Joseph Merrick

Joseph Merrick (August 1808 – 22 October 1849) was a Jamaican Baptist missionary who, assisted by Joseph Jackson Fuller, established the first successful mission on the Cameroon coast of Africa.

Biography Merrick was born in August 1808 in Jamaica.

Merrick began preaching in 1837 in Jamaica and was ordained a full missionary in 1838. In 1842, Reverend John Clarke and Dr. G. K. Prince, members of the Baptist Missionary Society of London, were seeking Jamaican lay missionaries to join them on an expedition to the Cameroon coast. Merrick signed on. The party reached England on 8 September 1842, and arrived at Spanish-controlled Santa Isabel on the island of Fernando Po in 1843. Over the next four to five years, translated parts of the New Testament into the Isubu language,

In 1849, Merrick was in ill health. He set off for England on furlough, and on 22 October, he died at sea. Joseph Merrick Baptist College in Ndu, Northwest Province, Cameroon, is named for him.