The Rise of William Phips

T HE American tradition of the poor boy who becomes rich through hard work, native ability, and good luck, is older than one suspects. Any one with imagination can discern unknown Rockefellers in the dry records of colonial estates, land titles, and assessments. Little imagination is required to reconstruct the story of William Phips. His career in the seventeenth century affords perhaps the best example of the favorite American folk-tale. Shepherd boy on the Maine frontier, obscure ship-carpenter until thirty-two years of age, he became in eight years captain of a royal ship, successful treasure-hunter, knight, conqueror of Port Royal, magistrate, and Royal Governor of the Province of the MassachusettsBay in New England. The parallel with the modern self-made man is complete, even to the biographer: Sir William Phips found his Sam Smiles in none other than the Rev. Cotton Mather, who held his hero up to the youth of the Puritan province as a noble example of how God may crown Heroick Virtue with supreme success. One can even find the keynote of the great American mythus in the words that Mather places in his hero's mouth, when the expedi

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