John Rowe

John Rowe (1788-1816) was from Somersetshire. He was baptized at Yeovil in 1807 and entered Bristol Academy in 1810. John Ryland struggled for several years to find a candidate to assist Moses Baker in Jamaica. At the base of a letter from William Wilberforce to Ryland, 19 November 1807, he writes in reference to Jamaica, “I cannot but think it is of great importance for us to send out some one speedily.  I have waited with great anxiety several years for some one to send.” He would find his man in Rowe. As the Broadmead Church Book notes on 8 December 1813: “John Rowe, a member of the church at Yeovil, late a student in the Academy, who married Sarah Gundry, one of our members, was ordained in our Meeting House by prayer and laying on of hands, in order to his going as a missionary to Jamaica.” The Rowes sailed on 31 December 1813 and arrived in Jamaica on 23 February 1814; his ministry, however, was short-lived, as he succumbed to a fever on 27 June 1816. Baker would later say of Rowe, “Though at a place where the most minute parts of his conduct were liable to the severest scrutiny, he conducted himself with such prudence and meekness as, at length, to gain the confidence and respect of the most prejudiced.” See Wilberforce-Ryland Correspondence, MS. G.97a., Bristol Baptist College Library; Broadmead Church Book, 1779–1817. MS., Bristol Record Office, Bd/M1/3, f. 345; BMS Periodical Accounts, vol. 6, pp. 72-73; John Clarke, Memorials of the Baptist Missionaries in Jamaica (London: Yates and Alexander, 1869), 18-30; Leslie Brooke, Baptists in Yeovil:  History of the Yeovil Baptist Church (Bath: Ralph Allen, 2002) 13-14.