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]