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).
[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.
[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.
[8] John Clarke got married in Berwick-upon-Tweed to a wife, Margaret, from that town in 1829, shortly before setting out for Jamaica.