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John Coleridge Patteson, Bishop of
Melanesia, and his Companions, Martyrs, 1871
20 September |
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 John Coleridge
Patteson was born in London in 1827. He attended Balliol College, Oxford,
and graduated in 1849. After a tour of Europe and a study of languages, he
became a fellow of Merton College, Oxford, in 1852. In 1855, he heard Bishop
George Selwyn of New Zealand call for volunteers to go the South Pacific to
preach the Gospel. He went there, and founded a school for the education of
native Christian workers. He was adept at languages, and learned
twenty-three of the languages spoken in the Polynesian and Melanesian
Islands of the South Pacific. In 1861 he was consecrated Bishop of
Melanesia.
The slave-trade was technically illegal in the South Pacific at that time,
but the laws were only laxly enforced and in fact slave-raiding was a
flourishing business. Patteson was actively engaged in the effort to stamp
it out. However, injured men do not always distinguish friends from foes.
After slave-raiders had attacked the island of Nakapu, in the Santa Cruz
group, Patteson and several companions visited the area. They were assumed
to be connected with the raiders, and Patteson's body was floated back to
his ship with five hatchet wounds in the chest, one for each native who had
been killed in the earlier raid. The death of Bishop Patteson caused an
uproar back in England, and stimulated the government there to take firm
measures to stamp out slavery and the slave trade in its Pacific
territories. It was also the seed of a strong and vigorous Church in
Melanesia today. Patteson and his companions died on 20 September 1871.
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