success, chewing
wine-glasses in his cabin, burning sulphur to make his ship seem
more like hell, and industriously scourging the whole Atlantic coast.
Charleston lived in terror of him until Lieutenant Maynard, in a small
sloop, laid him alongside in a hammer-and-tongs engagement and cut off
the head of Blackbeard to dangle from the bowsprit as a trophy.

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 u