Barbour updates for comment ...

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Raw rough draft. It will probably change.

Adventures in Australia

       As with his childhood, there is little record of Barbour’s adventures in Australia. He left through an east coast port. New York City is most probable. And we can date this to 1851 or 1852 based on a newspaper advertisement for his services as a physician. Other than his trip home, there are no explicit records of this adventure. The only definitive statement of it is found in an 1879 supplement to Zion’s Watch Tower, and all it says is that Barbour was a gold miner and that he was then “entirely uninterested” in Bible prophecy.” There is no explicitly clear record of his outbound journey, but the passenger record for the United States Mail Steamship Georgia, dated February 8, 1851, matches his details in ways no other known passenger record does. It lists a Mr. Barbour, born the correct year and single. The other records that come close are of married couples or list an impossible birth year. This Mr. Barbour is listed as a Mechanic, a listing that indicated anything from a fabricator to an inventor. This fits Barbour’s trade, presenting the strongest record possible for his emigration to Australia. It also fits the history of Millerite failures in the 1840s and early 1850s.

            He told the Rochester Union and Advertiser that he preached in all of the Australian colonies. This implies that he traveled regularly. There are three ship’s records for a Mr. Barber of the correct age traveling as a merchant between the various colonies. Lacking a first name or initials, we cannot firmly attach these to Nelson Barbour. A Mr. Barber appears in Australian newspaper files in the two years before he left for England. This Mr. Barber was being sued by several for defalcation. New York property records show property transfers to a N. H. Barbour in the eighteen months before he left for England. There are, however, at least two other N. H. Barbours living in New York State in that period. So while we could imagine a very dim and dirty story with Nelson Horatio Barbour at its center, without a firm identification with him we would craft fiction and not history.

            If Barbour sought his fortune in the Australian gold fields, the results were indifferent. He seems never to have had any appreciable wealth and was, perhaps, not a good steward of the money he had.[4] His interest seems to be limited to the scope of predictive prophetic studies. His claim to have preached in many of the Australian colonies fits no other time in his life.

            Barbour returned from Australia, setting sail in 1859 and taking the route around Africa to the United Kingdom. For Barbour the return voyage was life changing. He fell into a Bible discussion with a clergyman. “To wile away the monotony of a long sea voyage, the English chaplain proposed a systematic reading of the prophecies,” Barbour remembered. In Barbour’s assent to the chaplain’s suggestion, we see something of the “peculiar combination of the lion and the lamb” in his personality attributed to him by an associate. He “readily assented,” no doubt because he remained interested, but primarily because “having been a Millerite in former years, he knew right well there were arguments it would puzzle the chaplain to answer, even though the time has past.”[8] There is a certain perverse deviousness in his motive, but there may also have been an acute desire to discover wherein Miller had erred.

            He took the Millerite failure personally because he had invested his faith and life in the movement and because he could find no underlying error. He found a sense of personal validity as a Millerite and mourned the loss of significance and belonging it gave him. He suggested that accepting his interpretations re-validated Miller and his movement.

            When Barbour and the clergyman discussed Daniel 12:7, Barbour felt a sense of revelation. He “saw what he had never seen before, though he had read it a hundred times.” Daniel chapter twelve, verse eleven, says: “From the time the daily sacrifice shall be taken away, and the abomination that maketh desolate set up, there shall be a thousand two hundred and ninety days.” Millerite expositors almost without exception extended the 1290 days from 508 C.E. to 1798 C.E. (A.D.). Most Millerite expositors were convinced that they must end in 1798, so they must begin in 508. They found in “the eminence which Clovis had attained in the year 508, and the significance of his victories to the future of Europe and the church” the beginning of the 1290 days. The virtual imprisonment of Pope Pius VI in 1798 by French general Louis Alexandre Berthier was supposed to have ended the power of the popes, at least as political rulers and, in the Millerite view, fulfilled the prophecy.