, like, I'm stealing a cookie from the cookie jar.
You know what I mean?
It didn't sound that bad.
[John Allen Chau] All right, here we are, hiking out.
[Arin Okada] In John's posts or his stories on social media,
he felt like an influencer a little bit.
He got really into some brands that he was, like, promoting.
[John Allen Chau] Smells like Perky Jerky.
[Arin Okada] I mean, like, Perky Jerky
and Bedrock Sandals.
[Jimmy Shaw] John was telling his story–
you know, I'm a climber, I'm an adventurer.
And he was that... but more than that.
If things don't go well, he wanted to look
like a young, arrogant Western person
did a stupid thing and he was acting by himself
and move on,
because the last thing he wants is, like,
this to blow back on all these other people
who were invested and involved
and involved in other projects.
So he did that stuff on purpose, you know?
I mean, and that's not, like, we think he did it on–
He did it on purpose.
I'm telling you, he did it on purpose.
People that he deemed were trustworthy,
we would get password-protected emails.
[John Allen Chau] "Hey, folks.
I'd like to ask each of you to consider
joining in on this project
of getting the Gospel to the Sentinelese.
Like a spear, you've got the spear tip
and then the shaft backing it up.
I can't do this alone.
I'd like to ask you all if you want to be a part of the spear.
Pray about it.
In Christ, John Chau.
[airplane propeller whirring]
[Adam Goodheart] Part of the mystique of journeys and
adventures of first contact is a sense that maybe
it's an unscripted narrative, maybe it's a blank page.
But it's, it's so clearly not.
[♪ dramatic music]
Any encounter that we have with other people
is kind of scripted by what we've seen by narratives
that we understand.
We all have a sort of a mental image of the lost tribe.
[Reporter] We headed out into the Pacific Ocean
in search of new adventure.
We passed the Nicobar Islands on the left,
and we approached the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal,
where we found Jarawayan pygmies,
perhaps the most primitive people on Earth.
They have a custom of wearing
some part of the mate's head when he dies.
It's a custom that has its merits
because you can easily tell a widow,
but imagine making love to a woman that wears the skull
of her departed husband hanging on her breasts.
These pygmies on the Andaman Islands
are man killers.
[Adam Goodheart] There's no evidence at all
that the Andamanese ever engaged in cannibalism.
And so, so much in that film
encapsulates the story of white encounters
with these sort of "primitive people."
[splashing]
This idea of people who exist out of time...
that also erases their humanity.
They're just as modern as we are.
There's no reason that hunting for turtles with spears
is any less modern than writing a book on my laptop.
So why do we deny them their modernity?
[Crew] Why do we?
[helicopter whirring]
[Adam Goodheart] It's part of a narrative that we find
very seductive.
[♪ trumpet fanfare]
And that happens over and over again,
where the explorers come to the native people
and are greeted as gods,
that they're so majestic,
their technology is so superior and magical.
You know, that flatters us in so many ways.
[♪ fanfare ends]
[Reporter] On June 7, 1971,
in a clearing at the edge of a great,
unexplored rainforest,
Manda Elizalde reached out his hand
and began this historic contact
between the 20th century and Stone Age man.
The Tasaday actually use stone tools
for cutting and scraping.
They live a prehistoric Stone Age life at a time
when man has already walked on the surface of the moon.
[Adam Goodheart] It's a thread that's run deeply
through National Geographic
but also through anthropology and travel writing,
which is an intertwining of um,
a sense of common humanity
with a sense that
this person is strange and exotic and other.
In just about every single representation,
they're stylized people rather than individual people.
We've gone from cannibalism to treating these people
as romantic figures.
[Reporter] A lost tribe, untouched by time,
still lives in the last tiny corner of Eden left on Earth.
[Adam Goodheart] It's the oldest story in the world,
that there was this paradise of lushness and nakedness
and innocence,
a place that hasn't been corrupted.
As long as a place like North Sentinel Island exists,
Eden still exists.
[Reporter] There is the sky, and there is man.
We have begun to understand the nature of the moon
and of Mars and other planets,
but have we begun to understand our own impulses?
The Sentinelese don't want to have anything to do with us.
Are they right?
Is the Stone Age preferable to the Nuclear Age?
[soft music]
[door creaking]
[blowing]
[T.N. Pandit] These are my field notes.
Old ones.
I am the only one who has been inside
the Sentinelese settlement.
No other anthropologist has landed there since.
This happened only once.
Years of friendly visits
had softened their attitude.
I like this picture.
You see, I'm smiling and he is also smiling.
It was a matter of surprise that they had come forward.
Every one of us was handing over coconuts,
like it was a prize distribution.
Then at one point
one of the boys took out a knife
and made a carving motion.
[T.N. Pandit] Like this.
[T.N. Pandit] Perhaps trying to say,
that if you stay on, I will carve out your heart.
I got the hint.
See, they are human beings.
They are not stupid guys.
And that's why they're keeping us away.
Historically, they have seen what happened to other tribes.
Great Andamanese, they have disappeared.
It has not done any great good to the Onge.
[♪ dramatic music]
'Tomayu' — the evil spirit.
Do you believe in 'Tomayu'?
[Sentinelese Man] Of course we believe in him.
He constantly troubles us.
[T.N. Pandit] It troubles you? But, how?
- He captures men. - Captures?
[Sentinelese Man] That's why we are scared to go far.
- What do you call it? -"Tomayu."
- Evil spirit, Tomayu. - Tomayu.
[T.N. Pandit] Does it rise from the sea?
[Sentinelese Man] He may rise from the sea or from anywhere.
He comes hunting for men.
- And then? - He takes them away.
- Where? - To his place.
[laughter]
[speaking Sentinelese language]
[T.N. Pandit] Today you are given a coconut,
tomorrow you are given something else.
[laughing]
[shouting]
[camera shutter]
[T.N. Pandit] This is a popular picture of the Sentinelese.
But the photographer told me,
he had taken several hundred pictures.
They were not only aiming arrows at us,
they were doing other things.
Some pictures where they were standing doing nothing
and watching us...
would have been interesting.
But what is published is sensational,
showing them as violent...
ready to shoot.
Violence is not only killing someone,
violence is — you are made to do things
against your will.
Violence is using...
harsh words while describing them.
I am shouting myself hoarse,
protect them.
Outsiders coming there,
with friendship in their hearts,
can do a lot of damage.
[chatter, laughing]
[John Allen Chau] How does one make contact
with a potentially hostile tribe,
who might not even give the missionary a chance
to speak before firing arrows at him?
Do missionaries wear arrow-proof armor, shields?
Do they bring gifts?
If so, what type?
Does the team set up remote camera observations–
for example, trail cams, coconut camera, rock camera–
to try to study them from afar on the boat
before making contact?
It would be more costly and risky
but with the potential to help the team
learn a word or phrase before contact,
while also possibly angering the tribe
if they suspect they're being watched.
If they could attach a spiritual meaning
to an odd-shaped piece of driftwood,
then they might start worshipping the camera,
since it has an eye.
[Cameron Silsbee] I first encountered John
just before he was going to leave.
I thought, like, you know, here's a young man
trying to figure out what God wants him to do.
John reached out to me and just said,
"Can we meet up? I want to talk."
I'm one of the pastors at Van City Church
in Vancouver, Washington.
Early on in, in our conversations,
I wanted him to know that missions
is not my area of expertise.
How to do them, especially something like this,
I had no wisdom to share with him about that.
[Missionary] We're here to build a home.
We're going to learn your language and your customs.
We're going to bring you good news.
[Cameron Silsbee] One of the things that we would talk about
is, like, Jesus being good news
to people who aren't white and Western.
How do you just communicate that?
How do you know you're not communicating
this white, Western, idealized version of Christianity?
[speaking native language]
[Cameron Silsbee] John said, "I want the Sentinelese,
if they want to accept this story,
to do it in such a way that's honest to their own culture."
[shouting, laughter]
But from my vantage point,
John was pursuing a fantasy.
You know, you're talking about a one-in-a-million thing, man.
Like, you know, odds are this isn't actually
what you're supposed to do, or even if you think it is,
it's not going to work out this way.
So there's some sort of, like, idealism
that's masquerading as God's calling.
But this is behavior that's gone on,
for better and for worse,
for 2,000 years in church history.
So I didn't ever feel like it was up to me
to say, "John, you're wrong."
In discerning the call, we can mess it up.
I got the sense that he was very, very aware
that this just could be him,
and that was a wrestle.
[John Allen Chau] I was praying
and feeling a little unsettled
about whether or not I truly was called to go there.
I traveled over to the island chain in South Asia
on a vision trip.
I looked out the window,
and I could see the place where the tribe lived.
An incredible sense of peace and clarity and deep knowing
came upon me, such that I knew
that I was supposed to go there.
[♪ mysterious music]
[engines rumbling]
I spent two weeks exploring the island
and began building a network of contacts
for future long-term missions work in the area.
A high amount of paranoia prevails on the islands.
The entire island chain is heavily militarized,
and all foreigners are viewed with suspicion.
[♪ mysterious music]
[Jimmy Shaw] There is something to be said for blazing a trail.
I mean, we live in a world with satellite imagery of the world,
where 450 people a year
are going to attempt to climb Mount Everest.
And so there is a part of this that is saying, like,
"What is left to be seen,
like, that no one's seen, that no one's done?"
It's because it's among the most crazy things you can do–
that's a drive.
[John Allen Chau] Some have called this the most difficult
and impossible place to reach on Earth.
Mission agencies aren't interested in it
because the people are few and it's too challenging.
The government doesn't let anyone go there,
and, historically, the Sentinelese themselves
have violently opposed attempts
to make friendly contact.
[♪ mysterious music]
[♪ cheerful music]
The Plan...
The Plan entails: fly in to Port Blair.
Talk to hotel folks about going sea kayaking.
Instead, rendezvous with a boat.
Possibly discard a surfboard in ocean
to make disappearance more believable.
Decide on swimming to a landing point
or on moving closer in a boat under the cover of darkness
on a moonless night.
Or purchase a U.S. flag-sailing vessel
and sail from the U.S. or Australia
on an around-the-world voyage.
Depart from the ship near North Sentinel Island
via kayak on a cloudy night
outside of the three-mile exclusion zone
and paddle to the island.
Land on the shore wearing sandals,
for example, Bedrock Sandals,
to protect against stepping on coral.
Shed wet clothing,
wear briefs to avoid sunburn, and sit cross-legged
to await the arrival of the Sentinelese,
according to Pandit's observations
on how they welcome each other
by sitting on each other's laps.
Show them that we are friendly and nonthreatening.
Give gifts.
Express desire to stay with them.
Focus on learning everything from them
in order to give them a clear, contextualized explanation
of the Gospel.
[boar snuffling]
[arrow fires]
[laughter]
Focus on learning their myths and legends
to find redemptive analogies,
but will not disregard the facts of the Gospel.
Establish Christ-centered churches.
This will be up to them,
and the team will not bring any colonizing mentalities
into this mission.
Missionary could potentially reside
for the rest of his life on the island
and must be accepting of that possibility.
[Daniel Everett] Every missionary I know
has had their perspective altered as they've stayed
for a long period of time.
[laughs]
All right.
I worked with the Pirahã for 30 years.
At some point, I got to leave.
I was struggling with my faith
and not finding results that I wanted.
There are some ways in which getting killed
within the first second is a lot easier
than slogging through 30 years and still having
nothing to show for it at the end,
when all that faith you had
didn't produce the results you thought.
[children babbling excitedly]
[Daniel Everett] So we've tried showing the Pirahã
film strips of Jesus,
you know, Him preaching and healing and dying on the cross
and rising up on Easter, with me translating.
[indistinct chatter, laughter]
[indistinct chatter in Pirahã language]
[Daniel Everett] And they said, "We're willing to believe this,
and we're willing to believe that He has all these
special powers and He can heal people.
We've never seen anyone like this, but you say you have.
So that's reasonable, so let's probe a little bit," you know?
So they start asking these basic questions.
"What color is He?"
And I said, "Well, you know, some people say He was brown,
some people say He was white."
"But you saw Him. What did He look like?"
I said, "Well, I never saw Him."
"Your father saw Him?"
"No, my father"– "Who do you know who saw Him?"
"I don't know anybody who saw Him."
And it turns out, I don't know anything about Him
whatsoever as a person.
I know what the Bible tells me,
but they're not the kind of personal details
that would help to identify an individual.
In other words, I give my life for Jesus,
but if He walked past this room right now,
I wouldn't know it.
So, to them, that's just utterly absurd,
that I would come all this way to tell them
about somebody that I don't really know at all.
The evidence I say I have for Jesus,
to them, that's not evidence.
But it was so funny because that night
after we showed the film strips,
the people were up all night long,
running around screaming and everything.
The next day, I asked the guy who came over,
I said, "What happened last night?"
He said, "Well, Jesus came to the village."
I said, "What do you mean Jesus came to the village?"
He said, "Oh, yeah, Jesus came to the village,
and He had a penis three feet long,
and He was trying to put it in everybody."
You know, where do you get this from what we showed you
from these film strips?
And I'm realizing that this is their way of rejecting it.
It was their way of telling me,
and they did tell me then,
the women don't ever want to hear about Jesus again.
[Pirahã Man] We don't want anything up high.
We want things that are on the ground.
God is a foreigner.
We don't know Him. We don't want Him.
[Daniel Everett] I felt guilty and unethical
and wondered why I'm doing this.
"Why am I bothering them with all this stuff?"
[♪ somber music]
So, you know, it led to a divorce,
my kids not talking to me for a couple of years.
When you come to the conclusion
that there's no there there, there's no God...
And you see the effects missionaries have...
[children singing]
[Daniel Everett] The effects are not all positive, right?
I mean, even though they do medical work,
there's a huge power differential there.
They have taken people who were not as superstitious
and made them far more superstitious,
far more desirous to please the missionary.
And I realized, "I'm not helping them, I'm hurting them."
So I not only abandoned the faith,
but I am very much against missionary activity.
I don't think it should be allowed.
John Chau's a good example.
At the same time that I want to be tolerant of him,
I cannot deny that to me,
you know, he's just giving his life
for Zeus or Thor or Santa Claus.
There's no more reality in any of them
than there is in his Jesus and God.
If there is no God, the only ethical evaluation
is the effect that he's having,
and the effect is to possibly contaminate
this whole group with disease, to violate their will,
to lose his own life.
Therefore, it's an unethical act.
[shouting]
[Pam Arlund] That there's a people group that we would
decide, "Sorry, you don't get to hear about Jesus.
I'm gonna decide for you
that you're gonna say no to Jesus"...
to me, that's a basic violation of their human right
to say yes or no.
And so it's important to me that we provide them
the opportunity to say yes or no to Jesus.
All Nations is an organization
that trains, sends, and cares for missionaries
all over the world.
I'm in charge of security and risk management
for our organization.
When John Chau first called me,
he mentioned that he wanted to work
with the North Sentinelese.
And I said, "You realize how difficult and dangerous
that might be?"
And he said, "Yes, I do realize
how difficult and dangerous that might be."
And I said, "Well, I think we're gonna need to have
some more conversations about this."
I asked my colleague, "What do you think about this guy?
Do you think he has a messiah complex?"
Because we're not interested in sending those people out.
Screening for the messiah complex
is really important because we already have a messiah.
It's Jesus.
He's the one who saves people, not us.
And sometimes people get confused, and they think,
"Oh, you know, I just want to give everything for Jesus.
"Therefore, I deliberately want to seek out
the most dangerous thing to prove my love for God."
And that's not right.
[Mary Ho] At All Nations, we're pretty focused on training
and sending people to places to make disciples
and to plan churches.
John is one of the most prepared young men I've ever met.
We've had many conversations over the phone
before I personally met him,
and he would say,
"Hey, I really want to know about other cultures.
How should I go about it?"
We actually would give him assignments.
[Pam Arlund] Even though we're sitting in Kansas City,
the Midwestern part of the United States,
we get people to be actors and actresses
to re-create an experience from somewhere in the world.
Because if they've never done a role play,
then when they enter reality,
they actually don't know what to do.
[Pam Arlund] Some of the actors and actresses
are people that are on our staff.
I played a villager many times.
I played the village chief on several occasions.
I speak a language that only 35,000 people
on Planet Earth speak.
You say things like...
[speaking foreign language]
Watching their faces get a little bit shocked.
When the students would begin to approach,
there would be people who would rush out
with mock weapons and make them stop.
The worst that could happen to the students
is that they are told that they have to leave.
The coach will basically go back and be like,
"Okay, give them another chance.
Let's see if they can do better this time."
I've asked myself many times
what I thought would happen to John, and I thought...
that John would get accepted.
[Mary Ho] Eventually, when it's time to leave,
we actually assign a mentor to every one of our workers
so that we can journey with them.
[Crew] Who was that for John?
[Mary Ho] Oh, yeah, we cannot disclose personnel issues, yeah.
[insects chirping]
[fire crackling]
[Patrick Chau] Like one who takes off a garment
on a cold day
or like vinegar on soda,
is he who sings songs to a troubled heart.
The All Nations radicalism
has pushed my John into the suicidal mission
that is destined to fail.
This is the unchecked inflation of the messiah complex.
[♪ dramatic music]
[typing]
[Cassie Simons] I remember him saying,
"Caddis Fly, I don't know if I'm gonna come back.
I was like, "John, you'll be back.
We'll see you sometime.
It might not be a while, but I'll see you out there."
[sirens blaring, indistinct shouting]
[fire crackling]
But then a fire burned 90% of the park.
It looked like a bomb went off.
John was very sad,
and I don't think that we spoke after that.
[sirens wailing]
[John Allen Chau] Dear friends,
I've written up some thoughts on a question I'm often asked
so that each of you can see my perspective
on the purpose for going.
This question is, why?
I want to be a part of seeing Revelation become a reality.
In every generation after Jesus,
His followers have expected Him to return,
and yet He has not.
I believe that a reason is that Christ's followers,
for the most part, have not obeyed
His simple prerequisite command
that His gospel must first be preached
to all the people groups of the Earth.
[Patrick Chau] We were unable to agree on the assumption
that God would send any people to eternal fire
simply due to they never have the chance
to hear the name of Jesus.
We stopped the discussion right at this point.
What can we do?
But his determination
was like the arrow mounted on the fully pulled bowstring.
[♪ ominous music]
[John Allen Chau] Journal...
November 14, 2018, Port Blair...
I've been in a safe house for the past 11 days.
The originally planned date was delayed due to a cyclone
in the Bay of Bengal.
Much time was spent in prayer and reading.
[breathing heavily]
[♪ ominous music]
[Jimmy Shaw] In any endeavor,
a lot more people are involved than anybody knows.
And I think there was an inner circle of some other guys
that were more directly involved.
If you can talk to Bobby, Bobby's the person to talk to.
Bobby was there, you know?
Bobby and I are good friends.
My guess is that he will not talk about it.
There are court cases and people at risk
and families of people that were invested.
Anything that puts him in front of people,
he feels like...
endangers some of those other people.
[John Allen Chau] Bobby left five days ago.
It was such an encouragement to see him.
The plan is to link up with the crew and depart tonight.
[animals chattering]
[indistinct chatter]
I met with the fishermen,
who are all believers and agreed to drop me off.
The meeting went well.
I trust them.
Soli Deo gloria.
[cranking]
[engine rumbling]
[Jimmy Shaw] The hardest part of this stuff was actually
just doing it.
It's a little bit like learning to do a backflip.
There's no intermediate step.
You either are going to land on your feet or you're not.
He was aware of the risks and chose to do them anyway,
and some of us would prefer that he was naive
so we don't have to live with the consequences
of our own faith issues
that we're afraid to do something like this.
[fire crackling]
[John Allen Chau] Currently on the boat,
waiting to make contact.
But as we went north along the eastern shore,
we saw boat lights in the distance.
[♪ dramatic music]
God Himself was shielding us
from the Coast Guard and Navy patrols.
[♪ dramatic music]
[Adam Goodheart] "Boat rocked by waves,
men steering perhaps by stars,
wondering why they think we are going,
why I'm going.
See upright brown vertical line on yellow beach.
Think at first it's a tree stump,
and then it moves."
John Chau's diary looks similar to the notes
that I was scribbling when I was off North Sentinel.
There is a way that these trips reenact one another.
There are only so many ways for us to approach an island
full of unknown people who may want to kill us.
But I knew enough not to push it,
and I knew that nobody was gonna come save me,
whereas, I suppose John Chau felt that he was
in the palm of the Lord's hand somehow.
There's a fine line between faith and madness.
[♪ dramatic music]
[John Allen Chau] Some of the guys in my boat went fishing.
We put the two big fish on top of my kayak
and my small Pelican case
that held my initial-contact response kit.
Inside my kayak,
I had my waterproof Bible and some gifts.
I began rowing to the house we had seen
about a half mile or so away.
[♪ dramatic music]
My name is John.
I love you. Jesus loves you.
Jesus Christ gave me authority to come to you.
Here's some fish.
[gasps]
[♪ dramatic music]
[people speaking native language]
[John Allen Chau] I figured that this was it.
So I disembarked my kayak
to show them that I, too, have two legs,
and I preached a bit to them.
Jesus said, "My father has given me
all authority over everything and everyone
in Heaven and on Earth."
Oh, our God, You who sit on the throne,
and Jesus, who are like a lamb,
You, too, have delivered us from Satan's power.
[music continues]
[bow string creaking]
[arrow fires, splashing]
[waves lapping]
[motor whirring]
[screaming]
[crashing]
[sirens wailing]
[♪ dramatic music]
[John Allen Chau] Why did some little kid have to
shoot me today?
His high-pitched voice still lingers in my head.
Father, forgive him.
[♪ dramatic music]
Lord, is this island Satan's last stronghold?
I felt some fear, but, mainly, I was disappointed
they didn't accept me right away.
Well, I can try to tell the story
from the Sentinelese perspective
by telling it from the Pirahã perspective,
sort of, which is one I understand.
They live a hard life.
They enjoy their life,
but there are resources enough for them.
There are not resources to feed the world.
They know that outsiders have diseases
that will kill a lot of them,
and they don't want those.
They know that outsiders have intentions
that they don't like.
Maybe they want to steal their women or steal their children,
because that's happened to them before in their history.
So, from the Sentinelese people, you have this guy.
You've done everything you can to make it clear
that you don't want him there.
He's yelling nonsense.
He's giving you stuff
that you could already have gotten for yourself, food,
and a child shoots his Bible.
If he wanted to shoot him, he would've shot him.
He didn't miss.
People who live by the bow and arrow don't miss.
You've done everything you can to warn him,
and he still comes.
[♪ dramatic music]
[John Allen Chau] It's weird.
Actually, no, it's natural.
I'm scared.
There, I said it.
Would it be wiser to leave and let someone else continue?
I still could make it back to the U.S. somehow,
as it almost seems like certain death to stay here.
If I leave,
I believe I'll have failed the mission.
I've never felt this much grief or sorrow before.
Wondering if it'll all be the last sunset I see
before being in the place where the sun never sets.
I don't want to die.
[Cameron Silsbee] I hope that he was able to hear clearly
from Jesus in that moment.
Maybe this was just a no, and it's time to go home.
You don't actually have to go back to that island.
Or maybe... [sighs]
Jesus was saying,
you follow a crucified messiah...
and you follow Him for your life.
And I don't think I'm gonna have the answer to that
anytime soon,
at least not in this lifetime.
[thunder rumbling]
[inhales sharply]
[thunder rumbling]
[thunder booms]
[rumbling]
[♪ dramatic music]
[thunder rumbling]
[distorted voices]
[♪ dramatic music]
[John Allen Chau] Mom and Dad,
you guys might think I'm crazy in all this,
but I think it's worth it to declare Jesus to these people.
Last night, I had what I'd call a vision
as I've never had one before...
and I felt distressed.
Then a different light, a whitish light filled it,
and all the frightening bits melted away.
I can't wait to see them around the throne of God,
worshiping in their own language.
Please do not be angry at them if I get killed.
I love you all,
and I pray none of you love anything in this world
more than Jesus Christ.
[splashing,]
[heartbeat pounding]
[heartbeat quickening]
[wave crashes loudly]
[insects chirping]
[Reporter] An American man has been killed by members of
a protected tribe in the Andaman Islands.
John Allen Chau was a Christian missionary.
He was killed with bows and arrows,
and his body left on the beach.
Indian police-
[Patrick Chau] My youngest son
was reportedly killed by the tribesmen.
His lifetime-longing goal,
to break the communication barrier between
the civilized and the isolated, primitive world,
evaporated,
and he reportedly sacrificed his life
without any known result in return.
[♪ somber music]
I failed to keep him from being drawn
to the radical evangelical extreme.
[♪ somber music]
This riddle of life...
I cannot see through it now.
In the crushing pain of my John's reported sudden death,
I recalled a requiem I learned 42 years ago,
when first I came to the U.S. as a refugee.
"Under the wide and starry sky,
dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gently die...
and I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me,
here he lies where he longed to be.
Home is the sailor,
home from sea."
I dedicate this to be my youngest son's requiem.
I think that would match his life longing.
[pages rustling]
[Levi Davis] I think that the best conclusion
that the world can come to about John's life is,
ah, well, he did what he most wanted to do,
or he lived out his dreams.
Now you go do it, too, and you follow your dreams.
But it's like, that's not–
If John wanted to follow his dreams,
he would've been with that girl.
He would've probably either been in the military
or a police officer in a small town,
and he would probably still be alive.
The conclusion of John's life is...
he lived his life for Jesus.
Like, he did exactly what Jesus told him to do.
[Jimmy Shaw] One of the toughest things in the aftermath
for a lot of people was, like, no body, no–
you know, nobody there, you know?
And you got to trust people you don't know
to tell somebody you don't know
to tell somebody else that you do know,
this is what happened.
And, of course, my family, they don't know any different.
They don't know my involvement.
I didn't tell them,
and they're just kind of cracking jokes, you know?
And some of them are believers.
Some of them are not.
And they're like, "People are so dumb."
There was a lot of talk in the immediate aftermath.
John's story became global news.
Bobby took it rough, like, super rough.
Still super hard, you know, and a difficult thing
to talk about, so...
I mean, they were as close as you can be.
[Bobby Parks] Those of us that knew him personally
are still heartbroken.
We're hurting.
He was committed to the Gospel and the Great Commission
with such a pure heart.
[Daniel Everett] People who supported him
were both saddened and elated simultaneously
because he is a martyr for Jesus.
His death may be fertilizer for the field to come.
He will become famous in the Church.
His story will be told for generations.
[Bobby Parks] I believe that God is sounding a trumpet,
and I believe what He's saying right here in this day
is that He is looking to raise up firebrands
who are pure in heart, who would carry this pure Gospel
like an Olympic torch
and carrying it to the dark places of the Earth.
I believe God's raising up firebrands in this hour.
See, we're all called to find our North Sentinel Island,
but we have to be willing to say we'll go.
[Daniel Everett] I think it's very unfortunate
that we live in the 21st century
and we still have people believing first-century myths,
enough to die for them.
We have to realize that people are like this,
and religion doesn't seem to be on its way out.
There's billions of Christians,
and of those billions,
there's at least a billion that would agree with him.
There's not a billion anthropologists
and people who want to preserve the Sentinelese.
These cultures that are isolated and traditional,
when we cross that boundary,
we're saying your prohibition means nothing to us.
If they wanted to change, they would ask for us to come.
[Bobby Parks] God might be calling you out of your
comfort zone to invade some dark places.
This world is dark. This world is broken.
They're in need of a savior.
They're in need of the light of Jesus.
There's no greater love than this.
There's no greater love story.
There's no greater romance, no greater epic.
There's no greater force in all the universe
than the love of God
and His love story that He sent out to creation,
and He's looking for firebrands
to carry this pure Gospel that our God loves us so much
that He would even pay the ultimate price for us.
[applause]
John was carrying a torch of the pure love
of the Gospel of Jesus,
and it has now reached the ends of the Earth.
[Adam Goodheart] I think every person
who's been drawn to this story,
whether a missionary, an anthropologist,
a historian, an author, a filmmaker,
is coming in with their own narrative arc
that they want to see and experience and depict.
This island is a sort of a stage
that you're stepping onto for a performance,
and it can make it really hard
to see the reality of this place
and the reality of these humans.
We have to recognize that there's something problematic
and suspicious and, in some ways, corrupt
about our presuming to tell this story at all.
But, ultimately, accepting that we're telling a story
about us, not about them.
[indistinct shouting]
[Daniel Everett] It's the stories we tell
that make us who we are.
John comes from an ancient story.
It is one of the most powerful stories ever told.
Of course, the Sentinelese also have a story,
and we don't know what it is.
They don't feel any compulsion to share it with us.
Maybe in the future, somebody will remember
what happened to John there,
and there will be a contact,
and they'll tell us that story.
But that may not be the happy ending we get.
What we may get is the happy ending for them,
which is nobody ever hears that story.
[waves lapping]
[♪ "All the Trees of the Fields Will Clap Their Hands"]
♪ If I am alive ♪
♪ This time next year ♪
♪ Will I have arrived ♪
♪ In time to share? ♪
♪ And mine is about ♪
♪ As good this far ♪
♪ And I'm still applied ♪
♪ To what you are ♪
♪ And I am joining ♪
♪ All my thoughts to you ♪
♪ And I'm preparing ♪
♪ Every part for you ♪
[singers vocalizing]
♪ And I heard from the trees ♪
♪ A great parade ♪
[singers vocalizing]
♪ And I heard from the hills ♪
♪ A band was made ♪
[singers vocalizing]
♪ And will I be invited ♪
♪ To the sound? ♪
[singers vocalizing]
♪ And will I be a part ♪
♪ Of what you've made? ♪
[singers vocalizing]
♪ And I'm preparing ♪
♪ Every part for you ♪
[singers vocalizing]
♪ For you ♪
[singers vocalizing]
Captioned by Cotter Media Group.