nder 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."

CHAPTER II. THE PRIVATEERS OF '76

The wars of England with France and Spain spread turmoil upon the high
seas during the greater part of the eighteenth century. Yet with an
immense tenacity of purpose, these briny forefathers increased their
trade and multiplied their ships in the face of every manner of
adversity. The surprising fact is that most of them were not driven
ashore to earn their bread. What Daniel Webster said of them at a later
day was true from the beginning: "It is not, sir, by protection and
bounties, but by unwearied exertion, by extreme economy, by that manly
and resolute spirit which relies on itself to protect itself. These
causes alone enable American ships still to keep the element and show
the flag of their country in distant seas."

What was likely to befall a shipmaster in the turbulent eighteenth
century may be inferred from the misfortunes