John Coleridge Patteson

Life and Ministry

John Coleridge Patteson was born in 1827 to the family of a London judge — his great-uncle was the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge — educated at Eton and Balliol College Oxford, ordained in the Church of England in 1853, and recruited by his Eton schoolfellow George Selwyn, the first Bishop of New Zealand, to undertake the Melanesian mission of the Southern Pacific. Patteson sailed on the Southern Cross schooner among the islands of the New Hebrides, the Solomons, and the Banks Group for sixteen years, mastering at least two dozen Melanesian languages, founding the Melanesian Mission College on Norfolk Island, and being consecrated in 1861 as the first Bishop of Melanesia. He was known among the islanders as Bishopa Patteson and conducted his ministry on the principle that no European should remain on a Melanesian island; the gospel would be taken by Melanesian Christians to their own people.

Circumstances of Death

The Southern Pacific in the 1860s was being devastated by labor recruiters — the so-called blackbirders — who kidnapped or coerced Melanesian men onto Australian and Fijian sugar plantations. Five Nukapu men had been carried off in late 1870. When the Southern Cross arrived at Nukapu on September 20, 1871, Patteson went ashore alone in his usual practice, expecting to be received as he had been welcomed for years. The islanders, having been told by an outraged elder that the mission ship was a blackbirder vessel, attacked the boat. Patteson was clubbed to death in the chief's hut. Five arrows had been shot at the boat — the men in the boat survived but two of his catechists died of tetanus from the wounds in the following days. Patteson's body was set adrift in a canoe with five palm fronds knotted on the chest, one for each man kidnapped. The canoe was found by the Southern Cross at sea the next morning.

Legacy

Patteson's death prompted the British government, after years of resistance to legislation, to pass the Pacific Islanders' Protection Act of 1872, which placed labor recruitment under crown supervision and effectively ended the worst of the blackbirding trade. The Melanesian Mission continued through the twentieth century and gave the modern Anglican Church of Melanesia — one of the largest Anglican provinces in Oceania today — its founding shape. The cathedral on Norfolk Island, built as Patteson's mission school, remains the headquarters of the order. The phrase carved on his memorial at Norfolk reads: "To make the islands his own."