and educational needs of his people. Through Potter's ingenuity, the Wesleyan mission society sent not only Bibles but a Methodist missionary, Joseph Rhodes Dunwell of Yorkshire. Dunwell arrived on 4 January 1835 and immediately started his public ministry at Cape Coast and organised weekly meetings with local Christians. Dunwell died after six months on the Gold Coast, on 24 June 1835, from tropical fever. By 1844, 15 missionaries had died on the coast. Within the first eight years of Methodist mission in Ghana, out of a total of 21 missionaries sent to the Gold Coast, 11 including all five of Dunwell's successors, died. These successors include George O. Wrigley of Lancashire and his wife, Harriet, who both sailed on 12 August 1836 and arrived on 15 September 1836, 15 months after the death of Dunwell. He was assisted by Peter Harrod, who came to the Gold Coast with his wife on 15 January 1837. Peter Harrop of Derbyshire died on 11 February 1837, three days after his wife had died and three weeks after their arrival. Harriet Wrigley died on the same day as Mrs. Harrop. Nine months later, George Wrigley succumbed to a tropical ailment at Cape Coast on 16 November 1837. It is noteworthy that after only eight months in Cape Coast, Wrigley read the Ten Commandments in Fante on Sunday, 28 May 1837, preached in Fante three months later, on 20 August, and on 3 September 1837, he performed baptism using liturgy spoken in the Fante language. All five missionaries were buried in graves below the pulpit of the first Methodist chapel at Cape Coast. In Accra, the Wesleyan mission founded a theological institute in 1842 to train teachers-catechists. This institution was originally put into the care of the missionary couple, the Rev. and Mrs. Shipman. However, after the death of the school's first principal, the Rev. Samuel Shipman, the project was abandoned. Earlier on, James Hayford, a colonial representative of the British Merchant Company Administration in Kumasi, had started a Methodist Fellowship of a sort in Kumasi. Another Fante Christian and trader, John Mills, co-led the fellowship at Kumasi. Hayford was on good terms with the Asante royal family and was permitted to conduct a church service at the Asantehene's palace. Subsequently, Thomas Birch Freeman arrived on the Gold Coast in this period in 1838. Motivated by the positive development of Hayford's activities, Freeman had raised