John Coleridge Patteson was born in London on the first of April, 1827, the son of a judge. His mother, Frances Duke Coleridge, was a niece of the poet, and her family's Devon shaped him: his first school was at Ottery St Mary, where his great-grandfather and great-uncle had been headmasters, and the family bought Feniton Court when he was fourteen. At Eton and Balliol he was remembered for his cricket and his ear for languages. The ear would make his work possible. The body that had played the cricket would carry it: in the islands he swam ashore through surf where the boat could not follow, a basket of fish-hooks round his neck, and walked up the beach unarmed. That was deliberate; as he wrote, "the plan of going among the people unarmed and unsuspiciously has been seen to disarm their mistrust and to make them regard me as a friend."

In 1855 he sailed to join George Augustus Selwyn, Bishop of New Zealand, on a voyage through Melanesia, and the work took hold of him and did not let go. He learned the island tongues quickly and in quantity, more than twenty in the end, with printed grammars of thirteen, so that islanders could pray and read Scripture in their own words rather than in his.

Consecrated at Auckland on the twenty-fourth of February, 1861, as missionary bishop for the western islands of the Pacific, he took for his diocese hundreds of islands across thousands of miles of ocean. His method scandalised some of his countrymen. Rather than plant a fortified mission and make the islanders come to him on English terms, he sailed from island to island, learned the customs, and carried young men back to the mission school, first near Auckland, then at Kohimarama, and from 1867 on Norfolk Island, to be taught and sent home as teachers to their own people. In his own words:

We make no distinction whatever between English and Melanesian members of the Mission as such. No Melanesian is excluded from any office of trust. No classification is made of higher and lower kinds of work, of work befitting a white man and work befitting a black man.

On the twentieth of December, 1868, in the little chapel on Norfolk Island, he ordained George Sarawia deacon, the first Melanesian clergyman. Conversions came slowly for most of his episcopate, and he knew it; the native ministry, not the count of baptisms, was the work he had come to do.

Another kind of English ship was working the same waters. The labour traders the islanders called blackbirders carried Pacific men off by force and trickery to the plantations of Queensland and Fiji, and some dressed the deception in Patteson's own clothes: a vessel made to resemble the Southern Cross, a figure on deck in a black coat with a book in his hand, word passed ashore that the Bishop had sent for them. Patteson saw what it would cost, and guessed who would pay. Four days before his death he wrote from off the Santa Cruz group:

I am fully alive to the probability that some outrage has been committed here by one or more vessels. I am quite aware that we may be exposed to considerable risk on this account. I trust that all may be well; that if it be His will that any trouble should come upon us, dear Joseph Atkin, his father and mother's only son, may be spared.

On the twentieth of September, 1871, the reef at Nukapu would not let the boat in, and Patteson went ashore in the canoe of two chiefs he knew, leaving Joseph Atkin in charge of the boat. He did not come back. Arrows struck Atkin in the shoulder and Stephen Taroaniara, a teacher whom Patteson had meant to ordain, in six places. Both lived another week and died of tetanus. The islanders sent the Bishop's body out to the ship wrapped in matting, and thrust into the breast a palm frond with five knots tied in it. The man who received it, C. H. Brooke, wrote down what he saw without pretending to know what it meant: five knots, "the number of the slain, as they supposed, or possibly of those whom his death was meant to avenge." Five men had lately been taken from Nukapu by a labour recruiter. Within three years the five knots had hardened in print into an almost certain proof, and later still into a tradition that counted five wounds on the body to match. The mission believed he had died for the labour trade's crimes, and the world believed it with them. Scholars since have read the killing against Nukapu's own quarrels and obligations, and judge other explanations at least as likely.

What followed showed two ways of answering a death. HMS Rosario went down to Nukapu under Commander Markham; there was shooting, a marine was killed, and accounts of who fired first have never agreed. The mission wanted none of it. Every member signed a protest against any punishment of the islanders, and Markham gave his word that none would follow. Patteson had asked for exactly that in advance, refusing in writing to have retribution taken for outrages white men had begun. In Britain his death did what his warnings never had. The Queen's speech opening Parliament in February 1872 named the murder of "an exemplary Prelate" among the reasons to act; the bill went in that session and passed by June. It called itself the Kidnapping Act; an amending Act three years later renamed it the Pacific Islanders Protection Act, the name it is remembered by.

Thirteen years on, John Richardson Selwyn, son of the bishop who had first carried Patteson to the islands, brought a galvanised iron cross to Nukapu and set it up before the house where Patteson died, at the islanders' own earnest request, because they said it could be seen from the sea. Privately he doubted it. "I am afraid they can't very well," he wrote, "as it does not show out much, but it stands very well when you land."

Nukapu itself came in slowly. A school opened, closed, and opened again; by 1909 the bishop thought the island ready. On St Barnabas' Day, 1911, forty years after the killing, the Rev. G. F. Bury baptised eight islanders there, and among them was the sister of the man who had killed Patteson. Bishop Cecil Wilson, dedicating Nukapu's first church a few days later two hundred yards from the memorial cross, reported that the whole population was by then "either baptized, or catechumens, or hearers."

The church Patteson wanted outlived the argument about why he died. The school moved from Norfolk Island to the Solomons in 1920. In 1925 Ini Kopuria, a police sergeant, gave his own land to found the Melanesian Brotherhood, a religious order of islanders. On the twenty-sixth of January, 1975, the Church of Melanesia became an autonomous province, and that November consecrated Norman Palmer, the first Melanesian to lead it. In 2003, on the Weather Coast of Guadalcanal, seven of Kopuria's Brothers were killed: one taken and murdered, and six who went to find out what had become of him. Today about a third of all Solomon Islanders belong to that church.

And on Nukapu they tell the story themselves. In 2021, for the hundred and fiftieth anniversary, a sixth-form student at Selwyn College in Honiara, whose home is Nukapu, wrote down what their grandmother had handed on: that a woman of their own family, named Nivai, dug the grave. Go to the island today, the student wrote, and you will still see the hole she dug, and the cross.