Mr. Chau, an American thought to be in his 20s, was floating in a kayak off a remote island in the Andaman Sea. He was about to set foot on one of the most sealed-off parts of India, an island inhabited by a small, enigmatic and highly isolated tribe whose members have killed outsiders for simply stepping on their shore.

Fishermen warned him not to go. Few outsiders had ever been there. And Indian government regulations clearly prohibited any interaction with people on the island, called North Sentinel.

But Mr. Chau pushed ahead, setting off in his kayak, which he had packed with a Bible. After that, it is a bit of a mystery what happened.

But the police say one thing is clear: Mr. Chau did not survive.

On Wednesday, the Indian authorities said that Mr. Chau had been shot with bows and arrows by tribesmen when he got on shore and that his body was still on the island. Fishermen who helped take Mr. Chau to North Sentinel told the police that they had seen tribesmen dragging his body on the beach.

It was a “misplaced adventure,’’ said Dependra Pathak, the police chief in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. “He certainly knew it was off limits.’’

Mr. Pathak said Mr. Chau, believed to be 26 or 27 and from Washington State, may have been trying to convert the islanders to Christianity. Right before he left in his kayak, Mr. Chau gave the fishermen a long note in case he did not come back. In it, police officials said, he had written that Jesus had bestowed him with the strength to go to the most forbidden places on Earth.

On Wednesday, in a post on Mr. Chau’s Instagram account, his family expressed deep sadness and said he was “a beloved son, brother, uncle, and best friend to us. To others he was a Christian missionary, a wilderness EMT, an international soccer coach, and a mountaineer.”

They also seemed to hold out some hope that he had survived, saying the report of his death was unconfirmed. They also said they forgave those who might have been responsible for his death.

Family members did not respond to phone messages.

The Andaman and nearby Nicobar Islands are beautiful, palm-fringed specks ringed by coral in the Indian Ocean. The government controls access very carefully; of the more than 500 islands, many areas are off limits.

On Nov. 14, Mr. Chau hired a fishing boat in Port Blair, the main city in the Andamans, to take him to North Sentinel. He waited until darkness to set off, police officials said, so he would not be detected by the authorities.

T. N. Pandit, an anthropologist who visited North Sentinel several times between 1967 and 1991, said the Sentinelese people — who officially number around 50 and who hunt with spears and arrows fashioned from scraps of metal that wash up on their shores — were more hostile to outsiders than other indigenous communities living in the Andamans.

Once, when Mr. Pandit’s expedition offered a pig to the Sentinelese, two members of the tribe walked to the edge of the beach, “speared it” and buried it in the sand.

During another encounter, Mr. Pandit was separated from his colleagues and left alone in the water. A young tribesman on the beach pulled out a knife and “made a sign as if he was carving out my body.”

“He threatened; I understood,” Mr. Pandit said. “Contact was different with the Sentinelese,” he added, noting that the Jarawa, another tribe, “invited us to come ashore and sang songs.”

Being left alone was very important for the Sentinelese, said Stephen Corry, the director of Survival International, a group that protects the rights of indigenous tribal peoples around the world.

“This tragedy should never have been allowed to happen,” Mr. Corry said in a statement, adding that the Indian government must protect the tribe from “further invaders.”

Gift-giving expeditions to the Sentinelese stopped in 1996. The Indian Navy now enforces a buffer zone to keep people away. In 2006, the Sentinelese killed two fishermen who had accidentally drifted on shore.

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 the Instagram post, the family asked for the release of the seven and said he had “ventured out on his own free will.”

Another case has been registered against “unknown persons” for killing Mr. Chau. But in the past, the authorities have said that it is virtually impossible to prosecute members of the protected tribes because of the area’s inaccessibility and the Indian government’s decision not to interfere in their lives.

In a blog post from several years ago, Mr. Chau said he had coached soccer, worked for AmeriCorps and that he was “an explorer at heart.” The Indian police said he had visited the Andamans at least three times.

When asked what was the top of his must-do list, Mr. Chau had written on the blog: “Going back to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in India is on the top — there’s so much to see and do there!”

Source: https://nyti.ms/2DODcQl

It has been a summer of Hollywood mobbings. When the actor and director Mark Duplass recommended that his fellow liberals might get something out of following the conservative pundit Ben Shapiro on Twitter, the crowd rebuffed his suggestion so strongly that he was forced to issue a formal apology. An online crew dredged up old tweets in which James Gunn, the director of the “Guardians of the Galaxy” films, made jokes about pedophilia, so Disney axed him. And when 4chan and Reddit dwellers resurrected a risqué “Dexter” parody from 2009, in which the comedy writer Dan Harmon simulated the rape of a plastic baby doll, Harmon nuked his Twitter. Big Hollywood players, fearing the next takedown, are redrawing contracts and purging feeds.

The mobbing of Gunn was another animal entirely. Mike Cernovich — the same internet figure who helped foment Gamergate (a sustained harassment campaign against feminists in the gaming profession) and Pizzagate (a conspiracy theory claiming that liberal politicians were molesting children in a Washington pizzeria) — was one of a few right-wing trolls who spied an opportunity to engineer an outrage campaignagainst a liberal “elite.” Together they pounded it into Twitter until they got results.

But recent rhetoric attributes it all to the same shadowy force: The mob has claimed another victim.

Our popular understanding of a “mob” is more than a century old, tracing back to an 1895 book called “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind,” by the French polymath Gustave Le Bon. Just as critics of “Twitter mobs” worry about people’s behavior when they move from real life to the internet, Le Bon was skeptical about the shift from an agrarian society to city living. The urban crowd, he wrote, is marked by “impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason” and “the exaggeration of the sentiments.” A man on his own “may be a cultivated individual,” but “in a crowd, he is a barbarian.” Over the next several decades, Le Bon’s work attracted many influential fans: Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler.

In the second half of the 20th century, though, sociologists began to puncture these assumptions. Carl Couch argued in a 1968 paper that crowds often appear irrational only because they are working against the “established institutions of the day” — a “mob” was merely what authorities called it when “people organize their behavior on the basis of a different set of norms.” Far from being hyperemotional and irrational, crowds were ruled by the “highly rational” insight that their power was in their numbers. And despite a reputation for destruction, crowds “have generally been as gentle as a loving mother when compared with the established authority.”

Whether a group is labeled a “mob” often does have more to do with its aims than its tactics. The angry crowds coded as mobs are those whose actions are later condemned by history — the pogroms that murdered Jews in Russia or the lynch mobs of the Jim Crow South. Those whose ideas are eventually adopted and normalized become, in hindsight, revolutionaries.

Mob members are also often styled as an underclass, armed with a peasant laborer’s pitchfork and torch — as though the primal fear is that society’s discontents, a mass of people “beneath” you, will rise up, and not in a spirit of reason, fairness or mercy. Just about everyone, these days, seems eager to claim that underdog status — but there are those who lack institutional power because of discrimination, and then there are those who are kept out of polite society because they are amoral ghouls. The true nature of a mob becomes a lot clearer once you differentiate between the two.

The Johansson “mob,” for instance, was dedicated to challenging a fault in the status quo, punctuated by trans actors’ insights into the ways Hollywood was embracing their stories but still boxing them out of participating in telling them; it seemed less interested in punishing Johansson than in gaining opportunities for trans people. (As the actor Jen Richards told The Hollywood Reporter: “In an ideal world, I would like anyone to be able to play any kind of part. That’s the kind of freedom I want for myself and the kind of freedom I want for others” — a kind of thoughtfulness easily obscured by lumping her in with an irrational “mob.”)

The Gunn mob was led by a clutch of far-right men who only frame themselves as outsiders and use as their weapon the most thoroughly accepted norm they can find: that pedophilia is indefensible. The insincerity of their complaint — or the fact that Gunn apologized for his jokes years ago — doesn’t matter, because the goal isn’t to change anything; it’s merely to destroy a rival. As one 4chan user wrote of the Harmon mob, which formed in the wake of the Gunn win: “If they get to take scalps for someone making racist jokes, we get to take scalps for them making pedophilia jokes.”

Like a pitchfork, Twitter is an imperfect tool. Its brevity suppresses nuance; its virtuality opens the door for insincerity; it incentivizes people with no true investment in a controversy to weigh in anyway. And the internet has primed us to demand instantaneous results: When everything we want to know or buy can be accessed with a few clicks, perhaps we expect that justice be served just as swiftly. Members of some crowds acknowledge that these conditions are less than ideal. But for disingenuous outrage trolls, the blunt instrument of outrage is an end in itself: The crude result of getting someone fired is the entire point.

It’s true that internet mobs are rarely sated until they achieve some reduction in their target’s authority and power — often a firing. (They’re occasionally referred to as “lynch mobs,” as though losing a career opportunity were a kind of modern extrajudicial killing.) These mobs may not literally have the power to rip words from the web or push an actor off a call sheet, but they intuit that a big-enough public-relations disaster can force corporate interests to do it for them, whether the corporation finds the complaint valid or not.

It may be the employer or the publisher who ultimately makes that call, but it’s the mob that gets the attention — and some targets are beginning to find that blaming the mob is a smart P.R. move. No surprise, then, that so many “mobbings” are slickly converted into opportunities for grandstanding among self-styled freethinkers, their individuality under assault by the politically correct masses. Courting wrath on the internet can give you a powerful tale of persecution to share, surfing a wave of raised fists to fame. Greenbaum, for instance, rode her mobbing from The Washington Post to The New York Post and onward to Fox News, where she perched in a guest chair opposite Tucker Carlson and spoke about the “silencing” she experienced. And Carlson, for his part, found a way to indict the irrational masses and the liberal elites in the same breath. “Even the biggest Hollywood stars,” he marveled, “are no longer safe from the mobs they created.”