PHIPS, or PHIPPS, Sir WILLIAM The first royal Governor of Massachusetts. He was born at a' border settlement, since called Woolwich, on the Kennebec River, in Maine, and was one of a family of twenty-six children, all of the same mother. Till eighteen years of age he was employed in keeping sheep, but dissatisfied with this occupation. be became a ship-carpenter, and removed to Boston. There he learned to read and write, and also married a widow with some property. Some years later he conceived the idea of fishing up treasure stored in a Spanish galleon that had been wrecked fifty years before in the West Indies. The English Admiralty fell in with this plan and gave him command of a frigate, but after a long search he returned un successful. A little later he was sent out again in a vessel provided by the Duke of Albemarle and others, and this time he found a wreck and took from it. treasure to the value of about i3n0.000. As a reward for his success, he received as his share 116.000, the honor of knighthood. and the appointment as sheriff of New England. In 1690 he was sent by Massachusetts with a fleet of eight vessels against the French settlement of Port Royal in Acadia, and succeeded in capturing it. Later in the same year he commanded a larger expedition. consisting of 34 vessels and more than 2000 men, against Quebec. So active, however, were the French under Count Frontenae that the attempt failed, and on the way back to Boston nine of the vessels were wrecked. In
I692, through the influence of Increase Mather, the agent of the colony in England, Pbips was appointed Governor of Massachusetts, under the new charter. One of his first official acts was to commission a special court for the trial of those accused of witchcraft, but some months later he suspended its sittings. As Governor he displayed many of the bluff and choleric traits of a sea captain: among other things, he cudgeled Driuton, the collector of the port of Boston, and caned Captain Short of the Royal Navy. In 1694 he was summoned to England to answer com plaints made against him, and while there died suddenly of a malignant fever. Phips was a man of great energy and determination, but pos sessed no remarkable intellectual capacity: and he appears to have been strictly honest in his private dealings, though he deemed it no sin to steal from Frenchmen. There is a curious life of him in Cotton ".lather's Magnolia (London, 1702), but more trustworthy is that by Francis Bowen in vol. vii. of the first series of Sparks's American Biography (New York. 1S34-37). Con sult, also, Hutehiuson, History of Massachusetts; Parkman, Count Frontenac and Neu, France Under Louis. XIV. (Boston, 1877) and Myraud, ,Sir William Phipps devout Quebec (Quebec, 1893).