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The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · December 17, 1867

The Terrific Storm at St. Thomas.

One week from the day of my coming on shore, a fearful hurricane desolated the island; utterly destroying forty-seven ships—sunk, ashore or capsized, and drowned over five hundred persons. Our house was unroofed, we were wet, and all the furniture destroyed; no one in our house was injured, though the chimney, walls, fences and trees, were actually flying through the air. This dreadful hurricane gave no warning whatever, but commenced blowing from the northwest with utmost fury, and continued for two hours. During this time the distressing spectacle of seven vessels capsized in an instant by whirlwinds, was within my own sight. Nearly every soul of the crews remaining were clinging to the bottoms or to the spars of the sunken ships. A death-like calm followed, and prevailed for half an hour, during which time several vessels put out boats to save lives. The pilot department put out two beautiful cutters through a frightful sea, and had already saved many lives, and the Spanish man-of-war had all her boats out with forty men and officers, when the wind shifted in an instant to the southeast, in such a rush and blinding storm, that all these unfortunate people were swept at once into eternity. All the ships were sunk, and every wharf and building on the water's edge destroyed, and the trees torn up by the roots, and the suburban residences on the hills blown into a million tiny fragments and scattered for miles over the hillsides. Such a dreadful scene of ruin no man living, I think, has ever beheld. This happened on the 29th, and all day yesterday hundreds of corpses were being taken from the lower harbor. In the morning, under a cloudless sky, St. Thomas lay in ruins. Where the day before rode safely at anchor sixty-seven vessels on the smiling bosom of the bay, nothing met the eye but a mass of wrecks.