Aaron Buzacott - Retirement, Death & Memorial

Retirement, Death & Memorial

Retiring for health reasons, to New South Wales in 1857, Aaron Buzacott died there on September 20, 1864, attended by his wife and many friends. His funeral was held on 21 September, a Presbyterian minister reading from Scripture, and the procession then moving on to the Bourke Street Congregational Church where Rev Hartley, a Primitive Methodist, gave out the hymn. He was buried in the Congregational burying-ground in Devonshire Street, Sydney, now the location of the Central Railway Station.

Much of his contribution to published ethnographic knowledge of the Cook Islands, Samoa and Melanesia, was set out in a volume that was published posthumously in 1866 back in London, edited by his son and J. P. Sunderland, and with a preface by the Rev. Henry Allon. The work was concluded by several letters to Mrs. Buzacott written just after the death of her husband and in high estimation of him, and a list of diseases prevalent in the islands of the South Seas.

Aaron's widow Sarah Verney Buzacott, who kept her own written account of life in the coral islands of the Pacific, died some while later in England, and is buried at the Congregationalist's Abney Park Cemetery, Stoke Newington, London. Their son, Rev. Aaron Buzacott the younger (1829–81) - who styled himself Rev Aaron Buzcott BA to distinguish his work from that of his father - became Secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society - now Anti-Slavery International - and pastor (c.1870) of the Asylum Road Congregational Chapel, later known as the Clifton Congregational Chapel, Peckham; he is buried with his mother at Abney Park Cemetery.

Today the two-story Takamoa Mission House in the coastal town of Avarua, erected by Aaron Buzacott, is a government office; and the settlement of Arorangi, established by the Rev. Aaron Buzacott as a model village to resettle people near the coast under a native pastor, a tourist destination.

References

• Buzacott, Aaron (1985 reprint), Mission Life in the Islands of the Pacific, Institute of Pacific Studies of the University of the South Pacific (SUAV) & The Cook Islands Library & Museum Society
• Joyce, Paul (1985), A Guide to Abney Park Cemetery, London: SAPC & L.B.Hackney
• French, James Branwhite (1883), A Guide to Abney Park Cemetery, London:James Clarke & Co
• Hiney, Tom (2000), On the Missionary Trail: a journey through Polynesia, Asia and Africa with the London Missionary Society

Books

• Buzacott, Aaron (1866), Mission Life in the Islands of the Pacific, London:John Snow & Co