On the coast of Maine, near where the Kennebec flows past Bath into the sea, there is a bit of tide water known as Montsweag Bay, hard by the town of Wiscasset. Into this little bay extends a miniature cape, pleasantly wooded, which is known as Phips Point, and here it was that the most illustrious treasure seeker of them all, William Phips, was born in 1650. The original Pilgrim Fathers, or some of them, were still hale and hearty, the innumerable ship-loads of furniture brought over in the Mayflower had not been scattered far from Plymouth, and this country was so young that the "oldest families" of Boston were all brand-new.
James Phips, father of the great William, was a gun-smith who had come over from Bristol in old England to better his fortunes. With the true pioneering spirit he obtained a grant of land and built his log cabin at the furthest outpost of settlement toward the eastward. He cleared his fields, raised some sheep, and betimes repaired the blunderbusses with which Puritan and Pilgrim were wont to pot the aborigine. The first biography of William Phips was written by Cotton Mather, whom the better you know the more heartily you dislike for a canting old bigot who boot-licked men of rank, wealth, or power, and was infernally active in getting a score of hapless men and women hanged for witchcraft in Salem.
Cotton Mather deserves the thanks of all good treasure seekers, however, for having given us the first-hand story of William Phips whom he knew well and extravagantly admired. In fact, after this hero had come sailing home with his treasures and because of these riches was made Sir William Phips and Royal Governor of Massachusetts by Charles II, he had his pew in the old North Church of Boston of which Rev. Cotton Mather was pastor. But this is going ahead too fast, and we must hark back to the humble beginnings. "His faithful mother, yet living," wrote Mather in his very curious Magnalia Christi Americana, "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 the Wilderness until he was Eighteen Years old."
Then William decided that the care of the farm and the sheep might safely be left to his twenty brothers, and he apprenticed himself to a shipwright who was building on the shore near the settlement those little shallops, pinnaces, and sloops in which our forefathers dared to trade up and down their own coasts and as far as the West Indies, mere cockle-shells manned by seamen of astonishing temerity and hardihood. While at work with hammer and adze, this strapping lump of a lad listened to the yarns of skippers who had voyaged to Jamaica and the Bahamas, dodging French privateers or running afoul of pirates who stripped them of cargo and gear, and perhaps it was then that he first heard of the treasures that had been lost in wrecked galleons, or buried by buccaneers of Hispaniola. At any rate, William Phips wished to see more of the world and to win a chance to go to sea in a ship of his own, wherefore he set out for Boston after he had served his time, "having an accountable impulse upon his mind, persuading him, as he would privately hint unto some of his friends, that he was born to greater matters."
Twenty-two years old, not yet able to read and write, young Phips found work with a ship-carpenter and studied his books as industriously as he plied his trade. Soon he was wooing a "young gentlewoman of good repute, the daughter of one Captain Roger Spencer," and there was no resisting this headstrong suitor. They were married, and shortly after this important event Phips was given a contract to build a ship at a settlement on Sheepscot river, near his old home on the Kennebec, "where having launched the ship," Cotton Mather relates, "he also provided a lading of lumber to bring with him, which would have been to the advantage of all concerned.
"But just as the ship was hardly finished, the barbarous Indians on that river broke forth into an open and cruel war upon the English, and the miserable people, surprised by so sudden a storm of blood, had no refuge from the infidels but the ship now finishing in the harbor. Wherefore he left his intended lading behind him, and instead thereof carried with him his old neighbors and their families, free of all charges, to Boston. So the first thing he did, after he was his own man, was to save his father's house, with the rest of the neighborhood from ruin; but the disappointment which befell him from the loss of his other lading plunged his affairs into greater embarrassment with such as he had employed him. But he was hitherto no more than beginning to make scaffolds for further and higher actions. He would frequently tell the gentlewoman, his wife, that he should yet be Captain of a King's Ship; that he should come to have the command of better men than he was now accounted himself, and that he would be the owner of a fair brick house in the Green Lane of North Boston."[[1]]
Inasmuch as William Phips would have been a very sorry scoundrel indeed, to run away, for the sake of a cargo of lumber, and leave his old friends and neighbors to be scalped, it seems as Cotton Mather was sounding the timbrel of praise somewhat over-loud, but the parson was a fulsome eulogist, and for reasons of his own he proclaimed this roaring, blustering seafarer and hot-headed royal governor as little lower than the angels. Here and there Mather drew with firm stroke the character of the man, so that we catch glimpses of him as a live and moving figure. "He was of an inclination cutting rather like a hatchet than a razor; he would propose very considerable matters and then so cut through them that no difficulties could put by the edge of his resolution. Being thus of the true temper for doing of great things, he betakes himself to the sea, the right scene for such things."
