Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Bishop of Melanesia, & his Companions, Martyrs
September 20 · d. 1871
The first Bishop of Melanesia, killed on a Pacific beach in 1871, and with him two companions who died of their wounds a week later. Patteson learned more than twenty island languages and printed grammars of thirteen, and he built a mission in which no work was reckoned too low for an Englishman or too high for a Melanesian. The men who killed him at Nukapu were long believed to be avenging islanders stolen by labour traders. What they actually intended has been argued over ever since.
John Coleridge Patteson was born in London on the first of April, 1827, the son of a judge. His mother, Frances Duke Coleridge, was a niece of the poet, and her family's Devon shaped him: his first school was at Ottery St Mary, where his great-grandfather and great-uncle had been headmasters, and the family bought Feniton Court when he was fourteen. At Eton and Balliol he was remembered for his cricket and his ear for languages. The ear would make his work possible. The body that had played the cricket would carry it: in the islands he swam ashore through surf where the boat could not follow, a basket of fish-hooks round his neck, and walked up the beach unarmed. That was deliberate; as he wrote, "the plan of going among the people unarmed and unsuspiciously has been seen to disarm their mistrust and to make them regard me as a friend."
In 1855 he sailed to join George Augustus Selwyn, Bishop of New Zealand, on a voyage through Melanesia, and the work took hold of him and did not let go. He learned the island tongues quickly and in quantity, more than twenty in the end, with printed grammars of thirteen, so that islanders could pray and read Scripture in their own words rather than in his.
Consecrated at Auckland on the twenty-fourth of February, 1861, as missionary bishop for the western islands of the Pacific, he took for his diocese hundreds of islands across thousands of miles of ocean. His method scandalised some of his countrymen. Rather than plant a fortified mission and make the islanders come to him on English terms, he sailed from island to island, learned the customs, and carried young men back to the mission school, first near Auckland, then at Kohimarama, and from 1867 on Norfolk Island, to be taught and sent home as teachers to their own people. In his own words:
We make no distinction whatever between English and Melanesian members of the Mission as such. No Melanesian is excluded from any office of trust. No classification is made of higher and lower kinds of work, of work befitting a white man and work befitting a black man.
On the twentieth of December, 1868, in the little chapel on Norfolk Island, he ordained George Sarawia deacon, the first Melanesian clergyman. Conversions came slowly for most of his episcopate, and he knew it; the native ministry, not the count of baptisms, was the work he had come to do.
Another kind of English ship was working the same waters. The labour traders the islanders called blackbirders carried Pacific men off by force and trickery to the plantations of Queensland and Fiji, and some dressed the deception in Patteson's own clothes: a vessel made to resemble the Southern Cross, a figure on deck in a black coat with a book in his hand, word passed ashore that the Bishop had sent for them. Patteson saw what it would cost, and guessed who would pay. Four days before his death he wrote from off the Santa Cruz group:
I am fully alive to the probability that some outrage has been committed here by one or more vessels. I am quite aware that we may be exposed to considerable risk on this account. I trust that all may be well; that if it be His will that any trouble should come upon us, dear Joseph Atkin, his father and mother's only son, may be spared.
On the twentieth of September, 1871, the reef at Nukapu would not let the boat in, and Patteson went ashore in the canoe of two chiefs he knew, leaving Joseph Atkin in charge of the boat. He did not come back. Arrows struck Atkin in the shoulder and Stephen Taroaniara, a teacher whom Patteson had meant to ordain, in six places. Both lived another week and died of tetanus. The islanders sent the Bishop's body out to the ship wrapped in matting, and thrust into the breast a palm frond with five knots tied in it. The man who received it, C. H. Brooke, wrote down what he saw without pretending to know what it meant: five knots, "the number of the slain, as they supposed, or possibly of those whom his death was meant to avenge." Five men had lately been taken from Nukapu by a labour recruiter. Within three years the five knots had hardened in print into an almost certain proof, and later still into a tradition that counted five wounds on the body to match. The mission believed he had died for the labour trade's crimes, and the world believed it with them. Scholars since have read the killing against Nukapu's own quarrels and obligations, and judge other explanations at least as likely.
What followed showed two ways of answering a death. HMS Rosario went down to Nukapu under Commander Markham; there was shooting, a marine was killed, and accounts of who fired first have never agreed. The mission wanted none of it. Every member signed a protest against any punishment of the islanders, and Markham gave his word that none would follow. Patteson had asked for exactly that in advance, refusing in writing to have retribution taken for outrages white men had begun. In Britain his death did what his warnings never had. The Queen's speech opening Parliament in February 1872 named the murder of "an exemplary Prelate" among the reasons to act; the bill went in that session and passed by June. It called itself the Kidnapping Act; an amending Act three years later renamed it the Pacific Islanders Protection Act, the name it is remembered by.
Thirteen years on, John Richardson Selwyn, son of the bishop who had first carried Patteson to the islands, brought a galvanised iron cross to Nukapu and set it up before the house where Patteson died, at the islanders' own earnest request, because they said it could be seen from the sea. Privately he doubted it. "I am afraid they can't very well," he wrote, "as it does not show out much, but it stands very well when you land."
Nukapu itself came in slowly. A school opened, closed, and opened again; by 1909 the bishop thought the island ready. On St Barnabas' Day, 1911, forty years after the killing, the Rev. G. F. Bury baptised eight islanders there, and among them was the sister of the man who had killed Patteson. Bishop Cecil Wilson, dedicating Nukapu's first church a few days later two hundred yards from the memorial cross, reported that the whole population was by then "either baptized, or catechumens, or hearers."
The church Patteson wanted outlived the argument about why he died. The school moved from Norfolk Island to the Solomons in 1920. In 1925 Ini Kopuria, a police sergeant, gave his own land to found the Melanesian Brotherhood, a religious order of islanders. On the twenty-sixth of January, 1975, the Church of Melanesia became an autonomous province, and that November consecrated Norman Palmer, the first Melanesian to lead it. In 2003, on the Weather Coast of Guadalcanal, seven of Kopuria's Brothers were killed: one taken and murdered, and six who went to find out what had become of him. Today about a third of all Solomon Islanders belong to that church.
And on Nukapu they tell the story themselves. In 2021, for the hundred and fiftieth anniversary, a sixth-form student at Selwyn College in Honiara, whose home is Nukapu, wrote down what their grandmother had handed on: that a woman of their own family, named Nivai, dug the grave. Go to the island today, the student wrote, and you will still see the hole she dug, and the cross.
Patteson understood something most of us work hard not to understand: that he belonged to a people whose crimes would be charged to his account. He had stolen no one. He had denounced the trade in writing and at cost. And he knew, and set it down four days before it happened, that men coming for the slavers might not stop to ask which white man they had found. What he did with that knowledge is the remarkable part. He did not arm himself and he did not stay away, and he asked in advance that nobody be punished for whatever was done to him. Notice that he made the request before he knew what it would have to cover. It is easy enough to forgive an injury afterwards, on terms you set once you can see its size; he signed a blank one, and his mission honoured it when the warship came. You are probably in no danger from anyone's resentment. But you almost certainly belong to something, a family, a profession, a country, a church, that has taken more than it gave, and sooner or later you will meet an anger that is not about you and is not unearned either. The reflex is to establish that it was not your doing. His reflex was to ask that no one be made to pay for it. And forty years on, when the first eight islanders of Nukapu were baptized, one of them was the sister of the man who killed him. When a bill you did not run up is handed to you, what would it cost to take it without first proving it is not yours?
Patteson is among the best documented missionaries of the nineteenth century, and the documents are unusually easy to lay side by side. He wrote constantly, and within three years of his death his cousin Charlotte Mary Yonge, the novelist, had built a two-volume Life (1874) out of his own letters and journals. It remains the fullest account, and it is also a family memorial written to a purpose. Against it stands a contemporary witness: C. H. Brooke, who was aboard the Southern Cross, drew the arrowheads out of Stephen Taroaniara and nursed Joseph Atkin, and published his account the following year.
Reading the two together shows how a tradition sets. Brooke, who handled the palm frond, recorded five knots and two possible meanings and chose neither. Yonge, two years later, called the same evidence an almost certain indication of revenge. By 1961 a mission scholar retelling Nukapu's own memory could state it flatly, and add five wounds on the body to match the five knots, a detail the eyewitness never mentions. The bare facts are firmly attested: the landing from the chiefs' canoe, the five knots, the two companions dead of tetanus within the week. It is the meaning that accumulated.
The same drift can be watched on smaller things, and it is worth watching, because the later and more confident source is usually the one that gets quoted. Take the cross. John Richardson Selwyn wrote the account of setting it up himself, in a letter headed from the Southern Cross at sea and dated the twenty-sixth of October, 1884, and Montgomery, writing in 1896, gives the same year. A popular life of 1930 gives 1885 instead, and adds the name of the chief who asked for it; and it is that 1930 book, not the primary letter, that the caption to the standard photograph follows. Or take the words cut into the cross, which three sources transcribe three ways: the man whose life was there taken by those for whose sake he would willingly, or gladly, or freely have given it. This page prints the date from Selwyn's own letter and does not print the inscription at all.
Two things widely attributed to him are not his. The first is a sentence about Melanesian bishops one day presiding over churches of their own, which circulates as prophecy and was preached as his words from an English pulpit on his feast day in 2011. Its first two sentences are genuinely Yonge; the rest is not. A search of the complete Life in four separate digitisations, about 4.9 million characters, returns the controls and returns nothing for the disputed phrases, and the modern one-word "Someday" is an anachronism for 1866. The second is the detail, repeated everywhere, that he swam ashore with presents in his top hat. Yonge mentions a hat fourteen times and never once with gifts in it; what the primary record says he carried was a "basket round my neck with fish-hooks." The hat appears first in a centenary sermon of 1961, ninety years after the event. Neither invention is malicious. Both are what happens when a life is retold often enough by people who love it.
Patteson is commemorated on the twentieth of September, the day of his death. Most Anglican calendars remember his companions with him, though none of them names Joseph Atkin or Stephen Taroaniara; the Church of England keeps the day as a Lesser Festival, and the calendar of Aotearoa New Zealand remembers Patteson alone. In the Diocese of Melanesia it is a red letter day.
His estate, valued at thirteen thousand pounds, went to the mission he had led, and the memorial chapel of St Barnabas on Norfolk Island was consecrated in December 1880, unfinished and already in use. But the memorial that matters is the church itself, and the shape of it is the one he argued for: islanders teaching islanders, in their own languages, with no office of trust closed to them. Preaching at Exeter Cathedral in 2021, on the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the killing, the Archbishop of Canterbury called the Church in Melanesia "among the healthiest in the Anglican Communion."
Life of John Coleridge Patteson, Missionary Bishop of the Melanesian Islands (2 vols.)(English, 1874)
The contemporary life, built from Patteson's own letters and journals.
Public domain: Internet Archive
God's Gentlemen: A History of the Melanesian Mission, 1849-1942(English, 1978)
The standard modern history of the mission Patteson led.
Further reading. Charlotte Mary Yonge's Life of John Coleridge Patteson, Missionary Bishop of the Melanesian Islands, two volumes (1874), is the indispensable source, woven from his own letters. For the modern history of the mission he led, see David Hilliard, God's Gentlemen: A History of the Melanesian Mission, 1849-1942 (University of Queensland Press, 1978). The scholarly reassessment of his death is Thorgeir Kolshus and Even Hovdhaugen, "Reassessing the death of Bishop John Coleridge Patteson," The Journal of Pacific History 45, no. 3 (2010), 331-355.
Online resources. The contemporary account of the killing is C. H. Brooke's "The Death of Bishop Patteson" (Mission Life, 1872), at Project Canterbury, which also hosts Yonge's Life. David Hilliard's biography is free at Te Ara.
What the page claims about the effect of his death rests on better evidence than the usual devotional account of it. The Speech from the Throne at the opening of Parliament on the sixth of February, 1872, named the dishonour of the labour traffic and "the murder of an exemplary Prelate" among the reasons to legislate, and the Commons debate on the Address that same day named Patteson outright; a member was still citing the connection in April. Hilliard's own wording is worth keeping precise: the death "hastened the introduction into Parliament of a bill", which is a narrower claim than hastening an Act, and the narrower claim is the one the record supports. Two smaller things are held more loosely. The size of his estate, thirteen thousand pounds left to the mission, comes from Hilliard alone and is a probate valuation rather than a figure in the will. And what HMS Rosario actually did at Nukapu cannot be settled: Yonge has the islanders shooting first and a marine killed, and never describes a village being shelled, while the Australian Dictionary of Biography says only that her commander "fired at and killed some natives." The page reports that as the disagreement it is.
The question of why he was killed has been reopened. The modern reassessment is Thorgeir Kolshus and Even Hovdhaugen's "Reassessing the death of Bishop John Coleridge Patteson" (The Journal of Pacific History, 2010), which reads the mission sources alongside narratives recorded on Nukapu itself and argues for other and more likely explanations than reprisal. What those explanations are is not stated here, because only the article's abstract could be obtained, and filling that gap by inference is the exact failure this page exists to avoid. David Hilliard, writing in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, puts the position plainly: the revenge reading was almost universally assumed at the time, "but other explanations are equally plausible."
One further caution, which the same article supplies. Nukapu has its own account, and it is not simply a local version of the mission's. Kolshus and Hovdhaugen note that the island's traditions differ on key points from the narrative read out each year on Bishop Patteson's Day in every Anglican church of the Reef Islands and throughout Anglican Melanesia. The oldest surviving record of this death was written by the Englishmen on the ship. The people who were there have been telling it too.
Readings for a Martyr
Jeremiah 15:15–21Psalm 34Revelation 7:9–17Luke 12:4–12
Almighty God, you gave your servant John Coleridge Patteson boldness to confess the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ before the rulers of this world, and courage to die for this faith: Grant that we may always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in us, and to suffer gladly for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.