"And the second Angel poured out his Vial on the sea: and it became blood, as of a dead man: and every living soul died in the sea.”

The very parallel judgment of the second Trumpet on the western division of the old Roman earth was thus described. “The second Angel sounded; and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea: and the third part of the sea became blood; and the third part of the creatures which were in the sea, and had life, died; and the third part of the ships were destroyed.” And we saw reason to interpret this of the destruction by bloody wars of the maritime provinces, power, and commerce of Rome: the agency being that of Genseric and his Vandals; and the most characteristic feature of the vision the maritime parts noted, as the local scene and subject of the judgment. In similar manner we seem bound to interpret the judgment of the second Vial, as a judgment (probably not unconnected with that of the first Vial) that would fall on, and destroy, the maritime power, commerce, and colonics of the countries of Papal Christendom: that is, of France, Spain, and Portugal; these being the only Papal kingdoms to which such maritime colonies and power attached. And the fulfilment of the prophecy, so interpreted, stands conspicuous in the history of the wars that arose out of the French Revolution.

A twofold agency was made subservient, under the overruling of Divine Providence, to accomplish this:—first, that of the democratic revolutionary spirit of the first Vial, propagated, like a pestilence, across the sea into the French and Spanish colonies: secondly, that of the maritime power of England, long separated from the Papacy, though once the tenth part of its city; and now the bulwark, not of Protestantism only, but almost of the very profession of Christianity itself.

The first agency began to act before the second. Its earliest scene of operation was the greatest and most flourishing of the French West Indian colonies, St. Domingo. On the news of the meeting and revolutionary proceedings of the National Assembly at Paris, the Frenchmen of that colony in similar revolutionary frenzy planted the tree of Liberty, convoked their National Assembly, and proclaimed equality and the rights of man: but, on the mulattoes and then the negro slaves (the vast mass of the population2) claiming their share in those rights, indignantly rejected the claim; and had influence at home to procure a new Decree virtually annulling the celebrated French Decree of May 15, 1791, previously past in favour of at least the coloured population. Then began that dreadful civil and servile war of St. Domingo, which continued some twelve years, from 1792 to 1804:—a war in which 60,000 blacks are said to have been slaughtered; but which ended in the utter defeat and expulsion of the French armies,5 the extermination of the white colonists, and establishment of the island in 1804 as the independent Negro Republic of Hayti.

Meanwhile the great naval war between France and England was in progress; which from its commencement in February, 1793, lasted for above twenty years, with no intermission but that of the short and delusive peace of Amiens: in which war the maritime power of Great Britain was strengthened by the Almighty Providence that protected her to destroy everywhere the French ships, commerce, and smaller colonies; including those of the fast and long-continued allies of the French, Holland and Spain. In the year 1793 the greater part of the French fleet at Toulon was destroyed by Lord Hood: in June, 1794, followed Lord Howe’s great victory over the French off Ushant: then the taking of Corsica, and nearly all the smaller Spanish and French West Indian Islands: then, in 1795, Lord Bridport’s naval victory, and the capture of the Cape of Good Hope;4 as also, soon after, of a French and Dutch fleet sent to retake it: then, in 1797, the victory over the Spanish fleet off Cape St. Vincent, and that off Camperdown over the Dutch: then, in succession, Lord Nelson’s three mighty victories,—of the Nile in 1798, of Copenhagen in 1801, and in 1805 of Trafalgar.—Altogether in this naval war, from its beginning in 1793 to its end in 1815, it appears from James’ Naval History that there were destroyed near 200 ships of the line, between 300 and 400 frigates, and an almost incalculable number of smaller vessels of war and ships of commerce. It is most truly stated by Dr. Keith, that the whole history of the world does not present such a period of naval war, destruction, and bloodshed.9 In the figurative language of prophecy, “The sea became as the blood of a dead man.”

Finally, after that all the ships of war and maritime commerce and power of the Papal nations on whom the judgments fell, had been swept from the sea by the English victories, and all their smaller colonies also reft from them, the same revolutionary principle which had long previously introduced civil war and bloodshed into the great French colony of St. Domingo, was now the cause of similar civil wars, bloodshed, and separation from the mother country, of the great Spanish colonies in South America. The colonists there had read the works of the French philosophers and politicians; and during the twelve years, from 1796 to 1808, of Spanish subjection to France, had become familiar with the French revolutionary doctrines. And thus when, on Napoleon’s entrapping the King of Spain, and usurping the throne for his brother Joseph, the Spanish nation had risen, and the Cortes, assembled at Cadiz, had promulgated with their own authorization the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people,—these colonists were the better prepared to claim their full share of the rights of citizens. And when the claim was rejected,—when the Cortes (like the French colonists of St. Domingo) had decreed that the slightest tinge of African blood should be a bar to participation in the rights of citizenship, and England’s offer of mediation between Spain and her colonies had been rejected by the former,6—then in Mexico, and Venezuela, and Buenos Ayres, and Chili, and Peru, the flames of civil war broke out successively, and spread into an universal conflagration. The atrocities of that war are said by a writer in the Quarterly Review to have been unparalleled in the civil wars of ancient and modern times. Doubtless he must have forgotten Lyons and La Vendée, in so writing. Bloody, however, and full of horrors it was. Its result was the independence of the insurgents, and annihilation of the provinces in the character of European colonies.—And the Brazils having been a little subsequently, under the influence of the same revolutionary principles, though by a comparatively unsanguinary revolution, separated from Portugal, the prediction was fulfilled, in a manner the most complete and remarkable, with respect to those greater colonies of Papal Europe, as well as in regard of the lesser before spoken of, “And every living soul died in the sea.”3

So was judgment accomplished on both colonizers, colonists, and natives;—all participators alike in the great heresy of Antichrist. And, as regards the European countries, whose colonies they were, may we not in their losses and their sufferings in these civil wars, discern the action of something like retributive justice, for their cruelties both to native Indians and the imported negroes? Justice, divine justice, may wait long: but on iniquitous nations, as well as individuals, it seldom fails to strike hard at the last.


Elliott, E. B. (1862). Horæ Apocalypticæ; or, A Commentary on the Apocalypse, Critical and Historical (Fifth Edition, Vol. 3, pp. 376–381). Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday.