Joshua Marshman (20 April 1768 – 6 December 1837) was a British Christian missionary in Bengal, India. His mission involved social reforms and intellectual debates with educated Hindus such as Raja Ram Mohan Roy. Origins Joshua Marshman was born on 20 April 1768 in Britain at Westbury Leigh, Wiltshire. Of his family little is known, except that they traced their descent from an officer in the Army of Cromwell, one of a band who, at the Restoration, relinquished, for conscience-sake, all views of worldly aggrandisement, and retired into the country to support himself by his own industry. His father John passed the early part of his life at sea and was engaged in the Hind, a British frigate commanded by Captain Robert Bond, at the 1759 capture of Quebec. Shortly after this, he returned to England and in 1764 married Mary Couzener. She was a descendant of a French family who had sought refuge in England following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes; after his marriage he lived in Westbury Leigh and took up the trade of a weaver. Early days Marshman's family were poor and could give him little education. In 1791, Joshua married Hannah Shepherd and in 1794 they moved from Westbury Leigh to Bristol. There they joined the Broadmead Baptist Church, and Marshman taught in a local charity school supported by the church. At this time he also studied at the Bristol Baptist College. On 29 May 1799 Marshman his wife and their two children set out from Portsmouth for India aboard the ship Criterion. Although there was a threat of a French naval attack the family landed safely at the Danish settlement of Serampore, a few miles north of Calcutta, on 13 October 1799. Family The couple had 12 children; of these only five were alive when their father died. Their youngest daughter Hannah married Henry Havelock, who became a British general in India, and whose statue is in Trafalgar Square, London. Their daughter Rachel was married to the forestry administrator Sir Dietrich Brandis. When he first met pioneering missionary William Carey's four boys in 1800, Marshman was appalled by the neglect with which Carey treated them. Aged 4, 7, 12 and 15, they were unmannered, undisciplined, and even uneducated. Marshman, his wife Hannah, and their friend the printer William Ward, took the boys in tow. Together they shaped the boys as Carey pampered his