It was in the year 1822 that “it pleased God, who called me by his grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the heathen.” I was then in the eighteenth year of my age, and the second of my apprenticeship to a mercantile house in Dublin; but my parents having consented to my studying for the ministry, my master most kindly gave me up my indentures, indorsed with a good character. Accepted in 1825 by the Scottish Missionary Society as one of its students, I was ordained in 1829 by the Edinburgh Presbytery of the United Secession Church, and, accompanied by a “true yoke fellow,” departed for Jamaica, the appointed field of my future labours. There we landed in the middle of December, among scenes, to the eye the loveliest, to the heart the bleakest that can be imagined.

A life-time in the tropics has not effaced the first vivid impressions of the splendid scenery that burst on our view as our ship passed close along the coast of several of the West India Islands. Their varied forms and brilliant colours—their cane-fields, and pastures, and woods—steep ascents and deep ravines—snow-white beach, sparkling wavelets, and verdant shores, clothed in beauty to the water's edge, all bathed and glowing in floods of radiance—surpassed every previous conception, and seemed to assure us that the Isles of the Blest were not fabulous—that there might be found the Gardens of the Hesperides.