He headed mission stations, teaching, preaching, brick-making, and translating books such as John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress into Duala.
The people stayed all night, and at 6 o'clock in the morning a horn blew to summon the start of the working day, whereupon they lowered the coffin: they "buried old slavery".
As the mission scheme began, Joseph and his parents were given the opportunity to join the Baptist Missionary Society project as pioneers, to evangelise, bring education and welfare to, and encourage an end to slavery among some of the traditional chiefdoms and kingdoms of West Africa.
On November 30, 1843,[3] Fuller, together with his brother Samuel and 35 other West Indians, set sail to join them in a group led by John Clarke, arriving after a difficult three-month voyage.
The Society's missionaries on Fernando Po ventured to the mainland [3] to negotiate land on which to set up missions on either side of the Wouri estuary at Bimbia and Douala.
He was a genial, humorous preacher, and his message to those in Bimbia was so convincing that, besides the local people, he attracted a village chief and a group of nobles to throw down their "fetishes" and exclaim: "Now we will try yours!"
[3] In 1869 Fuller and his family travelled to England for the first time, visiting his in-laws' native Norfolk, where his oratory and first-hand account about the end of slavery in Jamaica impressed audiences.
On returning to England, he found his eldest son by Elizabeth Johnson, Alexander Merrick Fuller (1849–1898) an apprenticeship at an engineering company in Norwich.
Thomas Lewis, a fellow Baptist missionary, writing in his book These Seventy Years, recalled Joseph Jackson's popularity as a public speaker: In England, pleading the cause of his African brother, nobody had a better reception from English audiences.
Joseph Fuller died on 11 December 1908, and was buried at Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington, London, the resting place of two English missionaries to Jamaica whom he had known in his youth, Thomas Burchell and Samuel Oughton.