Sir William Phips, first royal governor of Massachusetts.
Phips had no notion of being a beggarly New England trading skipper, carrying codfish and pine boards to the West Indies and threshing homeward with molasses and niggers in the hold, or coasting to Virginia for tobacco. A man of mettle won prizes by bold strokes and large hazards, and treasure seeking was the game for William. Among the taverns of the Boston water-front he picked up tidings and rumors of many a silver-laden galleon of Spain that had shivered her timbers on this or that low-lying reef of the Bahama Passage where there was neither buoy nor lighthouse. Here was a chance to win that "fair brick house in the Green Lane of North Boston" and Phips busied himself with picking up information until he was primed to make a voyage of discovery. Keeping his errand to himself, he steered for the West Indies, probably in a small chartered sloop or brig, and prowled from one key and island to another.
This was in the year 1681, and the waters in which Phips dared to venture were swarming with pirates and buccaneers who would have cut his throat for a doubloon. Morgan had sacked Panama only eleven years before; Tortuga, off the coast of Hayti, was still the haunt of as choice a lot of cutthroats as ever sailed blue water; and men who had been plundering and killing with Pierre le Grande, Bartholomew Portugez and Montbars the Exterminator, were still at their old trade afloat. Mariners had not done talking about the exploit of L'Ollonais who had found three hundred thousand dollars' worth of Spanish treasure hidden on a key off the coast of Cuba. He it was who amused himself by cutting out the hearts of live Spaniards and gnawing these morsels, or slicing off the heads of a whole ship's crew and drinking their blood. A rare one for hunting buried treasure was this fiend of a pirate. When he took Maracaibo, as Esquemeling relates in the story of his own experiences as a buccaneer, "L'Ollonais, who never used to make any great amount of murdering, though in cold blood, ten or twelve Spaniards, drew his cutlass and hacked one to pieces in the presence of all the rest, saying: 'If you do not confess and declare where you have hidden the rest of your goods, I will do the like to all your companions.' At last, amongst these horrible cruelties and inhuman threats, one was found who promised to conduct him and show the place where the rest of the Spaniards were hidden. But those that were fled, having intelligence that one discovered their lurking holes to the Pirates, changed the place, and buried all the remnant of their riches underground; insomuch that the Pirates could not find them out, unless some other person of their own party should reveal them."
From this first voyage undertaken by Phips he escaped with his skin and a certain amount of treasure, "what just served him a little to furnish him for a voyage to England," says Mather. The important fact was that he had found what he sought and knew where there was a vast deal more of it. A large ship, well armed and manned, was needed to bring away the booty, and Captain William Phips intended to find backing in London for the adventure. He crossed the Atlantic in "a vessel not much unlike that which the Dutchmen stamped on their first coin," and no sooner had his stubby, high-pooped ark of a craft cast anchor in the Thames than he was buzzing ashore with his tale of the treasure wreck.
It was no less a person than the king himself whom Phips was bent on enlisting as a partner, and he was not to be driven from Whitehall by lords or flunkies. With bulldog persistence he held to his purpose month after month, until almost a year had passed. At length, through the friends he had made at Court, he gained the ear of Charles II, and that gay monarch was pleased to take a fling at treasure hunting as a sporting proposition, with an eye also to a share of the plunder.
He gave Phips a frigate of the king's navy, the Rose of eighteen guns and ninety-five men, which had been captured from the Algerine corsairs. As "Captain of a King's Ship," he recruited a crew of all sorts, mostly hard characters, and sailed from London in September, 1683, bound first to Boston, and thence to find the treasure. Alas, for the cloak of piety with which Cotton Mather covered William Phips from head to heels. Other accounts show convincingly that he was a bullying, profane, and godless sea dog, yet honest withal, and as brave as a lion, an excellent man to have at your elbow in a tight pinch, or to be in charge of the quarter-deck in a gale of wind. The real Phips is a more likeable character than the stuffed image that Cotton Mather tried to make of him.
While in Boston harbor in the Rose, Captain Phips carried things with a high hand. Another skipper had got wind of the treasure and was about to make sail for the West Indies in a ship called the Good Intent. Phips tried to bluff him, then to frighten him, and finally struck a partnership so that the two vessels sailed in company. Refusing to show the Boston magistrates his papers, Phips was haled to court where he abused the bench in language blazing with deep-sea oaths, and was fined several hundred pounds. His sailors got drunk ashore and fought the constables and cracked the heads of peaceable citizens. Staid Boston was glad when the Rose frigate and her turbulent company bore away for the West Indies.
There was something wrong with Phip's information or the Spanish wreck had been cleaned of her treasure before he found the place. The Rose and the Good Intent lay at the edge of a reef somewhere near Nassau for several months, sending down native divers and dredging with such scanty returns that the crew became mutinous and determined on a program very popular in those days. Armed with cutlasses, they charged aft and demanded of Phips that he "join them in running away with the ship to drive a trade of piracy in the South Seas. Captain Phips ... with a most undaunted fortitude, rushed in upon them, and with the blows of his bare hands felled many of them and quelled all the rest."
It became necessary to careen the Rose and clean the planking all fouled with tropical growth, and she was beached on "a desolate Spanish island." The men were given shore liberty, all but eight or ten, and the rogues were no sooner out of the ship than "they all entered into an agreement which they signed in a ring (a round-robin), that about seven o'clock that evening they would seize the captain and those eight or ten which they knew to be true to him, and leave them to perish on the island, and so be gone away into the South Seas to seek their fortune.... These knaves, considering that they should want a carpenter with them in their villainous expedition, sent a messenger to fetch unto them the carpenter who was then at work upon the vessel; and unto him they showed their articles; telling him what he must look for if he did not subscribe among them.