The ship from Dunedin and the tragedies on Nukapu

My interview with Christchurch radio station RDU has gone online. Host James Dann asked me not only about the raid on ‘Ata Island but about the wider Pacific slave trade and its links with New Zealand. I mentioned the Dunedin-based steamship Wainui, which played a seminal role in the most infamous and misunderstood episode of the entire slave trade.

The Wainui’s captain and crew stole men and women from Melanesia and sold them in Queensland or Fiji to the owners of sugar plantations. In August 1870 the Wainui approached Savo, one of the Reef Islands of the Solomons, and encountered a group of men and women in canoes. The captain of the Wainui steered his ship into the little vessels; their passengers went screaming into the water. The crew of the Wainui lowered a whaleboat into the sea, rowed towards the flailing bodies, and pulled them to safety, and into slavery.

But the Wainui’s captain did not realise that his latest captives included both the wife and daughter of the chief of Savo Island. The people of the island were enraged, and its sole white inhabitant, a beachcomber and small trader, had to barricade himself in his hut.

Nukapu is one of the Reef Islands, and its people are related to their Savo neighbours by centuries of marriage. They shared the anger of their relatives at the abduction of the chief of Savo’s family.

A few weeks after the raid on Savo John Coleridge Patteson, the Anglican Bishop of Melanesia, approached Nukapu on the missionary ship Southern Cross. For sixteen years Patteson had been landing on the beaches of Melanesia. By 1871, he could preach in twenty-three of Melanesia’s thousand languages. On island after island, the bishop left Bibles and medicines and sailed away with young men, who learned to read and pray at Anglican schools on Norfolk Island and in Auckland.

Patteson was popular in some places, and slavers took to imitating him. They would anchor off islands, don black garments, and holding Bibles aloft on the decks of their ships. The Bishop of Melanesia became a meticulous opponent of the slave trade, collecting stories of raids and writing long memoranda to the governments of Australasia and Britain.

Patteson landed on Nukapu in a Melanesian canoe given to him by some of his students. Hours later he drifted back towards the Southern Cross on the same vessel. There were arrows and axe marks in his torso, and the right side of his head had collapsed. The bishop had become Nukapu’s message to the white world.

Patteson’s death created an uproar throughout the British Empire. In New Zealand public meetings denounced the slave trade, and parliament passed a resolution calling on Britain to ban and punish the practice. Captain Jacobs of the Southern Cross published an account of Bishop Patteson’s death that blamed the event on slave traders, and mentioned the Wainui’s raid on Savo.

Despite Jacobs’ testimony, the British government sent a warship, the HMS Rosario, to punish Nukapu for Patteson’s death. The Rosario was driven by propellers and had eleven guns. On the way to Nukapu the ship stopped in New Zealand, where some of its crew played the first ever rugby union international against a team of Aucklanders.

When the Rosario anchored off Nukapu in October the local men danced on their beach, then fired a volley of arrows that fell into the sea far short of the warship. The Rosario responded by bombarding the island. The ship fired its largest guns, and the ship’s crew opened up with their rifles. Later a party of marines went ashore, and burned a Nukapuan village.

The invasion of Nukapu was condemned by anti-slavery campaigners as an insult to the memory of Bishop Patteson, and was criticised by newspapers in New Zealand and in Britain. Patteson himself became the first Pacific martyr of the Anglican church, and is still remembered by members of the church today. Patteson’s certificate of ordination is displayed at Auckland’s Anglican cathedral; on a window in church in a Surrey village called Kingswood there is a portrait of Patteson serenely contemplating his Bible while two copper-coloured savages carrying clubs approach him.

What is not remembered is the share of responsibility that a steamer from Dunedin bore for both the slaying of Bishop Patteson and the British navy’s attack on Nukapu.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

from Planet GS via John Jason Fallows on Inoreader http://ift.tt/2huVAmk
Skyler