ement; the inhabitants, flying for their
lives, crowded on board the vessel, and Phips set sail with
a shipload of his old friends and neighbors, who could pay
him only in thanks. It is not unlikely that some of his own
brothers and sisters were among the rescued. Certainly the
extensive family of Phips must have spread somewhat widely
over the coast region of Maine.

William Phips's first adventure had proved unprofitable
except in works of charity. But he was not one to be easily
put down, having in his nature an abundance of the perilous
stuff of ambition. He was not the man to sit down and wait
for fortune to come to him. Rather, he belonged to those who
go to seek fortune. He was determined, he told his wife, to
become captain of a king's ship, and owner of a fair brick
house in the Green Lane of North Boston. It took him some
eight or nine years to make good the first of these
predictions, and then, in the year 1683, he sailed into the
harbor of Boston as captain of the "Algier Rose," a frigate
of eighteen guns and ninety-five men.

It was by the magic wand of sunken silver that our hero
achieved this success. The treasures of Peru, loaded on
Spanish ships, had not all reached the ports of Spain. Some
cargoes of silver had gone to the bottom of the Atlantic.
Phips had heard of such a wreck on the Bahamas, had sailed
thither, and had made enough money by the enterprise to pay
him for a voyage to England. While in the Bahamas he had
been told of another Spanish wreck, "wherein was lost a
mighty treasure, hitherto undiscovered." It was this that
took him to England. He had made up his mind to be the
discoverer of this sunken treasure-ship. The idea took
possession of him wholly. His hope was to interest some
wealthy persons, or the government itself, in his design.
The man must have had in him something of that
silver-tongued eloquence which makes persuasion easy, for
the royalties at Whitehall heard him with favor and support,
and he came back to New England captain of a king's ship,
with full powers to search the seas for silver.

And now we have reached the verge of the romance of the life
of William Phips. He had before him a difficult task, but he
possessed the qualities which enable men to meet and
overcome difficulty. The silver-ship was said to have been
sunk somewhere near the Bahamas; the exact spot it was not
easy to learn, for half a century had passed since its
demise. Sailing thither in the "Al