and anti-elitism.” Gold Coast and Asante Thomas Freeman, his wife, Elizabeth Booth and Joseph Smith, the headmaster of the Cape Coast Castle School sailed aboard the Osborne to the Gold Coast and landed at Cape Coast on 3 January 1838. On his arrival Gold Coast in 1838, the Cape Coast Methodists offered gifts: "37 fowls, 43 [tubers] of yam, a few bunches of shallots…a basket of corn for feeding fowls.” Within a month and a half, Thomas Birch Freeman became ill with malaria and his first wife cared for him. Shortly thereafter, Booth died suddenly from an inflammatory condition on 20 February 1838 as Freeman recuperated, within seven weeks of their arrival. Eventually, he overcame the grief of his wife's death and started the strenuous programme as a missionary. Freeman became close friends with Captain George Maclean, the Governor of the British Gold Coast from 1830 to 1843, who encouraged him through his personal tribulation. Thomas Freeman also sought counsel from connoisseurs of the Gold Coast, who had a deeper knowledge on the culture and geography of the country. He purchased a more spacious mission house with a design conducive to the environment. He then completed the first Methodist Church at Cape Coast, the Wesley Methodist Cathedral, inaugurated on 10 June 1838. The missionaries, Wrigley and Harrop had started the structures before their early deaths. Freeman had started the rebuilding on 17 January 1838, a fortnight after his arrival. The opening service was attended by Governor Maclean, European residents on the coast and more than 1200 native people, with many congregants overflowing outside the chapel. Furthermore, he supervised the planting of multiple Methodist churches at Anomabo, 8 km (5 miles) to the east, and at Dominase, 28 km (18 mi) to the northeast, of Cape Coast. Freeman trained two ethnic Fante young men, William de Graft and John Martin in catechism, in preparation for the "native ministry" as his colleague Wesleyan missionaries saw him as a fellow Englishman. He befriended several paramount chieftains on the Gold Coast and was nicknamed “Okomfo Obroni” meaning "white fetish priest" in the Fante language. His arrival on the coast, as the fourth Methodist missionary in the colony, was on Wednesday. As such, he was dubbed, Kwaku Annan. In Akan culture, Kwaku is the day name given to a male child born on a Thursday. Annan refers to the fourth male child. Thomas Freeman sent