William Yates

William Yates (1792-1845), after serving an apprenticeship to a shoemaker, studied at Bristol Academy and then sailed for India as a BMS missionary, arriving in 1815, the first missionary to settle in India after the passage of the new charter for the East India Company in 1813. He was not willing to submit to the Serampore Mission’s rules of conduct, and so he broke with Carey, Marshman, and Ward, setting up a separate mission in Calcutta, along with James Penney, John Lawson, Eustace Carey, and W. H. Pearce. Yates, a skilled linguist, published a number of textbooks in the native languages of India. After the death of his wife, Catherine, in 1839, he married Martha Pearce, the widow of his colleague, W. H. Pearce, in 1841. Yates’s health declined and he was told to return to England in 1845, but he died on the journey and was buried at sea on 3 July 1845. See W. H. Carey, ed., Oriental Christian Biography, Containing Biographical Sketches of Distinguished Christians who have Lived and Died in the East, 3 vols. (Calcutta: J. Thomas, Baptist Mission House, 1852), 3:148-152; 1:29-48.