Captain Joseph Bates wrote the original autobiography. After his death, Elder James White edited and republished the account with an introduction and closing remarks. Open either original scan at its cover and use the built-in reader controls or the zoom buttons below.
His own account of life at sea, impressment into British naval service, years as a prisoner of war, Dartmoor Prison, and his later Advent ministry.
Open the 1868 AutobiographyJames White’s later edition preserves Captain Bates’s autobiography while adding an editor’s preface and closing reflections. James White wrote: “The author was one of those noble and godly men who though ‘dead yet speaketh.’”
Open James White’s 1877 EditionCaptain Joseph Bates was born in Rochester, Massachusetts, on July 8, 1792, and grew up near Fairhaven. He went to sea as a teenager—reportedly at age 15—and spent two decades as a merchant sailor, eventually earning his master's papers and commanding his own vessels.
During the War of 1812, Captain Joseph Bates was forced into British naval service and later confined as an American prisoner of war. After approximately five years under British control—including imprisonment at Dartmoor—he was released in April 1815. Captain Bates personally recorded these remarkable experiences in The Autobiography of Elder Joseph Bates (1868). The phrase “held captive” opens into his own account of impressment, service on British warships, and long confinement in Dartmoor Prison. He sailed under difficult conditions, witnessed hardship at sea, and developed the discipline and directness that would define his ministry. By 1827 he had accumulated enough wealth to retire comfortably from the sea.
Captain William Miller and Captain Joseph Bates both passed through the fiery crucible of the War of 1812. Miller defended America as a United States Army officer and witnessed the Battle of Plattsburgh; Bates, an impressed American sailor, refused British service against his country and endured imprisonment at Dartmoor. Their later partnership in the Advent movement carried the memory of that war into a very different campaign: the public search for truth in Scripture and the soon return of Christ. Compare the two lives in Captain William Miller's biography and in Bates's own 1868 autobiography.
According to his own autobiography, Captain Bates's wife, Prudence Nye Bates, packed a Bible for him on a voyage. His reading during that journey contributed to his eventual conversion to the Christian faith. After his retirement from the sea, he threw himself into reform movements: temperance, abolition of slavery, anti-tobacco, anti-tea and coffee, and dietary reform.
He gave away nearly his entire savings in charitable and mission causes, including to tract societies and the emerging Advent movement. By the time he became deeply involved in Adventism, he had little materially left — and considered that entirely proper.
Before Captain Joseph Bates carried the Sabbath message across the Advent movement, he questioned a teaching he had heard at home. His parents belonged to the Congregational church. In his autobiography, Bates recalled telling his father that he could not understand a view in which Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, was also the Father—“one and the same being.”
The conversation came during the spring of 1827, when a revival of religion in Fairhaven set Bates thinking about which body of Christians to join. His wife, Prudence, had long been a member of the Christian church, which took “the Scriptures for their only rule of faith and practice, renouncing all creeds.” His father, “a deacon of long standing” in the Congregational church, “labored to convince” him. Bates named two points he could not accept: “their mode of baptism, and doctrine of the trinity.”
“Respecting the trinity, I concluded that it was an impossibility for me to believe that the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, was also the Almighty God, the Father, one and the same being. I said to my father, ‘If you can convince me that we are one in this sense, that you are my father, and I your son; and also that I am your father, and you my son, then I can believe in the trinity.’”
— The Autobiography of Elder Joseph Bates (1868), p. 204
Bates put the problem to his own father in the plain language of their relationship: could the father also be his son, and the son also be his father? “Then I can believe in the trinity,” Bates said. — The Autobiography of Elder Joseph Bates (1868), p. 204. Read Bates’s account.
The same Bible-only test settled his baptism. After prayer he read Psalm 27 and said, “Lord, I will! If I wait on thee according to thy word, I must be immersed—buried with Christ in baptism.” “In a few days I was immersed and joined the Christian church,” he wrote, and that same day he began raising the Fairhaven Temperance Society (pp. 205–206).
James White later wrote, “The Father was greater than the Son in that he was first.” White immediately added that the Son was equal with the Father because He had received all things from the Father. — “The Mind of Christ,” The Review and Herald, January 4, 1881, p. 2. Read the original issue.
Read their words beside the KJV: Genesis 1:26–27; John 17:3; John 20:17; 1 Corinthians 8:6; and John 5:26. Bates’s question still invites a careful answer: Who is the Father, and who is His Son? Study the five KJV questions on “Let Us Make Man in Our Image”: The Father and His Son.
Captain Bates accepted the Millerite message around 1839 after hearing Captain William Miller preach on Daniel 8:14. He threw himself into Advent evangelism. He was a speaker, organizer, and writer in the movement that announced Christ's coming before October 22, 1844.
When the Great Disappointment came on October 22, 1844, Captain Bates was among those deeply shaken but not completely cast down. He was convinced the day was correct even if the event was misunderstood — and he began searching the Scriptures with renewed intensity.
In 1845, Captain Bates encountered a tract by Thomas Motherwell Preble arguing for the seventh-day Sabbath from Scripture. He studied it carefully, and it convinced him. He immediately began preaching the Sabbath with full force.
His 1846 tract, The Seventh-Day Sabbath, a Perpetual Sign, was the first major Adventist work defending the seventh-day Sabbath. He argued from Exodus 31:13 and Ezekiel 20:12 that the Sabbath was a sign between God and His people — perpetual, not abolished, not transferred to Sunday.
The widow Rachel Oakes Preston and Elder Frederick Wheeler had already adopted the Sabbath in Washington, New Hampshire, by 1844 — but Captain Bates did more than any other man to systematize and spread Sabbath theology in the early movement.
At the Sabbath Conferences of 1848, held in Volney, Rocky Hill, Topsham, and Dorchester, Captain Bates labored alongside James White and Ellen White to establish the pillars of Adventist doctrine — Sabbath, sanctuary, state of the dead, and the Three Angels' Messages.
Ellen White recorded that before she received a vision confirming the Sabbath, Captain Bates was not fully satisfied she had genuine prophetic gift. After the vision, in which she accurately affirmed the connections Captain Bates had been teaching about the planets and astronomy, he became fully persuaded and said: "I am satisfied that her vision is of God."
Captain Joseph Bates's 1849 tract, A Seal of the Living God (1849), is one of the most important documents of early Adventism. In it, Captain Bates argued that:
Bates connected the Sabbath, the sanctuary, and the sealing into a coherent prophetic framework that became central to Sabbatarian Adventism. His insight was not that the Sabbath was merely a day of rest — it was the identifying sign of those who are "married to the Lamb" as His bride, chosen through the investigative judgment.
Elder John Norton Loughborough, one of early Adventism's most durable pioneers, carried the sealing message forward into the twentieth century with his own 1916 study, exploring the same Revelation 7 sealing truth Captain Bates had first laid out nearly seventy years earlier.
Read the sealing tract: A Seal of the Living God (PDF) Three Angels / Seal Summary: Full Summary (PDF)
Captain Bates worked throughout the late 1840s and early 1850s organizing the scattered Adventist believers. He traveled widely, held meetings in private homes and small chapels, and helped link groups that had come to accept the Sabbath and sanctuary truths independently.
Captain Bates strongly supported formal church organization when it finally came in 1861–1863, recognizing that the scattered state of the believers weakened the work. He was present at the formation of the Michigan Conference and the General Conference in 1863.
Another crucial Captain Bates work is The Second Advent Waymarks and High Heaps (1847). In this tract he traced the prophetic waymarks from 1840 (First Angel's Message) through the Midnight Cry and October 22, 1844, showing that these were not mistakes but divine milestones. The publication was made possible because a widow sold her small farm and gave half the proceeds to print it.
The waymarks Captain Bates identified remain foundational to historic Adventist understanding:
Captain Bates was known for personal severity in reform. He abstained from alcohol, tobacco, tea, coffee, and meat. He pressed these reforms on others with what some described as excessive strictness. Historical records show he occasionally received correction from his fellow laborers regarding his tone, but he never abandoned the substance of what he taught.
He was also known for personal sacrifice. Captain Bates gave his financial reserves to the cause, traveled at personal cost, and maintained a simple life to the end.
Captain Joseph Bates died in Battle Creek, Michigan, on March 19, 1872. He was 79. His funeral was attended by many of the leading figures of early Adventism.
He is remembered as:
Captain Bates's connection between Sabbath, sanctuary, and sealing — articulated in A Seal of the Living God (1849) — remains the prophetic framework through which the 144,000 are understood to be sealed before the close of probation and the standing up of Michael (Daniel 12:1).
Heman Stetson Gurney's biography follows the working believer who traveled with Captain Bates, received the Sabbath-and-sealing message, and became known as the “singing blacksmith.” His testimony also preserves an eyewitness account of Ellen White in vision during a carriage journey to encourage believers. Heman helped print Ellen's To the Little Remnant Scattered Abroad broadside, and he and his son Charles were later arrested for working in the field on Sunday. Read the companion biography of his wife, Anne “Eliza” Elizabeth Gurney, for the household witness behind this early work.
Captain Bates wrote the original 1868 autobiography himself. After his death, Elder James White edited and republished the account in 1877, adding an introduction and closing remarks. James White wrote of Captain Bates: “The author was one of those noble and godly men who though ‘dead yet speaketh.’”
Published writings and theological contributions
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