Suicidal American Tourists Can’t Quit Uncontacted Headhunters’ Island

My grandfather, as recalled in my recently republished memoir, Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, once told me that his boyhood dream was to tour the unexplored corners of the world in the mold of a Ferdinand Magellan.

Alas, we lamented together, most of the charting of Earth’s surface had already been done even by the time of his birth in 1943, the natives in all of their Heart-of-Darkness native glory documented, the soil excavated, the artifacts of import collected and archived in museums of natural history.

… Save, perhaps, for a handful of tribes in the impenetrable Amazon and the people of North Sentinel Island, floating in self-imposed obscurity in the Andaman Sea, blissfully unencumbered by outside civilization, willing and able to enforce their isolation at the tip of a spear.

Related: Converted Pagan Headhunters and the Shining City on a Hill

Via HowStuffWorks (emphasis added):

“For centuries, the island's reclusive, Indigenous people (known as the Sentinelese) have rejected most attempts by the outside world to infiltrate their tiny tropical home in the Bay of Bengal. In fact, anthropologists have no idea how many Sentinelese people live on the secluded island; estimates vary between 50 and 500…

The few glimpses of life on isolated North Sentinel Island paint an intriguing picture of an untouched society of hunter-gatherers.

The islanders live in basic structures, spearfish from dugout canoes and wear no clothing at all. What's amazing is that this almost Neolithic society exists less than 20 miles (32 kilometers) from neighboring islands where Indigenous cultures have mixed with the modern world, not always with happy results.”

Even with the knowledge of their nativist aggression made very public, including by the Indian authorities who forbid travel to the island, some of the pioneering ethos — including ones, as we’ll see, with, by all accounts, the purest intention to spread the Word of God — apparently have a deathwish.

In any case, suicide by Stone Age savage is a hell of a way to go.

Curiosity killed the cat but the latest guy to brave wilds of North Sentinel Island got off with a few days in an Indian jail — which, if not a worse fate than an arrow to the heart, doesn’t sound much more enjoyable.

Via DW. April 2025 (emphasis added):

“An American tourist was arrested for entering a restricted island with an isolated tribe carrying a can of Diet Coke and a coconut, Indian police said on Thursday.

The 24-year-old man entered North Sentinel Island, part of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands off India's southeastern coast.

He wanted to meet the Sentinelese people, who are untouched by the modern world.

Numbering around 150, the Sentinelese shun all contact with the outside world and have been known to throw spears at anyone who comes close. Their language and culture remain a mystery to outsiders.”

Other tourists historically haven’t been so lucky — including, most infamously, an American missionary who martyred himself on the shores of North Sentinel Island back in 2018.

Via The Voice of the Martyrs (emphasis added):

“John [Allen Chau] spent almost a decade preparing to take the gospel to the Sentinelese, one of the last uncontacted people groups. His journey began in 2008, the year he turned 17, when he became what he described as “an apprentice to Jesus.”

After taking his first missions trip the following year, he began to pray about spending his life serving as a missionary. “I know that God used that time to mark my life,” he said later. In his prayers, John asked God where He wanted him to go, echoing Isaiah’s affirmation — “Here I am! Send me.”

Soon after making that prayerful commitment, John found information online about the Sentinelese people, who live on an isolated island and have never heard the gospel. He sensed that God was calling him to go to North Sentinel Island to share God’s love with them.”

The Sentinelese did not, in fact, embrace Christ as John Allen Chau, as God’s messenger, had hoped.

Instead, they shot him with an arrow and killed him.

If God did have a plan for Chau, as he believed, it wasn’t to make it off that island alive.

Benjamin Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

Follow AP on X.

Subscribe (for free) to Armageddon Prose and its dystopian sister, Armageddon Safari.

Support AP’s independent journalism with a one-off, hassle-free "digital coffee" tip or GiveSendGo.

Bitcoin public address: bc1qvq4hgnx3eu09e0m2kk5uanxnm8ljfmpefwhawv