Through Gates of Splendor

The book’s final chapter attempts to reconstruct what must have happened at that fatal meeting on Palm Beach. The five missionaries carried guns as a last resort against hostile action, intending first to fire them into the air to frighten any Huaorani warriors if necessary, but with ammunition available should the situation require it. The men’s wives surmised that their husbands had likely been surprised in an ambush—perhaps distracted by a welcoming party while a larger group of warriors snuck up from the other side. At least one gun had been discharged, with a bullet-hole left in the plane’s windscreen, but the fact that all five bodies were discovered in the water likely indicated that they had retreated until the last moment, hoping to show their peaceful intent by drawing back in the face of violence. After the missionaries’ deaths, the Huaorani had stripped the plane of its outer metal fabric and returned to their settlements.

In the remainder of the chapter, Elisabeth Elliot explains the diverging views that the outside world took of the five men’s deaths, but also the effects that their story were beginning to have: “To the world at large this was a sad waste of five young lives.