The Autobiography of
Elder Joseph Bates

The Sea Captain Who Spent His Last Dollar on the Sabbath

Joseph Bates commanded ocean voyages before he ever commanded a congregation. Born in Rochester, Massachusetts in 1792, he went to sea at age 15 as a cabin boy. Two decades of seafaring followed — including imprisonment by the British during the War of 1812 — before he earned his master’s papers and commanded his own vessels, sailing as far as England, the Mediterranean, and South America.

His conversion was total. He gave up rum, tobacco, tea, coffee, and finally even meat. He refused to eat sugar produced by slave labor. A committed abolitionist, he helped organize anti-slavery societies decades before the Civil War. He gave away his accumulated savings — nearly his entire fortune — to tract societies and mission work, until he had almost nothing left.

Then, in 1846, he published his first Sabbath tract — spending the last of his money to print it. He sent a copy to James and Ellen White. The result? The Whites accepted the Seventh-day Sabbath, and the three of them became the founding trio who established the original, living platform of Seventh-day Adventist truth. The foundation laid between 1841 and 1860. The one that Bates helped build — which is not the “new organization” (1SM 204) incorporated as the General Conference Corporation of Seventh-day Adventists on April 15, 1904 in the District of Columbia.

In 1868, at age 75, Bates sat down and wrote the story of his life. The autobiography covers his seafaring career, his captivity during the War of 1812, his reformation, his discovery of the Sabbath and sanctuary truths, and his role in the founding of the Advent movement. It is a treasure of Adventist history — and one of the most remarkable testimonies of what God can do with a man who surrenders everything.