3-053-423 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Bishop Patteson's Memorial Church, Norfolk Island, 1873. '...on Sept. 20, 1871, the missionary Bishop Patteson, while cruising in his little yacht the Southern Cross, among the isles of the Pacific Ocean, on the holy and blessed errand of teaching their savage people to adore the God of Christian Faith, was slain at Nukapu, one of the Swallow group, in mistaken revenge for the cruel wrongs perpetrated by lawless slavetraders and kidnappers who disgrace the English name...the so-called Melanesian groups of islands...have become the scene of detestable practices for the supply of forced labour to the Fiji cotton plantations. The late Bishop, a man of truly evangelical piety and charity, had the see and head-quarters of his mission at Norfolk Island, much farther south, between New Zealand and New South Wales. A small church is to be erected there as a memorial of his noble example, which is almost that of a martyr; for he had indignantly denounced the practices above referred to, and he chose to visit those islands in the course of his duty, with a consciousness of the risk to his life from the temper of the natives, as they would make no distinction between one white man and another. The architect of the Memorial Church is Mr. John O. Scott'. From "Illustrated London News", 1873.