Their union had been a happy one, as Johannes was sympathetic to the social mores of African peoples; he had even designed a missionary's uniform based on the local male dress, in spite of Mission headquarters having discouraged the use of African vestments. He opposed the transatlantic slave trade but countenanced African domestic slavery, which he felt provided family structures for the integration of persons without a sense of community and identity; having understood the rationale for the practice, he felt that it would be gradually displaced by the Christian example; and having been cured of a serious ailment by a herbalist, he did not scoff at herbal medicines. The roots of his empathy lay in his interest in local languages; to learn a language was to understand a society's way of life, value systems and categorization of people, objects and events. He learned to speak and devised a spelling system for the Ga language; he translated the Bible into Ga and composed hymns in Ga ; and in 1858 he published A grammatical sketch and vocabulary of the Akra- or Ga Language with an appendix on the Adanme dialect followed, in 1874, by a Tshi-Akra-English dictionary compiled with Reverends J. G. Christaller and C. W. Locher.  
Catherine was no doubt proud of her husband's accomplishments and empathetic contribution to African life, and Johannes, too, was proud of her: 'my number one Catherine', as he wrote in a 1852 letter. She certainly earned the admiration of her Mission colleagues, both in Jamaica and the Gold Coast, for her assiduous work, her devotion to teaching and her influential role in  
the formal education of young Christian Gold Coast women. In addition to that seminal role, we should also note the charming effect that Catherine and her sister Susan had had as children; one Moravian pastor, writing in 1834, commended the 'two young girls' for ' $[\mathrm{T}]$ heir amiable dispositions, pleasing manners, and wonderfully providential leading, [which] render[ed] them objects of interest to ourselves, and every Christian visitor'. ${ }^{11}$