Sir William Phips
Of this rudely adventurous era, it would be hard to find a seaman more
typical than the redoubtable Sir William Phips who became the first royal
Governor of the Massachusetts Colony in 1692. Born on a frontier farm of
the Maine coast while many of the Pilgrim fathers were living, "his
faithful mother," wrote Cotton Mather, "had no less than twenty-six
children, whereof twenty-one were sons; but equivalent to them all was
William, one of the youngest, whom, his father dying, was left young with
his mother, and with her he lived, keeping ye sheep in Ye Wilderness until
he was eighteen years old." Then he apprenticed himself to a neighboring
shipwright who was building sloops and pinnaces and, having learned the
trade, set out for Boston. As a ship-carpenter he plied his trade, spent
his wages in the taverns of the waterside and there picked up wondrous
yarns of the silver-laden galleons of Spain which had shivered their
timbers on the reefs of the Bahama Passage or gone down in the hurricanes
that beset those southerly seas. Meantime he had married a wealthy widow
whose property enabled him to go treasure-hunting on the Spanish main.
From his first voyage thither in a small vessel he escaped with his life
and barely enough treasure to pay the cost of the expedition.
In no wise daunted he laid his plans to search for a richly ladened
galleon which was said to have been wrecked half a century before off the
coast of Hispaniola. Since his own funds were not sufficient for this
exploit, he betook himself to England to enlist the aid of the Government.
With bulldog persistence he besieged the court of James II for a whole
year, this rough-and-ready New England shipmaster, until he was given a
royal frigate for his purpose. He failed to fish up more silver from the
sands but, nothing daunted, he persuaded other patrons to outfit him with
a small merchantman, the James and Mary, in which he sailed for the coast
of Hispaniola. This time he found his galleon and thirty-two tons of
silver. "Besides that incredible treasure of plate, thus fetched up from
seven or eight fathoms under water, there were vast riches of Gold, and
Pearls, and Jewels . . . . All that a Spanish frigot was to be enriched
withal."
Up the Thames sailed the lucky little merchantman in the year of
1687, with three hundred thousand pounds sterling as her freightage of
treasure. Captain Phips made honest division with his backers and, because
men of his integrity were not over plentiful in England after the
Restoration, King James knighted him. He sailed home to Boston, "a man of
strong and sturdy frame," as Hawthorne fancied him, "whose face had been
roughened by northern tempests and blackened by the burning sun of the
West Indies . . . . He wears an immense periwig flowing down over his
shoulders . . . . His red, rough hands which have done many a good day's
work with the hammer and adze are half-covered by the delicate lace rues
at the wrist." But he carried with him the manners of the forecastle, a
man hasty and unlettered but superbly brave and honest. Even after he had
become Governor he thrashed the captain of the Nonesuch frigate of the
royal navy, and used his fists on the Collector of the Port after cursing
him with tremendous gusto. Such behavior in a Governor was too strenuous,
and Sir William Phips was summoned to England, where he died while waiting
his restoration to office and royal favor. Failing both, he dreamed of
still another treasure voyage, "for it was his purpose, upon his
dismission from his Government once more to have gone upon his old
Fishing-Trade, upon a mighty shelf of rock and banks of sand that lie
where he had informed himself."
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