Sentimentality in Revolt Narration

The death of bishop Joseph Patteson, as I learned, played a large role in the criminalization of black birding.  He was killed near the time Melville's "Benito Cereno" (italics aren't working for me for some reason) was published.  The story of his death, a missionary dying by the hand of islanders, as vengeance for the murders committed on the island by slavers, became an almost sentimental tale at the time.  This article is particularly relevant because it examines the different accounts of the event, in order to determine where the agency and the motives truly lie in this murder.

The pages I posted as screenshots conclude the piece of the article that breaks down the different accounts gathered by European people's, examining the motives of the people telling the story, such as Patteson's blackbird-hating partner, Robert Henry Codrington.  The article also examines the different accounts of the involvement of the native women, some claiming their tending to Patteson's corpse as a sign of their disapproval of his murder or a compassion towards him.  This I found particularly interesting, because it seems this could be a sentimental appeal, not only pointing at the remorse of the natives, but singling out women.  Sentimental writing and human rights campaigns were often aimed at Euro/English women, therefore implying that the women of the indigenous people play the same humanitarian role in their tribes as women in societies of the Northern Hemisphere could be an attempt to bend the story to relate to a white female audience.


 Kolshus, Thorgeir, and Even Hovdhaugen. "Reassessing the Death of Bishop John Coleridge Patteson." Journal of Pacific History 45.3 (2010): 331-55. Web. 25 Jan. 2015.