Early one morning in October 1911, maritime officials on duty at the harbor in Portland, Maine, stared with disbelief at a vessel slowly drifting toward them out of the mist. It took only a minute to identify the ship, the once famous racing sloop Coronet.

Feared lost at sea for more than a month, suddenly here she was, appearing like a ghost of her once elegant self. Encrusted with barnacles, with shredded storm sails hanging from her masts, the yacht anchored at the medical inspection station and was boarded instantly by authorities, who hoisted the yellow flag of quarantine. On board they found deplorable conditions: sixty passengers, including women and children, in a space allocated for thirty, crowded into filthy, water-soaked quarters. The crew to a man were thin and haggard, some barely able to stand. "The worst cases of scurvy I have ever seen," the senior medical officer told the gathering reporters.

In a matter of days, a federal marshal arrested the owner of the vessel, the Rev. Frank Weston Sandford, charging him with the deaths of six of his crew. He had "unlawfully, knowingly and willfully" refused to provision a ship at sea with proper food and staples, read the indictment. Sandford pleaded not guilty. The tragedies had occurred in the process of obeying a "higher law," he told the court. He and his followers were carrying out the will and purposes of God for the end of the age and the triumphant return of Jesus Christ.

This story may seem all too familiar to modern readers--followers captivated by a deranged but convincing religious leader and led inevitably to disaster. But Sandford's organization was no backwoods parody, and Sandford himself, a graduate of Bates College, a respected young pastor, once a member of the highly acclaimed Student Volunteer Movement, had won the admiration of local and national Christian leaders and appeared to be headed for an important role in the church. So what went wrong?

Frank Heard Whispers in His Ears
With an imagination like a magnet for the powerful stream of passions in the 19th century church--perfectionism, world evangelism, end-time prophecy, and the messianic ideals of America itself--Sandford's ministry took a turn in the late 19th century, when God, he claimed, began to speak to him in whispers. The first word was "Armageddon," which he heard as a directive to establish a band of purified Christians, absolutely obedient to the Bible (as no other group or denomination yet was, he was convinced) to fulfill God's plan for the ages with "signs, wonders and mighty deeds."

He began this new work in southern Maine, with a tiny Bible school in a borrowed house. His first students, carefully selected men and women barely out of their teens, were to become the hard core of the special "band." With funds "prayed in," the school expanded quickly. A complex of buildings soon arose on a sand hill in the farming town of Durham, with the first structure, a chapel, called "Shiloh." Though the movement labeled itself variously over time as the "Holy Ghost and Us Bible School," the "World's Evangelization Crusade," the "Church of the Living God," and finally "The Kingdom," "Shiloh" was the name that stuck.

Sandford's messianic vision also continued to grow, and he announced that he heard a series of God-whispered revelations naming him the present day embodiment of the Old Testament David and the prophet Elijah returned--the restoration and completion of God's work throughout Biblical history. According to this vision, Sandford and his closest co-worker would be martyred for Christ on the streets of Jerusalem and rise again in three days, as predicted of the two witnesses in the Book of Revelation.