16 NOVEMBER 2002, Page 40

Not one for the pot

From Mr Christopher Booker Sir: It seems that in my article (Killer peak', 2 November) about nearly climbing Kilimanjaro I was misinformed in claiming that my ancestor Bishop John Coleridge Patteson was placed in a cooking pot by South Sea islanders in 1871. He in fact died heroically in the course of trying to stamp out the slave trade. Some of the islanders he was trying to defend mistook him for one of their oppressors and stabbed him to death. As the first Bishop of Melanesia, he spoke 23 local languages and was clearly a good egg.

Christopher Booker

Litton, Somerset