3-034-841 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Scene of the murder of Bishop Patteson, Santa Cruz, Pacific Ocean, 1871. Further to '...the shocking news of the murder of Bishop Coleridge Patteson and another English missionary by the savages...Santa Cruz is one of the North Hebrides Islands...[which] are comprised in the English Church Missionary Diocese of Melanesia, but do not belong to the British Empire, or to any civilised State. It is asserted that the natives are frequently kidnapped by vessels engaged in a clandestine slave trade, and are carried off, against their will, to forced labour in the sugar and cotton plantations of Fiji, owned by English settlers...Bishop Patteson had protested against this illegal and infamous practice...It appears that the kidnappers had...had the effrontery to use the Bishop's name as a decoy to persuade the poor people, who knew him, to come on board their ships. He expressed his apprehensions lest the wronged islanders revenge themselves upon the next boat's crew...but, as he relied upon...their goodwill towards him, he did not fear to go there for his usual visit. Unhappily, his confidence was mistaken, and he has fallen a victim to the crimes of his unworthy countrymen, a martyr to the cause of humanity and Christianity, in those remote isles...'. From "Illustrated London News", 1871.