An Extreme Bishop

On September 20th 1870, a small canoe was towed across the quiet lagoon of the tiny island of Nukapu in the Santa Cruz group and left to drift towards the schooner Southern Cross, anchored outside the reef. It carried the body of a man carefully wrapped in a mat and on his chest, a palm leaf with five knots. On the corpse were five wounds – seemingly one for each of five village men recently kidnapped by ‘blackbirders’ as slaves for the Queensland sugar plantations.
 
This reprisal was a double tragedy. First, because it was part of the sad 40-year chapter where more than 62,000 Kanakas were either enticed by false promises or taken by force to work as ‘indentured labourers’ in Australia’s North. Second, because the murdered man had worked tirelessly to create a positive future for the peoples of the myriad islands North East of Australia.

A brilliant linguist, John Coleridge Patteson learned twenty-three of the many Melanesian languages he met as he sailed thousands of kilometres of the Pacific. At 28 years old, the gifted Oxford scholar had been inspired to leave a comfortable English lifestyle to join Bishop Selwyn in the hazardous adventure of bringing the message of Jesus to the 2000 islands stretching from Papua New Guinea to Fiji in nearly a million sq kms of ocean. Strenuous travel over sixteen years led to bouts of malaria and exhaustion.

In spite of threats and a flight of poison arrows that killed his companions, John sustained a passion to communicate with the wild and warlike islanders on their own terms. He sailed around the islands preaching to the communities he discovered and setting up schools. He held a deep respect for the cultures and customs he encountered and put his exceptional linguistic powers to work collecting grammars and vocabularies and translating some gospels into the Mota dialect. In one four-month stretch he systematized and put into the printer's hands grammatical studies of 17 languages besides working up ten or more in manuscript.
 
He was unique in his determination to empower locals by training indigenous clergy rather than imposing British culture. He rated it seriously unfair and wrote, "I have for years thought that we seek in our mission a great deal too much to make English Christians of our converts…we encumber our message with unnecessary requirements."
 
At a large public meeting in Sydney March 1864, he stirred wide public support for the Melanesian Mission, with Anglican Churches agreeing to meet the annual expenses of the Southern Cross. It was Patteson's gentleness that drew him to the family of the enterprising Thomas Mort who became a personal friend and generous benefactor. Patteson’s strategy of empowering locals by training indigenous clergy surely appealed to Mort’s own vision of having management personally engaged with workers to make progress. (Thomas’ daughter Anne later plunged into life as the wife of the next bishop of Melanesia.)
 
Rather than imposing British culture with long-term white settlement, Patteson focused on taking Islanders to training centres and established the Melanesian Mission base on Norfolk Island. His most brilliant native scholar, Edward Wogala, distinguished him from the blackbirders. “He did not live apart, he was always friends with us and did not despise in the least a single one of us.”
 
By making St Barnabas a culturally integrated learning environment, the dedicated teacher redeemed the previously dark reputation of the infamous convict settlement. Dynamic and practical he had native foods such as yams grown, he taught his scholars to speak English, tend livestock and even play the game he loved - cricket! Girls came to the school so that family units could be formed and then couples returned to their home islands.
 
It seems the blackbirders may have deceived the native population of Nukapu by using Patteson’s name to gain a foothold on their island. Most likely, the kind itinerant bishop was clubbed twice in the head and stabbed three times as symbolic retaliation for the kidnapping of local men. The chief of the island pursued the murderer, who fled to the island of Santa Cruz, where the islanders killed him. The women of Nakapu, who knew and loved Patteson, were horrified by his murder and a group of them washed and prepared him for burial.
 
What makes it doubly sad is that throughout his 16 years of service, John Patteson was known through the islands, New Zealand and Australia as a staunch opponent of the slave trade.  But triumph came from the tragedy. Wide reporting of the bishop’s death in the British Press shocked the public and forced the government to act on his criticism of the slave trade by passing the Imperial Kidnapping Acts of 1872 and 1875. These brought the trade under control along the lines he had suggested.
 
The martyrdom of John Patteson and several of his native companions has been called the seed that produced the strong and vigorous Church which flourishes in Melanesia today. His legacy of training locals has continued.
 
Sydney remembered him with a noble sculpture in the beautiful downtown Christ Church St Laurence, but a more fitting memorial stands under the palms on the beach of the tiny island where he died at just 44 years old. Round the simple iron cross run these words.
 
“In memory of JOHN COLERIDGE PATTESON Missionary Bishop whose life was here taken by men for whose sake he would willingly have given it.”
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