After this the history of the Society is a record of meetings, committees, travels, and labors, of deputations to the churches, difficulties and embarrassments, in the midst of which no one was more devoted and useful in bringing the plans of the young Society into working order than Carey's valuable friend, Andrew Fuller. The first subscription list was made up at another meeting of the Association, held at Kettering, in Carey's own county, in the autumn of the same year. Its promises amounted to £13 2s. 6d. This little fund was the precursor of the tens of thousands which have since flowed into the treasuries of our modern Christian Missionary Societies. In twenty-nine days after the fund was started at Kettering, Birmingham followed with the noble gift of £70. The Society was now fairly started, with the resolution formally recorded on its minute-books "to convey the message of salvation to some portion of the heathen world." On the 9th of January, 1793, Carey and a colleague were appointed by the Committee to proceed at once to India. Carey's colleague was a man of extraordinary missionary zeal, who had "lately returned from Bengal, and was endeavoring to establish a fund in London for a mission to that country."[43] He was a Baptist, and on hearing of the schemes of his brethren in England, he readily fell in with their proposal that he should accompany Carey to India. But the question of finding a berth on an English vessel was not easily settled. No English captain dare take them out without a government license, and to obtain a license as missionaries was not to be thought of. Having at one time gone on board a vessel with all their baggage, they were obliged by the captain, who felt that he was risking his commission in taking them on board, to land again and return to London. They were compelled at length to have recourse to a Danish vessel, the _Cron Princessa Maria_, whose captain, an Englishman by birth, though naturalized as a Dane, looked favorably on their enterprise. On the 13th of June, 1793, Carey and his companion set sail from the shores of England, their expedition as ambassadors for Christ as little heeded by the world at large as that of the Cilician tentmaker and his little band of preachers who set sail seventeen centuries before from the port of Alexandria Troas for the shores of Europe. [43] _Quarterly Review_, Feb. 1809, p. 197. This generous article on "The Periodical Accounts of the Baptist Missionary Society" is known to have been written by Southey. See below. Some idea of Thomas's passionate zeal may be formed from certain expressions in the letters sent home after Carey and he had arrived in India. He says, "Never did men see their native land with more joy than we left it; but this is not of nature, but from above," etc. See p. 223 of same article.