SYDNEY, Australia — A tribe in Papua New Guinea has apologized for killing and eating four 19th-century missionaries who were under the command of a British clergyman.

The four Fijians were on a proselytizing mission on the island of New Britain when they were massacred by Tolai tribesmen in 1878. They were murdered on the orders of a local warrior chief, Taleli, and were then cooked and eaten. They had been sent by the Reverend George Brown, a Wesleyan missionary from County Durham who spent most of his life as a missionary in the South Seas.

This week, thousands of villagers attended a reconciliation ceremony near Rabaul, the capital of East New Britain province, once notorious for its cannibals.

Their leaders apologized for their forefathers’ taste for human flesh to a Fijian delegation led by Fiji’s high commissioner to Papua New Guinea. They laid wreaths at the Fijians’ feet and placed strands of sacred shells around their necks.

Cannibalism was once common in many parts of the South Pacific — Fiji was formerly known as the Cannibal Isles — and dozens of missionaries were killed by islanders. Brown was familiar with the gory traditions of the region. He was born at Barnard Castle, but immigrated to New Zealand as a young man and served as a missionary in Samoa before moving with his wife and children to New Guinea.

He once described a visit to a village in which he counted 35 smoke-blackened human jawbones dangling from a hut. He told the Royal Geographical Society: “A human hand, smoke-dried, was hanging in the same house. And outside I counted 76 notches in a coconut tree, each notch of which, the natives told us, represented a human body which had been cooked and eaten there.”

Even so, he was shocked when told that four of his staff had been eaten.

“They were killed simply because they were foreigners, and the natives who killed them did so for no other reason than their desire to eat them,” he wrote.

He agreed to launch a punitive expedition, ordering his men to burn down villages implicated in the murders and destroy wooden canoes.

At least 10 tribe members blamed for the attack were killed. Brown claimed the raids made the region safe for Europeans. In a letter to the general secretary of the Wesleyan Missionary Society, he wrote: “The natives respect us more than they did, and as they all acknowledge the justice of our cause, they bear us no ill will.”

But the reprisals attracted fierce criticism from the press, particularly in Australia.