John Coleridge Patteson

John Coleridge Patteson was born on April 1, 1827, in London, England. His father, Sir John Patteson, was a judge, and his mother was a niece of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The family was comfortable and well connected. He was educated at Eton, where he was a leading student, and at Balliol College, Oxford. He was a gifted linguist, and he studied Hebrew, Arabic and several European languages. He was tall, strong and good at sports. He was ordained in the Church of England and served as a curate in Devon.

He was drawn to missions after meeting George Augustus Selwyn, the Bishop of New Zealand, who visited England in 1854. Selwyn invited him to come to the South Pacific, and he went. He sailed to New Zealand and joined Selwyn's work. He spent several years on missionary voyages through the islands of Melanesia, a region of thousands of islands where there were many different languages and peoples. He had a gift for languages and learned to speak several dialects. He wrote that he had a love for the people and a desire to see them free from fear.

In 1861, he was consecrated as the first Bishop of Melanesia, at the age of thirty-four. He set up a headquarters at Norfolk Island, a small island between New Zealand and New Caledonia, where he founded a school to train young men from the islands to be teachers and evangelists. He visited the islands each year on a ship called the Southern Cross, picking up students and bringing them to Norfolk Island. He lived with them and studied their languages. He taught them Christianity and ways to improve their communities. He insisted that the students be treated as equals. The principle was to train native evangelists to carry the gospel to their own people.

He was a bishop who felt at home with the people, and he had a calm and gentle manner. He did not believe in forcing the faith on anyone and treated the islanders with respect. He opposed the practice of blackbirding, in which islanders were kidnapped or tricked into working on the plantations of Queensland and Fiji. This labor trade was a form of slavery, and he saw the damage that it did to the islands. He spoke against it and worked to protect the islanders. His criticism angered the traders and also some officials.

His life was a heavy burden, and he was often tired. He lived on a simple diet and suffered from poor health, with fever and dysentery. He was also a man of delicate conscience, who often reproached himself for his failings. He was lonely and longed for the company of his family. He never married. He kept up an active correspondence with his sisters, and his letters give a picture of his life.

On September 20, 1871, he visited the island of Nukapu, in the Santa Cruz group. He went ashore alone in a canoe to speak with the people. The islanders attacked him. They had lost several of their men to blackbirders, and they took revenge on the first white man they met. He was killed, and his body was put in a canoe and sent adrift. Several of his companions were also struck by arrows, and they died of tetanus a few days later. He was forty-four years old. His body was found with five knots in a palm leaf laid on his chest, which was believed to mean that five of the islanders had been killed in revenge.

His death was a shock to the church and to the colonial government. It helped to bring an end to the abuses of the labor trade, and the British government passed the Pacific Islanders Protection Act of 1872. The mission that he began continued, and the Anglican church in Melanesia is now large. His life shows what a man can do who takes the part of the weak and who is willing to give his life for them.