He worked from his base in Montego Bay, Jamaica for twenty-two years, from 1824–46. During these years, the abolition movement developed in the colony, which he supported. He wrote letters to family, friends and the missionary society in England about the harsh conditions of slavery. He and his wife lived to see the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, in the period from 1834, when children of slave mothers were considered free at birth and adults were subject to multi-year "apprenticeships," to 1838, when all chattel slavery was ended.