Wayside Cross to Bishop Patteson

DIFFERENT CATEGORY - a Victorian wayside memorial cross designed by the architect William Butterfield, standing at a road junction in Devon, thousands of miles from the actual killing. John Coleridge Patteson (1827-1871) was raised near Ottery St Mary - his mother was a niece of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the cross was erected by 'his kinsman, Lord Coleridge.' In 1861 he became the first Bishop of the Anglican Church of Melanesia, working across roughly 1,800 miles of South Pacific islands and eventually learning 23 of the region's languages. His mission became entangled with the activities of 'blackbirders' - illegal slave traders who kidnapped Melanesian men, sometimes by outright deception and violence, to work Australian and Fijian plantations; Patteson actively worked with colonial authorities to suppress the trade. On 20 September 1871, landing alone on the island of Nukapu, he was killed - widely believed at the time to be in retaliation after blackbirders had abducted five men from the island days earlier, killing one of them, with islanders mistaking his mission ship for a slaving vessel. According to an early account, the islanders realised their error afterwards and treated his body with respect, returning it to sea in a canoe covered with woven matting and a palm branch. More recent historical research (Kolshus and Hovdhaugen, 2010), drawing on mission records and Melanesian oral history, suggests the reality was more complicated: local women, including the paramount chief's wife Niuvai, had been leading resistance to the mission's practice of taking local boys away to its school, and the islanders may not have sharply distinguished between blackbirders and missionaries in the first place. Historic England's own 1974 listing still uses the phrase 'murdered by natives', which reads as outdated and reductive next to this fuller picture.