“Redeemed from savagery”: Sanctification and civilization in the accounts of Cook Islands missionaries Aaron Buzacott and John Williams

Abstract

This article explores the way in which two Protestant missionaries to the Cook Islands in the mid-nineteenth century, John Williams and Aaron Buzacott, engaged with the idea of civilization in their ethnographic descriptions of the islanders. It contributes to an important strand of recent scholarship which focuses on developing a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between Enlightenment ideas and evangelical missionaries in the Pacific. While Buzacott and Williams firmly understood that the missionary was the instrument of transforming civilization, they did not merely replicate the lexicon or concept of civilization contained in secular Enlightenment philosophy. I argue that Buzacott and Williams used the theological concept of sanctification to frame the secular, historical, process of “civilizing” the Cook islanders, such that they argued that the driving force in the process of civilizing was not historical development, but rather, the sanctifying transformation wrought by the Holy Spirit. In short, Williams and Buzacott used the theological concept of sanctification to perform descriptive and ethnographic, rather than purely theological and normative, work. This study provides a window into a significant phenomenon, in which theological concepts played a formative, and frequently overlooked, role in Pacific missionary anthropology and ethnography.

Keywords

civilization missionaries ethnography evangelicalism Pacific Oceania

“[In] the greatest transformation that a people can undergo … namely from barbarism to civilization, from heathenism to Christianity … the missionary has been not only the witness but the instrument of it,” proclaimed Aaron Buzacott and John P. Sunderland in their laudatory account of Buzacott’s mission work in the Cook Islands, published in 1866.¹ The idea that societies develop from barbarism to civilization is a familiar trope to historians of missionaries, of the Enlightenment, and of empire. Indeed, an important strand of recent scholarship focuses on developing a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between Enlightenment ideas and evangelical missionaries in the Pacific. This article contributes to these scholarly efforts by addressing the issue of missionaries’ engagement with ideas about civilization. I attempt to approach this question from a different angle, however. Instead of focusing on the issue of whether missionaries were agents of imperialism, cultural or otherwise, or on islander receptions of Christianity, I investigate the missionaries’ theology.

Taking missionary theology seriously, I argue, enables us to understand that Aaron Buzacott and John Williams, two prominent missionaries to the Cook Islands in the mid-nineteenth century, used the theological concept of sanctification to frame the secular, historical process of “civilizing” the islanders. For the missionaries, sanctification denoted the process in which, once converted to Christianity, the Holy Spirit began to reform the life of the believer, renewing them and conforming them to the image of Christ. In effect, the concept of sanctification described a change of lifestyle, among individuals or communities. The congruence between sanctification and the secular notion of civilizing should not escape us. While this issue is broad, the work of Aaron Buzacott (1800–1864) and his more famous colleague, John Williams (1796–1839), in the Cook Islands provides a useful and clearly defined point of entry, because both missionaries made ethnographic observations about the role of Christianity in the historical progress of the islander community, particularly on Rarotonga. I argue that Buzacott and Williams used the theological and normative concept of sanctification to perform descriptive work, by using the concept to help shape their ethnographic descriptions of the process of development towards civilization. I then argue that they also used the concept of sanctification to navigate their dual, and potentially conflicting, roles as “witnesses” as well as “instruments”—to use Buzacott’s terminology—of the historical development of civilization.

John Williams and Aaron Buzacott shared similar backgrounds. Both were working-class young men, born into humble families in the south of England, and spent their youth learning trades before they discovered and pursued their callings as missionaries. Buzacott apprenticed as a blacksmith, and Williams as an ironmonger. In the eyes of the London Missionary Society (LMS), these practical skills, combined with the missionaries’ strong personal faith, made them ideal candidates for mission work. In its early years, the LMS intentionally sought enthusiastic and committed men from lower-class backgrounds, like Williams and Buzacott, to become missionaries. In a milieu influenced strongly by the Calvinist Methodism advocated by George Whitefield and his colleagues, these young missionaries often had dramatic personal narratives about their conversions to Christianity, and a sense of urgent calling to preach the gospel to the non-Christian world.² Founded during the mid-eighteenth-century rise of evangelicalism, the LMS embodied an urgent desire to evangelize to those parts of the world which, in their eyes, remained deprived of the light of Christianity. Intentionally non-denominational, the LMS was the fruit of a group of evangelical clergymen and men engaged in international trade, particularly in the South Pacific.

In recent years, the relationship between mission work, Protestant evangelicalism more broadly, and the Enlightenment has been the subject of burgeoning scholarship. As Brian Stanley put it, evangelical Christianity is finally “being interpreted as a movement whose origin and contours owe an immense debt to the philosophical and cultural patterns of the Enlightenment.”³ This recent scholarship is something of a corrective to a long-held assumption that evangelical Christianity was counter-posed to the Enlightenment, and even arose as a reaction against Enlightenment ideas. In addition to Brian Stanley, historians Neil Gunson, Sujit Sivasundaram, and Jane Samson, among others, have helped rectify this by exploring the relationship between Enlightenment ideas and evangelicalism, particularly in the Pacific context.⁴

This is the first of two overlapping strands of scholarly discussion into which this article intervenes. The second historiographic discussion centers upon the broader issue of expanding and reorienting the intellectual geography of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sciences, natural and human. This move is a concerted effort to recognize the importance of those places formerly considered “marginal” to the formation of modern science. They are spaces well outside the European metropolises, and frequently on the colonial periphery. As Sujit Sivasundaram observed, “Instead of proposing a clean account of how science became secular in the nineteenth-century, historians are emphasizing the diversity of contexts in which the relations of knowledge and belief were forged.”⁵

I intend to develop these two strands of scholarship by exploring how Buzacott and Williams, during their time in the Cook Islands, engaged with one of the quintessential, and most notorious, Enlightenment ideas, that of civilization. Unsurprisingly, missionaries as a group were well versed in ideas about civilization. There was a debate among missionaries, and in the LMS, for example, on the subject whether civilization need precede conversion to Christianity. Most concluded that Christianity could be the principal instrument of what they understood as the civilizing and improvement of islander societies. There was a general agreement that there was a close, if not symbiotic, relationship between Christianity and what Aaron Buzacott termed the “greatest transformation that a people can undergo … namely from barbarism to civilization, from heathenism to Christianity.”⁶

For the most part, scholars have considered the phenomenon of missionaries bringing what they understood to be “civilization” to Oceania in terms of whether or not this makes the missionaries agents of imperialism. Indeed, there exists an extensive literature on the role of evangelical missionaries in British imperialism, and their arguable “collusion with the larger project of British imperialism.”⁷ Alternatively, other historians approach the issue of missionaries “civilizing” the islanders by considering how islanders received such messages; the resistance, negotiation, and strategies of adaptation which islanders used. Historians have produced fruitful research in response to these important questions. I intend to approach the issue of civilization from a different angle, however. I am interested in how missionaries used their theological resources to engage with what was an Enlightenment philosophical concept. Did they merely absorb a secular concept of civilization and reproduce it in their studies of islander societies? Interestingly, my study of Buzacott and Williams’s work on the Cook Islands reveals something quite the contrary. Both missionaries used a theological concept, that of sanctification, to describe and refashion the process of “civilizing” the Cook Islands.

Broadly speaking, it is my contention that theological concepts played a formative role in Oceania missionary anthropology and ethnography, even performing descriptive and analytic—rather than purely normative—work.⁸ The role of theology is generally under-recognized by historians of missionaries who wrote ethnographies.⁹ My approach here, therefore, stresses the importance of taking theology seriously. Jane Samson pointed out recently that the Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders, edited by Douglas Denoon, despite its 518 pages, has no index entry for religion. Moreover, Christianity is mentioned on only 29 of the 518 pages, usually in passing.¹⁰ Samson’s insight is astute. It has not always been the case that historians have been interested in the theology of missionaries. Much of the historical work on missionaries’ ethnographic work has focused on the rhetorical and political functions of such texts, particularly on how they constructed and justified the persona and role of the missionaries. But as Samson, again astutely, points out, “missionary anthropologies did indeed function in political ways, and they did feature various literary tropes, but to reduce them to either of these things is to miss an opportunity to get to grips with the theological origin of the paradoxical features they display.”¹¹ The texts I examine in this article are missionary accounts of work in the Cook Islands by Aaron Buzacott and John Williams.¹² While the issue of missionaries’ engagement with concepts of civilization could be pursued at greater length, for the purposes of this journal-length article, Buzacott and Williams’s work in the Cook Islands serves as a useful case study and point of entry into this complex and under-explored issue.

The theology of sanctification

The concept of sanctification described the personal transformation that new Christians underwent after having given their lives to Christ. This resounded with nineteenth-century evangelicals, who emphasized the importance of personal commitment to following Christ, and the holy living which must ensue.

Most important in their influence on ideas of sanctification in evangelical circles, however, were the Methodists and Moravians. Indeed, it is interesting to note that Aaron Buzacott spent his childhood and youth in Devon, on the border of Cornwall, which was the hotbed of Methodism in the early nineteenth century. In addition to the Methodists, the Moravians also influenced the rise of evangelicalism in England considerably, as J. C. S. Mason has shown.¹³ The two groups frequently placed similar emphasis on the importance of sanctification in the Christian life, particularly upon notions of moral improvement and transformation. Such processes could sound eerily like the tenor of Enlightenment secular philosophies describing the development of civilization, save for the evangelical references to the work of the Holy Spirit. Despite the fact that we don’t know whether or not Williams or Buzacott would have read the works of Enlightenment philosophers such as Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson who described the processes of civilization, the sense that societies underwent historical processes of improvement and civilizing penetrated English culture generally. This was particularly the case in discussions by Whigs and Liberals on the issue of England’s role and responsibilities towards its colonies.¹⁴ In 1836, Buxton chaired a select committee of the House of Commons which examined the treatment of “native peoples” throughout the empire, and “to consider what measures might be adopted” to encourage improvement and civilization. As Henry Reynolds has shown, Buxton considered the advent of “civilization” as something of a compensation for some of the “evils” that inevitably accompanied British settlement.¹⁵

Various missionaries were called up, including John Williams. One of the outcomes of the Select Committee was a work published in 1837 entitled Christianity and the Means of Civilisation. As Neil Gunson has pointed out, “the idea that the role of the missionary was to introduce civilisation together with the doctrine of the cross … developed into a principle of the missionary enterprise.”¹⁶ The general view among missionaries concurred that their own work was twofold, bringing both Christianity and civilization. William Ellis, the missionary to Polynesia, Hawaii, and Madagascar, echoed the general view among missionaries that “true civilisation and Christianity are inseparable; the former has never been found but as a fruit of the latter … No man can become a Christian, in the true sense of the term, however savage he may have been before, without becoming a civilized man.”¹⁷

Aside from its attachment to various imperial debates and policies, civilization was also a central concept of the emerging human sciences. Indeed, the idea of civilization was central to many Pacific missionary ethnographies, not just those of Williams and Buzacott, because the concept intersected with two ideas central to biblical narratives about humanity, namely, the nature of human difference and human history. In addition to Williams’s Narrative of Missionary Enterprises, his ethnographic work on Samoa, central Polynesia, and Tonga in his journals of 1830 and 1832, for example, or William Ellis’s Polynesian Researches, discuss the customs and manners of islander societies in terms of their degrees of civilization. The missionary James Wilson (1760–1814) is another good example. In his Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean Performed in the years 1796, 1797 and 1798, Wilson engaged with ideas of civilizing processes extensively, often describing the kinds of “improvements” he had witnessed in the Friendly Isles when compared with other areas of the Pacific. He noted that “in improvements and civil government the people of the Friendly Islands appear superior; their canoes are larger, more numerous, and better formed; their clubs and carvings more curious, their land better cultivated, their roads neatly maintained, and their country generally enclosed with reed fences.”¹⁸

While we find missionaries engaging with the idea of civilization, however, they do not simply replicate the lexicon, nor the triumphal narrative, of secular Enlightenment philosophy. Rather, they use the theological concept of sanctification to refashion the idea of civilization, such that the processes of the change of customs, traditions, and habits in islander communities are accounted for as generated by their Christian conversion. This is a fascinating phenomenon because Buzacott and Williams turned a theological, and therefore normative, idea into an analytical and descriptive one. Their ethnographic descriptions of the Cook islanders were driven by deploying the theological idea of sanctification to perform analytical ethnographic work. As Aaron Buzacott put it, “the religious conversion of a people is a radical change of their inner life itself, and determines all the principles and impulses of their future actions. Just as in individual men, there is no change so radical and causative as religious conversion, so it is in a collective people.”¹⁹ As we will see, when Buzacott and Williams came to describe the changes in the societies to which they evangelized, their observations were explained as being a result of “their turning from idols to serve the living and true God,” as Buzacott put it.²⁰

Williams

John Williams, one of the most well-known evangelical missionaries of the South Pacific, was born in London in the winter of 1796. As a young adult, Williams was invited to attend Whitefield Tabernacle, one of the centers of the eighteenth-century evangelical revival led by John Wesley and George Whitefield. In 1815, having attended Whitefield Tabernacle for about a year, Williams found his calling, and approached the LMS. In 1816, he was ordained, and married Mary Chawner. Within months the newlyweds set sail to the South Pacific. Having traveled through Rio, Hobart, and Sydney, John and Mary Williams arrived in Moorea, in the Society Islands of French Polynesia in 1817. He began training a select few of his converts to Christianity to be able to evangelize to, and disciple, their fellow islanders. By 1822, Williams felt that he had trained at least one young man, Papeiha, who was native to Raiatea, to such a degree that he would be competent to join the mission work himself. Later that year, the Williamses and Papeiha arrived in the Cook Islands (then known as the Hervey Islands) and landed at Rarotonga, where Williams left Papeiha to continue the work. Williams found himself back in the Hervey Islands five years later in 1827, and remained on Rarotonga while he worked on the translation of the New Testament. That year, Aaron Buzacott and his wife Sarah arrived. The Williamses began to split their time between Raiatea and Rarotonga, traveling back and forth numerous times, including during the period when a hurricane hit Rarotonga in 1831, and after which Mrs. Williams became dangerously sick. Eventually, after a four-year trip back to England, the Williamses returned to the Pacific, where John and his missionary colleague James Harris were murdered and eaten by cannibals on the island of Erromanga in Vanuatu in 1839.

During the mid-1830s, Williams compiled his journals and extensive notes into the book he published under the title Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Pacific: with remarks upon the natural history of the islands, origins, languages, traditions and usages of the inhabitants. The work was first published in 1837, and contains what historians now recognize as one of the foremost contributions to the early ethnography of the Pacific. The work gives an account of the various places in the Pacific where Williams spent time, but for the purposes of this article, I will focus on his extensive observations about Rarotonga. From the outset of the text, Williams described himself as “entertaining a pleasing hope” that he should see “the inhabitants of many more islands turned from darkness to light, by the transforming influence of the Gospel of Christ.”²¹ Williams was adamant, in other words, that once the islanders became Christians, they would be “sanctified” and thereby begin to be conformed to Jesus’ image. But what did this mean in practice? Theologically, as Williams and Buzacott knew well, it meant the formation of individual attributes which imitated those of Christ, rather than humanity’s sinful nature.

As eighteenth-century evangelicals stressed, the virtues, or fruits, of the Holy Spirit, listed in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, were particularly important character traits of the follower of Christ. “Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Gal. 5:22–23). Moreover, sanctification entailed self-sacrificial love—the willingness to serve others at great personal cost—articulated in the New Testament Greek term agape. One of the most popular accounts of these ideas appeared in the various sermons of John Wesley, in particular, his famous sermon entitled “The Scripture Way of Salvation.”²² None of these characteristics, of course, were culturally specific to Europe. Given that Jesus of Nazareth, and the first-century authors of the New Testament, were firmly grounded in the Middle East and Mediterranean world, there is, of course, no necessary theological connection here between sanctification and the trappings of European civilization.

How do we make sense, then, of the fact that Williams made the direct connection between evangelism and “raising a large portion of our species in the scale of being” and “introducing amongst them the laws, the order the usages, the arts and the comforts of civilized life”?²³ One interpretation of the disjunction between the theological idea of sanctification, and its practical application in the Pacific, would simply state that Williams was, at heart, bringing a kind of cultural imperialism to the Pacific, and that Christianity should therefore simply be understood as a convenient justification. Obviously, to some extent, this is the case. But such an account is so simplistic, that, if left there, it overlooks a more complex phenomenon in Williams’s work. Moreover, as noted above, there is already an extensive literature on the issue of missionaries’ role in imperialism, broadly conceived.²⁴ Instead, I would suggest that it is fruitful to try to understand the relationship between missionaries and Enlightenment ideas, in particular, that of civilization. Williams used the theology of sanctification to adapt the idea of civilization for his own purposes. For one thing, sanctification enabled Williams to describe the apparent transformation in the islanders’ lives, on both an individual and a societal level. Consider how he explained the task of the missionary:

The Missionary enterprise regards the whole globe as its sphere of operation. It is founded upon the grand principles of Christian benevolence, made imperative by the command of the ascending Saviour, and has for its primary object to roll away from six hundred millions of the race of Adam the heavy curse which rests upon them; to secure their elevation to the dignity of intelligent creatures and children of God;—to engage their thoughts in the contemplation, and to gladden their hearts with the prospects, of immortality; to make known “the way of life” through the meritorious sufferings of the Redeemer;—in a word, to fil the whole earth with the glory of the Lord.²⁵

To a certain extent, eradicating some traditional islander customs was theologically sound because it was consistent with the biblical idea of the sanctity of human life, created in God’s image, and the care for what the Bible called “the least of these,” the most vulnerable people. Indeed, these two biblical ideas were also central to the social programs of the evangelicals back in England. It is not surprising, nor at odds with his theology, that the missionaries attempted to eradicate the practices of infanticide and human sacrifice, which were a part of traditional life in Rarotonga. Williams proudly proclaimed that “their sanguinary wars have ceased; the altars of their gods are not now stained with the blood of human beings offered up in sacrifice; and mothers have ceased to destroy their innocent babes.”²⁶ But what happens when we consider how Williams dealt with customs, manners, and concepts of civility and barbarism that had scant biblical basis but were central to contemporary European discussions of civilization? Williams used the lexicon of savagery, for example, when explaining that “the savage disposition cannot, in all cases, be entirely eradicated in a few months.”²⁷ Likewise, he explained that he instructed two islander missionaries “to impart knowledge of that Gospel by which, savage as they are, they will ultimately be civilized and blessed.”²⁸

When Williams came to describe the actual changes in customs and manners that had taken place, and produce what historians have recognized as a contribution to the early ethnography of the Cook Islands (and elsewhere), he used the concept of sanctification to re-describe the effects of civilization, such that he presented the two as symbiotic. In other words, the concept of sanctification took on analytical power to explain and describe the processes John Williams witnessed on a societal level. The gospel was “mighty to the pulling down of strongholds” and there was at least one means by which “uncivilized nations might be constrained to bless, rather than execrate, the day when civilized men first landed on their shores.”²⁹ The law is one of the most interesting fields to consider here. Not only was the law central to Enlightenment ideas about the advent of civilization, but it was also one of the most important aspects of the reforms of progressive evangelicals back in England. In Rarotonga, Williams attempted to establish a new law code to replace tribal law. In Williams’s eyes, the aim was “as far as possible, to lay a permanent foundation for the civil liberties of the people by instituting at once that greatest barrier to oppression—trial by jury.”³⁰ Williams went on to explain that the code, having undergone some modification, was “adopted by the chiefs and people of Rarotonga and thus we trust that the reign of despotism, tyranny and private revenge, under which the inhabitants … had so long groaned, has for ever terminated.”³¹

Williams gave an illustration of this transformation, in which a young boy was caught stealing, and was being punished for that crime under the traditional system, by being drowned alive:

The boy sank to the bottom and would soon have paid for the crime with his life, and not one of the native teachers, who saw him thrown into the water, immediately plunged in, and rescued him from this perilous situation. It was evident to the chiefs that none of these sanguinary modes of punishment were in accordance with the merciful spirit of the religion they now pressed, and wishing that their civil and judicial polity should be so, they very naturally applied for advice.³²

For Williams it was mercy and care for children which lay at the heart of the islander teacher’s opposition to the tribal punishment of the death penalty for the child’s stealing. Establishing a legal system which embodied these principles was not simply part of a civilizing process. In Williams’s eyes, it formed part of the “important duty of extending the knowledge and blessings of the gospel.”³³

The other key area that Williams desired to reform was education. Like the law, educational reforms were central to evangelicals, Liberals, and Whigs in Victorian England. While education aligned with the general goals of improvement and useful knowledge which were popular in the Enlightenment’s intellectual milieu, for Williams, education began with the gospel. He understood education to be of fundamental importance because understanding Jesus’ teachings was necessary in order to follow them. For this reason, Williams’s literacy efforts began with his translations of the Bible. Williams translated the Gospel of John and Paul’s letter to the Galatians into the Rarotongan language, a feat which was facilitated by his previous work on, and knowledge of, Tahitian. In order to print the translations of the Bible, a printing press was brought to the Cook Islands in 1830, and was placed on the island of Mangaia.

Williams used the idea of sanctification to describe the transformation in individuals’ lives, and in the collective life of the society of Rarotonga once some measures toward schooling and literacy were introduced, despite the fact that Williams openly admitted in his personal correspondence that such measures were rudimentary at best. In a letter which forms part of the South Seas Letters collection of the LMS at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, Williams reflected on the difficulties of educating the Rarotongans in the Bible. “For a serpent, their present idea is a sea eel, and for a trumpet, a conch shell … [M]any beautiful passages relative to pastoral affairs are utterly lost to them, for want of a mode of conveying ideas which pictures alone can afford.”³⁴ In another letter to the LMS in July 1838, Williams lamented that very young children received inadequate education, and that none of the missionaries under his supervision was competent to educate young children.³⁵ Despite admitting that his efforts were only partially successful at best, Williams used the theological concept of sanctification to help frame this process. The legal and education systems that Williams sought to introduce were not seen as the mere products of a secular, historical process of civilizing, but rather as the outworkings of grace. Williams reminded his readers that it was not secular history which defined the progress or advancement or “civilizing” of the Rarotongans. “He in whose work we are engaged is the Wonderful Counsellor, the government is upon his shoulders, and he overrules all human events for the furtherance of his designs of mercy.”³⁶

Buzacott

Aaron Buzacott, like John Williams, was a working-class boy who apprenticed as a blacksmith. He was born in March 1800 in Devon, to parents who were members of the Congregational Church which used the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. After a period spent working on a local farm Buzacott recollected that “the voice of Jesus called” him.³⁷ Various pastors took an interest in the young Aaron and persuaded him to engage in missionary work. He spent a year under the tuition of Rev. Francis of Ludlow, in Shropshire, as a preparation for studying theology. The following year, Buzacott entered Hoxton Academy, one of the well-known Dissenting academies, where his tutors recommended him to the Board of Directors of the LMS. Just before his twenty-seventh birthday, Buzacott was ordained in Exeter, and married Sarah Verney Hitchcock. A couple of months later, the Buzacotts set sail and arrived in Tahiti five months later, in August 1827. The following year, after Sarah gave birth to their son in Tahiti, the Buzacotts arrived in Rarotonga in February 1828, where they spent the next 14 years, before they left due to ill health and came to Sydney, in the colony of New South Wales. After a trip back to London, they returned to Rarotonga in 1851 before retiring and dying in Sydney in 1864.

What is interesting about Buzacott’s descriptions of the islanders is that he used his theological resources, in particular the concept of sanctification, to refashion the secular idea of civilization such that the driving force in the process was not historical development but rather the transformation wrought by the Holy Spirit. When he reflected on what he saw as the islanders’ apparent eagerness for European customs, Buzacott remarked that “they were eager to learn the novel arts of civilisation but seemed to have no conception of their need of regeneration by the Holy Ghost.”³⁸ As far as Buzacott was concerned, as much as the islanders might desire the accoutrements of European civilization, there could be no actual progress or advancement without sanctification; the “regeneration by the Holy Ghost,” as he put it. Eventually, however, Buzacott claimed that the missionaries had some success. In 1834, Buzacott’s letter to the LMS recorded that there was a “spirit of religious excitement at Rarotonga.”³⁹ When it became clear to Buzacott that the Rarotongans’ customs and habits had begun to transform, he described the outcome as the result of the “wonderful changes wrought by God through their self-denying labours.”⁴⁰ As Buzacott explained, “in 1828 the natives appeared as naked savages, the men wearing a narrow belt of cloth round the loins; the women girded with a short petticoat of tapa,” but now, he noted, “they are tidily dressed in European costume—cotton shirt, white trousers, and white frock coat.”⁴¹ As much as this reads like classic Enlightenment ethnography, Buzacott was adamant that this was not, in fact, the result of a secular process of civilizing, but rather of what he termed “a new era in the moral history of Rarotonga,” inaugurated by the conversion of the islanders to Christianity and the work of the Holy Spirit in “regenerating” their lives.⁴²

When he came to describe some of the individual Rarotongans’ transformations following their conversion, Buzacott also used the theological concept of sanctification to help frame the process he observed. Referring to Makea, a young chieftain who had converted to Christianity, Buzacott remarked that “the customs, the manners, the habits, the worship, the life of his people, were all changed. He himself was an illustration of the mighty change that God had wrought—a change which justified and rewarded the missionary enterprise.”⁴³ Despite Buzacott’s obvious excitement at Makea’s example of individual transformation, Buzacott, like Williams, believed that the most important areas of renewal and sanctification were on a societal level, particularly in education. As far as Buzacott was concerned, the proper foundation of education was knowledge of God, and in particular, the ability to read the Bible. In 1832, Buzacott acquired a printing press from Huahine, and set to work translating and printing the Bible. His next step was the establishment of a school at Avarua, in the north of the island, which used the Bible as the foundation stone for teaching English, as well as those skills considered practical and useful. In 1839, Buzacott wrote to the LMS to report that he had two students at the school, and that, in addition to studying theology, they devoted “four hours daily study to mechanical and agricultural pursuits.”⁴⁴ By 1857, Buzacott triumphantly constructed a narrative of success. “Let the reader compare the ignorance and helplessness of the people in 1828, with their thorough acquaintance of the Word of God and with the … elementary branches of education in 1857.”⁴⁵

The issue here is not the success—or lack thereof—of the missionary efforts, nor Buzacott’s agenda in constructing his narrative, but rather his refashioning of the idea of civilizing around the concept of sanctification. As we saw earlier, Buzacott was competent using the lexicon of Enlightenment ideas of civilization and development, and stated that the “greatest transformation” a people can undergo is from “barbarism to civilization.”⁴⁶ He was aware that the missionary played a dual role here. In the first instance, the missionary was spreading the gospel and thus serving as an instrument in the renewal and development of the islanders. But at the same time, Buzacott (like Williams) was simultaneously an observer, performing what we would now refer to as ethnographic work. As Buzacott put quite plainly when explaining his ability to participate in, and observe, the transformation of the islanders, “of this change, the missionary is often the witness, the means, and the historian.”⁴⁷ It is not surprising, then, that Buzacott argued that “the birth of a nation” was “twofold,” involving both “the birth of its civil and the birth of its religious life.”⁴⁸ Buzacott’s use of sanctification to reshape and accommodate the concept of civilizing enabled him to be at ease navigating his dual roles as “witness” as well as “instrument”—to use his terminology—of the historical development of civilization.

Conclusion

This article explored the way in which two Protestant missionaries to the Cook Islands in the mid-nineteenth century, John Williams and Aaron Buzacott, engaged with the idea of civilization in their ethnographic descriptions of the islanders. While Buzacott and Williams firmly understood that the missionary was the instrument of transforming civilization, they did not merely replicate the lexicon or concept of civilization contained in secular Enlightenment philosophy. I argued that Buzacott and Williams used the theological concept of sanctification to help frame the secular, historical process of “civilizing” the Cook islanders, such that they argued that the driving force in the process of civilizing was not historical development, but rather the sanctifying transformation wrought by the Holy Spirit. In short, Williams and Buzacott used the theological concept of sanctification to perform descriptive and ethnographic, rather than purely theological and normative, work. This case study provides a window into a significant phenomenon in which theological concepts played a formative, and frequently overlooked role in Pacific missionary anthropology and ethnography. Historians of missionaries might now begin to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between Enlightenment ideas and the work of evangelical missionaries. Given that evangelical ideas in this period were circulated throughout the globe, it would be particularly fruitful to map whether there were similarities, or even a dialogue between, these conceptions of civilization and sanctification in the Pacific, and those pursued by missionaries to indigenous peoples in North America. The globalization of nineteenth-century missionary ideas is an exciting field, ready to be addressed by scholars of missiology.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

ORCID iD

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker

Author biography

Sarah Irving-Stonebraker is Senior Lecturer in History at Western Sydney University, Australia. She was awarded her PhD in History from Cambridge University (2007), where she was a Commonwealth Scholar at King’s College. Her first book, Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire (Routledge, 2008, 2016) was awarded The Royal Society of Literature and Jerwood Foundation Award for Non-fiction. She was formerly Assistant Professor of Religion at Florida State University, and Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford University.

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