3-065-833 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Altar-tomb of the late Bishop Patteson, Christ Church, Sydney, 1874. 'The death of the Right Rev. John Coleridge Patteson, Missionary Bishop of the Church of England in the South Sea Islands, by the rash and misguided violence of those he had laboured to save and to bless, was the martyrdom of a Christian hero...The natives of the sequestered island, in the Santa Cruz group, where he was killed instantly on landing there, had been exasperated by the cruel outrages inflicted upon them by kidnappers and slave-traders of English race. They did not know that Bishop Patteson had been striving for years to move the British and the Australian Governments to put a stop to those atrocious practices...The kidnappers had sometimes approached their prey in the disguise of missionary clergymen; so these poor savages, who mistook their truest and boldest friend for one of their dreaded persecutors, met him and killed him on the beach. After that, one would say, the entire suppression of the South Pacific slave trade should be merely a question of the shortest time and the most effective manner...A monument has lately been put up, from the design by Mr. E. T. Blacket, architect, with a recumbent marble figure by Mr. H. Apperley, sculptor, of that city'. From "Illustrated London News", 1874.