Considered by many to be an autocrat who insisted on unquestioning loyalty, Sandford regularly starved his followers, which resulted in deadly outbreaks of smallpox, diphtheria, and other infectious diseases.

In 1911, he knowingly sailed from Africa to Greenland with insufficient food and supplies, causing six crew members to be stricken with scurvy and die on his return to Portland.

[1] An early companion recalled young Sandford as a natural leader, stating that he was always the one who "drove the horse and steered the boat"; if they played ball, "he was always a captain.

[6] Frustrated by the seminary's mixture of formalism and religious modernism, Sandford later said that God had addressed him directly with words from the gospel of Matthew: "Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled."

[16] These diverse, yet related, strands of late 19th-century evangelicalism came together for Sandford after he accepted the pastorate of a more affluent Free Will Baptist church in Somersworth, New Hampshire.

In August 1891, Sandford had two strange experiences: he tentatively, but (at least according to his own testimony) successfully, cast demons out of a friend; and the following morning, he heard whispered in the trees the single word: "Armageddon."

[22] Eventually he achieved some success among people in Maine's coastal hill regions and contributions came in plentifully, although Sandford did not solicit money or even pass a collection plate.

[24] Thus abandoning the Free Will Baptists, he began to issue a monthly magazine, Tongues of Fire from the World's Evangelization Crusade on Apostolic Principles, in which he advertised for other workers to join him in his ministry.

Although Sandford eventually decided that publishing a list of needs in his Tongues of Fire would be acceptable, the manner in which the money and volunteer labor was provided by supporters was nearly miraculous in any case.

"[30] What little schedule there was consisted of one or two hours of private devotions in the morning, breakfast and kitchen chores, prayer at 9:00am, classes until noon, and lunch before personal household or office duties.

"[34] By 1898, Sandford had found additional spiritual and material support among Higher Life Christians in Boston and London, and he concluded that God now wanted him to establish an outpost in Ottoman-controlled Palestine.

Visiting Jerusalem for the first time, he dashed off a paper announcing that the Ten Lost Tribes were England and the U.S., blood descendants of the ancient Hebrews who had been carried into captivity by the Assyrians in 721 BC.

[35] British Israelism was a religious version of ideas about Anglo-Saxon supremacy that were common to the contemporary English-speaking world, and the doctrine made the Bible all the more relevant because its prophecies seemed to apply to the people of Shiloh and the nation of which it was a part.

[37] Soon Tongues of Fire reported healings of pneumonia, cancer, diphtheria, catarrh, "sick headache," sprained wrist, dropsy, typhoid, mental derangement, broken bones, and "utter exhaustion.

He believed that illness might be the result of either discipline from God or an attack of Satan; but casting out demons required “prevailing prayer,” an exercise that included such protracted fervency and shouting that one skeptic became apprehensive as what sounded “like a hundred people talking at once” concluded with a woman’s screams piercing the din.

"[53] As usual, Sandford was also making an eschatological reference: he believed that, as Elijah, he would be one of the two witnesses of Revelation 11, who would be martyred and rise from the dead in Jerusalem before the coming of Christ's kingdom.

Peers were encouraged to closely examine each other's lives for sin, and parents regularly whipped children, a practice Sandford apparently condoned as the "schoolmaster to bring them to Christ.

In 1905, the Maine Supreme Court reversed the manslaughter conviction because the trial judge had required jurors to make a decision based on their own belief about the "efficacy of prayer as a means to cure the sick."

"[65] Sandford made two quick trips to Jerusalem in 1905-06, but when his legal difficulties had ended, he and his thirty selected crewmen and passengers (including his wife and five children) circumnavigated the globe on what he described as a missionary journey.

[67] Oddly, Sandford added a taxidermist to a crew of reasonably experienced seamen, and he included on a ship already filled to capacity both "eyes for stuffed animals and birds" and a large harp on which he took lessons.

[68] There were moments of real peril, as when Coronet fought its way through the thundering seas around Cape Horn and then again after a powerful gale broke the main sheet and (indirectly) part of the mast almost immediately after Sandford had shot an albatross.

At this point, Sandford decided to bring back all his followers from Palestine, and Whittaker reluctantly agreed to accept passage to the U.S. on another Shiloh ship, the three-masted barquentine Kingdom.

After recrossing the Atlantic to catch the northerly currents, Coronet passed up numerous opportunities to take on water and supplies, Sandford announcing that God had ordered him not to put into port in the U.S. or Canada.

[77] Unfortunately, the ship now made little headway, and the passengers and crew were saved from possible starvation only by the fortuitous appearance of the ocean liner S.S. Lapland, which provided some food—but ominously, no fruit or vegetables.

Sandford was first arrested on Whittaker's warrant and then, a few days later, for being responsible for the deaths—"unlawfully, knowingly, and willingly" allowing a ship to "proceed on a voyage at sea without sufficient provisions.

He also volunteered to teach a group of prisoners how to read and write, and especially enjoyed conducting a weekly Bible class that began with one student and grew to more than a hundred.

[84] But when, in 1915, John was put in charge of an inquisitorial board called the "Eye-of-the-Needle," intended to probe the souls of Shiloh residents, Sandford himself brought the experiment to a halt when his son incurred resentment and, in any case, proved temperamentally unsuited to the task.

He prayed, farmed, raised sheep, studied astronomy, taught small groups, and gradually regathered his scattered followers into centers in different parts of the country.

[101] A successor organization, Kingdom Christian Ministries—reorganized in 1998 after a split occasioned by continued debate over Sandford's theology[101]—has several hundred members at a few centers in the eastern United States.

Author Stephen King spent part of his childhood in Durham, Maine, and elements of the novel Salem's Lot, such as the Marsten House, were inspired by Sandford's cult and their Shiloh Chapel.