nd of
quest.

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 set