John Clarke (1802–1879) was an English Baptist minister and missionary, who served in Jamaica and Fernando Po (an island off the coast of West Africa). He is the author of a collection of comparative vocabulary in numerous West African languages, published in 1848/9,[1] as well as a grammar of the Fernandian (Bube) language of Fernando Po.[2]
Clarke first went to Jamaica in 1829 and worked as a teacher and Baptist minister in Kingston, Spanish Town, and elsewhere until 1840, when he was sent with George K. Prince to investigate the possibilities of founding a mission in West Africa. They landed in Fernando Po in January 1841.[3] In 1842 Clarke went back to Jamaica and England to recruit volunteers for the mission, returning in February 1844 with a party of Jamaican teachers and settlers, among them the 18-year-old Joseph Jackson Fuller, who was later to become famous himself as a missionary.[4]
The mission on the island of Fernando Po was not a success, and was eventually forced to close in 1858, mainly due to restrictions from the Spanish authorities, who claimed the island and were determined to make it Catholic;[5] but the mission which the Baptists founded on the Cameroonian mainland opposite the island survived until it was taken over by the Basel Mission Society in 1886.[6] Clarke himself became ill and in 1847 he and his wife went back to Jamaica, and then in 1848 to England.[7] After a time he returned to Jamaica, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life.[8]
John Clarke got married in Berwick-upon-Tweed to a wife, Margaret, from that town in 1829, shortly before setting out for Jamaica. They remained together for more than 40 years until she died. Two of their children died in childhood, but a daughter survived.[9]
