tlement 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