PIETAS IN PATRIAM.* THE LIFE OF HIS EXCELLENCY SIR WILLIAM PHIPS, KNT., LATE CAPT'N-GENERAL AND GOVERNOUR IN CHIEF OF THE PROVINCE OF THE MASSACHUSET BAY. CONTAINING THE MEMORABLE CHANGES UNDERGONE, AND ACTIONS PERFORMED BY HIM. WRITTEN BY ONE INTIMATELY ACQUAINTED WITH HIM. Discite Virtutem ex Hoc, verumque Laborem.† THE author of the following narrative, is a person of such well-known integrity, prudence and veracity, that there is not any cause to question the truth of what he here relates. And moreover, this writing of his is adorned with a very grateful variety of learning, and doth contain such surprizing workings of Providence, as do well deserve due notice and observation. On all which accounts, it is with just confidence recommended to the publick by April 27, 1697. NATH. MATHER, To his Excellency the Earl of Bellomont, Baron of Coloony in Ireland, General Governour of the Province of Massachusets in New England, and the Provinces annexed. MAY IT PLEASE YOUR EXCELLENCY: The station in which the hand of the God of heaven hath disposed his Majesty's heart to place your honour, doth so manifestly entitle your Lordship to this ensuing narrative, that its being thus presented to your Excellency's hand, is thereby both apologized for and justified. I believe had the writer of it, when he penned it, had any knowledge of your Excellency, he would himself have done it, and withal would have amply and publickly congratulated the people of New-England on account of their having such a governour, and your Excellency on account of your being made governour over them. For though as to some other things it may possibly be a place to some persons not so desirable, yet I believe this character may be justly given of them, that they are the best people under heaven; there being among them not only less of open profaneness, and less of lewdness, but also more of the serious profession, practice, and power of Christianity, in proportion to their number, than is among any other people upon the face of the whole earth. Not but I doubt there are many bad persons among them, and too many distempered humours, perhaps even among those who are truly good. It would be a wonder if it should be otherwise; for it hath of late years, on various accounts, and some very singular and unusual ones, been a day of sore temptation with that whole people. Nevertheless, as I look upon it as a favour from God to those plantations, that he hath set your Excellency over them, so I do account it a favour from God to your Excellency, that he hath committed and trusted in your hand so great a part of his peculiar treasure and precious jewels, as are among that people. Besides, that on other accounts the Lord Jesus hath more of a visible interest in New-England, than in any of the outgoings of the English nation in America. They have at their own charge not only set up schools of lower learning up and down the country; but have also erected an University, which hath been the happy nursery of many useful, learned, and excellently accomplished persons. And moreover, from them hath the blessed gospel been preached to the poor, barbarous, savage heathen there; and it hath taken such root among them, that there were lately four-and• Devoted love of country. From him learn virtue and life's truest work. twenty assemblies in which the name of the Lord Jesus was constantly called on, and celebrated in their own language. In these things New-England outshineth all the colonies of the English in those goings down of the sun. I know your Excellency will favour and countenance their University, and also the propagating of the gospel among the natives; for the interest of Christ in that part of the earth is much concerned in them. That the God of the spirits of all flesh would abundantly replenish your Excellency with a suitable spirit for the service to which he hath called your Lordship, that he would give your honour a prosperous voyage thither, and when there, make your Excellency a rich blessing to that people, and them a rejoicing to your Excellency, is the prayer of, My Lord, Your Excellency's most humble servant, April 27, 1697. NATH. MATHER. THE LIFE OF HIS EXCELLENCY SIR WILLIAM PHIPS, KNT. § 1. IF such a renowned chymist as Quercetanus, with a whole tribe of "labourers in the fire," since that learned man, find it no easie thing to make the common part of mankind believe that they can take a plant in its more vigorous consistence, and after a due maceration, fermentation and separation, extract the salt of that plant, which, as it were, in a chaos, invisibly reserves the form of the whole, with its vital principle; and, that keeping the salt in a glass hermetically sealed, they can, by applying a soft fire to the glass, make the vegetable rise by little and little out of its ashes, to surprize the spectators with a notable illustration of that resurrection, in the faith whereof the Jews, returning from the graves of their friends, pluck up the grass from the earth, using those words of the Scripture thereupon, "Your bones shall flourish like an herb:" 'tis likely, that all the observations of such writers as the incomparable Borellus, will find it hard enough to produce our belief that the essential salts of animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an ingenious man may have the whole ark of Noah in his own study, and raise the fine shape of an animal out of its ashes at his pleasure: and that, by the like method from the essential salts of humane dust, a philosopher may, without any criminal necromancy, call up the shape of any dead ancestor from the dust whereinto his body has been incinerated. The resurrection of the dead will be as just, as great an article of our creed, although the relations of these learned men should pass for incredible romances: but yet there is an anticipation of that blessed resurrection, carrying in it some resemblance of these curiosities, which is performed, when we do in a book, as in a glass, reserve the history of our departed friends; and by bringing our warm affections unto such an history, we revive, as it were, out of their ashes, the true shape of those friends, and bring to a fresh view what was memorable and imitable in them. Now, in as much as mortality has done its part upon a considerable person, with whom I had the honour to be well acquainted, and a person as memorable for the wonderful changes which befel him, as imitable for his virtues and actions under those changes; I shall endeavour, with the chymistry of an impartial historian, to raise my friend so far out of his ashes, as to shew him again unto the world; and if the character of heroick virtue be for a man to deserve well of mankind, and be great in the purpose and success of essays to do so, I may venture to promise my reader such example of heroick virtue, in the story whereto I invite him, that he shall say, it would have been little short of a vice in me to have withheld it from him. Nor is it any partiality for the memory of my deceased friend, or any other sinister design whatsoever, that has invited me to this undertaking; but I have undertaken this matter from a sincere desire that the ever-glorious Lord JESUS CHRIST may have the glory of his power and goodness, and of his providence, in what he did for such a person, and in what he disposed and assisted that person to do for him. Now, may he assist my writing, even he that prepared the subject whereof I am to write! § 2. So obscure was the original of that memorable person, whose actions I am going to relate, that I must, in a way of writing like that of Plutarch, prepare my reader for the intended relation, by first searching the archives of antiquity for a parallel. Now, because we will not parallel him with Eumenes, who, though he were the son of a poor carrier, became a governour of mighty provinces; nor with Marius, whose mean parentage did not hinder his becoming a glorious defender of his country, and seven times the chief magistrate of the chiefest city in the universe; nor with Iphicrates, who became a successful and renowned general of a great people, though his father were a cobler; nor with Dioclesian, the son of a poor scrivener; nor with Bonosus, the son of a poor school-master, who yet came to sway the scepter of the Roman empire; nor, lastly, will I compare him to the more late example of the celebrated Mazarini, who, though no gentleman by his extraction, and one so sorrily educated that he might have wrote man before he could write at all; yet ascended unto that grandeur, in the memory of many yet living, as to umpire the most important affairs of Christendom: we will decline looking any further in that hemisphere of the world, and make the "hue and cry" througout the regions of America, the New World, which he that is becoming the subject of our history, by his nativity, belonged unto. And in America, the first that meets me is Francisco Pizarro, who, though a spurious offspring, exposed when a babe in a church-porch, at a sorry village of Navarre, and afterwards employed while he was a boy in keeping of cattel, yet, at length, stealing into America, he so thrived upon his adventures there, that upon some discoveries, which with an handful of men he had in a desperate expedition made of Peru, he obtained the King of Spain's commission for the conquest of it, and at last so incredibly enriched himself by the conquest, that he was made the first Vice-roy of Peru, and created Marquess of Anatilla. To the latter and highest part of that story, if any thing hindred his Excellency Sir WILLIAM PHIPS from affording of a parallel, it was not the want either of design, or of courage, or of conduct in himself, but it was the fate of a premature mortality. For my reader now being satisfied that a person's being obscure in his original is not always a just prejudice to an expectation of considerable matters from him, I shall now inform him that this our Phips was born February 2, A. D. 1650, at a despicable plantation on the river of Kennebeck, and almost the furthest village of the eastern settlement of New-England. And as the father of that man which was as great a blessing as England had in the age of that man was a smith, so a gun-smith-namely, James Phips, once of Bristol-had the honour of being the father to him whom we shall presently see made by the God of Heaven as great a blessing to New-England as that country could have had, if they themselves had pleased. His fruitful mother, yet living, had no less than twenty-six children, whereof twenty-one were sons; but equivalent to them all was WILLIAM, one of the youngest, whom his father, dying, left young with his mother, and with her he lived, "keeping of sheep in the wilderness," until he was eighteen years old; at which time he began to feel some further dispositions of mind from that providence of God which "took him from the sheepfolds, from following the ewes great with young, and brought him to feed his people." Reader, enquire no further who was his father? Thou shalt anon see that he was, as the Italians express it, "a son to his own labours!" § 3. His friends earnestly solicited him to settle among them in a plantation of the east; but he had an unaccountable impulse upon his mind, perswading him, as he would privately hint unto some of them, "that he was born to greater matters." To come at those "greater matters," his first contrivance was to bind himself an apprentice unto a ship carpenter for four years; in which time he became a master of the trade that once, in a vessel of more than forty thousand tuns, repaired the ruins of the earth; Noah's, I mean; he then betook himself an hundred and fifty miles further a field, even to Boston, the chief town of New-England; which being a place of the most business and resort in those parts of the world, he expected there more commodiously to pursue the Spes Majorum et Meliorum* hopes which had inspired him. At Boston, where it was that he now learned first of all to read and write, he followed his trade for about a year; and, by a laudable deportment, so recommended himself, that he married a young gentlewoman of good repute, who was the widow of one Mr. John Hull, a well-bred merchant, but the daughter of one Captain Roger Spencer, a person of good fashion, who, having suffered much damage in his estate, by some unkind and unjust actions, which he bore. with such patience, that for fear of thereby injuring the publick, he would not seek satisfaction, posterity might afterward see the reward of his patience, in what Providence hath now done for one of his own posterity. · Hopes of greater and better things. Within a little while after his marriage, he indented with several persons in Boston to build them a ship at Sheeps-coat River, two or three leagues eastward of Kennebeck; where having launched the ship, 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, surprized by so sudden a storm of blood, had no refuge from the infidels but the ship now finishing in the harbour. Whereupon he left his intended lading behind him, and, instead thereof, carried with him his old neighbours and their families, free of all charges to Boston; so the first action that he did, after he was his own man, was to save his father's house, with the rest of the neighbourhood, from ruin; but the disappointment which befel him from the loss of his other lading, plunged his affairs into greater embarrassments with such as had employed him. § 4. 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 he should yet be captain of a King's ship; that he should come to have the command of better men than he was now accounted himself; and that he should be owner of a fair brick-house in the Green-lane of North-Boston; and that, it may be, this would not be all that the providence of God would bring him to. She entertained these passages with a sufficient incredulity; but he had so serious and positive an expectation of them, that it is not easie to say what was the original thereof. He was of an enterprizing genius, and naturally disdained littleness: but his disposition for business was of the Dutch mould, where, with a little shew of wit, there is as much wisdom demonstrated, as can be shewn by any nation. His talent lay not in the airs that serve chiefly for the pleasant and sudden turns of conversation; but he might say, as Themistocles, "Though he could not play upon a fiddle, yet he knew how to make a little city become a great one." He would prudently contrive a weighty undertaking, and then patiently pursue it unto the end. He was of an inclination cutting rather like a hatchet than like a razor; he would propose very considerable matters to himself, and then so cut through them, that no difficulties. could put by the edge of his resolutions. Being thus of the true temper for doing of great things, he betakes himself to the sea, the right scene for such things; and upon advice of a Spanish wreck about the Bahamas, he took a voyage thither; but with little more success than what just served him a little to furnish him for a voyage to England; whither he went in a vessel, not much unlike that which the Dutchmen stamped on their first coin, with these words about it: Incertum quo Fata ferant.* Having first informed himself that there was another Spanish wreck, wherein was lost a mighty treasure, hitherto undiscovered, he had a strong impression upon • None can tell where Fate will bear me. |