Anglican Commemoration
Bishop of Melanesia, & his Companions, Martyrs
September 20 · d. 1871
The first Bishop of Melanesia, murdered on a Pacific beach in reprisal for crimes he had spent his life opposing. Patteson mastered more than twenty island languages and built a mission founded on respect for the peoples he served. When the kidnappers called blackbirders raided the islands for plantation labor, he warned that their violence would one day fall on him; on the twentieth of September, 1871, on the island of Nukapu, it did.
John Coleridge Patteson was born in 1827 into a comfortable family in Devon; his father was a judge, his godfather and namesake belonged to the family of the poet Coleridge, and he was sent to Eton and to Balliol College, Oxford, where he was remembered for his cricket and his ear for languages. Both gifts would matter more than anyone could have guessed.
In 1855 he sailed to the far side of the world to join George Augustus Selwyn, the missionary Bishop of New Zealand, on a voyage through the islands of Melanesia. The experience seized him. He found in the island peoples a quickness to the gospel that moved him, and he discovered in himself a rare power: he could learn their languages, and not just one. In the end he gained a working command of more than twenty Pacific tongues, and he used them to translate prayers and Scripture so that island Christians could worship in their own words.
Consecrated the first Bishop of Melanesia in 1861, Patteson took for his diocese hundreds of islands scattered across thousands of miles of ocean: the Solomons, the New Hebrides (today Vanuatu), the Santa Cruz group. His method was patient and respectful in a way that scandalized some of his countrymen. Rather than plant a fortress mission and demand that islanders come to him on English terms, he sailed from island to island building trust, learned the customs, and brought young men to a school on Norfolk Island to be taught and sent home as teachers to their own people.
But another kind of English ship was working those same waters. The labor traders the islanders called blackbirders kidnapped Pacific men by force and trickery to work the plantations of Queensland and Fiji, sometimes disguising their vessels as mission ships to lure victims aboard. Patteson saw the evil clearly and warned, again and again, that its violence would one day be repaid on the innocent, very likely on himself. On the twentieth of September, 1871, he went ashore alone on the little island of Nukapu, in the Santa Cruz group, where blackbirders had lately raided and carried men away. The islanders killed him. They sent his body back to his horrified crew in a canoe, wrapped in a mat, a knotted palm frond laid upon it, once, the mission believed, for each islander the traders had stolen. He had said his death might pay that debt, and so, in their own grim reckoning, the islanders seem to have counted it.
How we know: Patteson is among the best documented missionaries of the nineteenth century. He was a copious letter-writer and diarist, and within three years of his death his cousin Charlotte Mary Yonge, the popular novelist, published a two-volume Life of John Coleridge Patteson (1874) built from his own papers, still the fullest account.
The Melanesian Mission kept its own records, and the missionary scholar Robert Codrington, who knew the islands intimately, preserved details of the killing and its background. The labor trade that provoked it is independently documented in colonial and parliamentary papers. The one thing later tradition has shaped is the meaning of the palm frond and its knots; the bare facts of the raid, the lone landing, and the death are firmly attested.
Patteson is commemorated on September 20, the day of his martyrdom. The Anglican Communion recognized at once what his death meant, and it carried a force beyond the mission field: the killing of a bishop in reprisal for the labor trade brought the scandal of blackbirding to international attention and helped push the British government toward regulating and finally suppressing it.
His own refusal to seek vengeance on the islanders, whom he understood to be answering an English crime, made him a prophetic figure in later Anglican thinking about mission. He is honored as a patron of the Church in Melanesia, where the faith he planted in the islanders' own languages grew into living provinces, and as a model of the missionary who comes to learn and to serve rather than to conquer. The Melanesian Brotherhood keeps his memory, and a memorial cross stands at Nukapu.
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 a modern account, see David Hilliard, God's Gentlemen: A History of the Melanesian Mission (University of Queensland Press, 1978).
Online resources. Yonge's Life of Patteson is free at the Internet Archive.
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.
Readings for a Martyr
Jeremiah 15:15–21Psalm 34Revelation 7:9–17Luke 12:4–12