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.

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