He went to England, and so succeeded in arousing the King's interest in his proposed adventure that a man-of-war, well appointed, was given him. He was gone on his first voyage two years, and came back without any treasure, but the certain knowledge, he thought, of the exact spot where it could be found. But he also brought back a high reputation as a naval commander, for he had shown great skill and courage in quelling a formidable mutiny among

his men.

That he should have been able to induce a company to second him in another attempt is an evidence of the irrepressible energy of the And this time he succeeded. The sunken Spanish ship was found and she was filled with treasure.

man.

About £300,000 were recovered in bullion, coin and plate. Phips's share of this was £16,000 and a gold cup of the value of £1,000, which was given to his wife by the Duke of Albemarle, the patron of the expedition. But he was otherwise rewarded, for the King knighted him, and the young man who a few years before was hewing ship-timber in a Boston ship-yard, and learning at odd times to read and write, was wealthy and famous.

He returned to New England in 1688, with the appointment of sheriff, the duties of which office, however, he found it impossible to discharge under Andros. Two years later—both Andros and his master having been meanwhile disposed of, and war having broke out between France and England - Phips was appointed by Governor Bradstreet to lead an expedition against Port Royal. In this he was successful. The fort was destroyed, the town plundered, the French governor and others taken prisoners and carried to Boston. On his return Sir William landed at various points along the coast, and the whole of Acadia was reduced to English rule.

Phips's expedition against Port Royal and Canada.

Soon after his return from this successful expedition, a larger and more important one was undertaken, for the reduction of Canada, which had been planned and decided upon at a Congress of the colonies which met at New York at the call of Governor Leisler. A land-force of New York and Connecticut troops, under John Winthrop and Robert Livingston, were to invade Canada and threaten Montreal, while a naval expedition under Phips, with Major Walley of Plymouth as commander of the troops on board, was to take Quebec. The fleet, which sailed in August, 1690, consisted of thirty-two vessels and carried two thousand and two hundred men.

The expedition from New York met with nothing but disaster. Disputes before starting between New York and Connecticut in relation to commanders caused delay and neglect of measures essential to

1692.]

success.

SIR WILLIAM PHIPS GOVERNOR.

399

When the troops reached the lakes no boats had been provided for their transportation. A march through the wilderness seemed impossible, and the army turned back. Phips meanwhile had sailed leisurely along the coast and up the St. Lawrence, so leisurely that Frontenac had time to hear of his coming and to move down from Montreal to Quebec and to prepare for defence. When at length the fleet reached the fortress, the attack was so clumsily conducted owing partly to Phips's inexperience in military affairs, and partly to Walley's cowardice and inefficiency that repulse was inevitable. Men were landed at the wrong time and in wrong places; ammunition was wasted in useless bombardments of works on which no impression could be made; useless exposure brought on fatal sickness; cold weather set in and caused a good deal of suffering. A second attempt, in which it was hoped some of these blunders might be corrected, was prevented by a storm which dispersed the fleet. The ships found their way back to Boston as best they could; several were so long at sea that they were given up for lost; one was never again heard of; another was burnt at sea, and a third was wrecked, though the crew was saved. No booty was brought away to help pay the cost of the expedition, which was large enough to impair seriously the finances of the colony; some of the artillery was left behind in the hands of the French, and the loss of life-though Phips denied this was said to have been two hundred men.

To meet the exhaustion of the colonial exchequer, caused by this unfortunate expedition, a resort was had to an issue of paper money. The soldiers were paid off in a currency which soon fell to a discount of about thirty-three per cent. It is greatly to Phips's credit, that feeling himself in a large measure responsible for this public disaster, he redeemed with his own money the depreciated bills which his soldiers had been compelled to accept.

Owing probably in part to this generous act, the credit and popularity of Sir William were little impaired by his military failure. In 1691 he again went to England to interest the King in fresh projects for destroying the French power in Canada, in bringing to an end the Indian raids under French guidance upon the eastern settlements, and to aid the agents in London in obtaining, if possible, the restoration of the old Charter. He returned with a new Charter and as Governor, as we have already said, in May, the next year.

The stubborn friends of the old Charter soon organized themselves into a party in watchful opposition to Governor Phips. It Opposition was, no doubt, a factious opposition, so far as there could be to Phips. any real expectation of restoring the old rule of Puritanic government. But Phips was not a man of much wisdom, of much dignity of char

acter, nor of that experience in political affairs which sometimes suffices in the absence of higher qualities. He made an expedition to Maine against the Indians, which had no brilliant result, while the fort he ordered to be built at Pemaquid was costly, of little use, and gave rise to bitter complaints of the taxation it involved. He was sometimes indolently or ignorantly good-natured, leaving the General Court to follow the bent of its own inclinations without check; and he was sometimes so choleric in temper as to assert what he conceived to be his official privileges, in a way better fitted to the deck of a ship and a disorderly crew than the peaceful citizens of a quiet city. For example, he disputed the authority of the Collector sent from England; and when that officer declined to obey the Governor's order for the release of a ship and cargo, Sir William went down to the wharf, fell upon the Collector and gave him a beating. He had a dispute with a Captain Short, of a British frigate, and on meeting him in the street, upbraided and abused him and finally fell upon him and "broke his head with a cane."

One incident of his administration, however, had political importance. It was common in the country towns of Massachusetts to choose their representatives to the General Court from among the citizens of Boston. The inevitable result was a preponderating influence which usually enabled a few men in Boston to manage affairs to suit themselves. Phips was popular in the country, where probably little was known of his overbearing temper and his ignorance of affairs of state. In 1694, a movement for his removal had gathered so much strength that his friends in the General Court proposed an address to the King against it. The motion was carried, but it was only by a vote of twenty-six to twenty-four, and in the minority were all the members chosen from Boston. A law was immediately enacted requiring that no town should be represented in the General Court by a non-resident.

But Phips's enemies at length prevailed, and he was ordered to England to answer the charges made against him. He went in 1694, and about a year after died of malignant fever in London.

CHAPTER XVII.

PHILIP'S WAR.

OUTBREAK OF PHILIP'S WAR. ITS CAUSES. PHILIP'S EARLIER RELATIONS WITH THE ENGLISH. INDIAN ATTACKS AT SWANSEA, TAUNTON, AND ELSEWHERE. WILLIAM BLACKSTONE. THE FIGHTS AT BROOKFIELD AND HADLEY. THE AMBUSH AT BLOODY BROOK.-EXPEDITION INTO THE NARRAGANSETT COUNTRY.THE SURPRISE AT TURNER'S FALLS. PHILIP ATTACKED AND KILLED NEAR MOUNT HOPE.

Stoughton.

governor. The Indian hostilities, which, as the next chap- governor ter will relate, had broken out again in the eastern provinces, soon gave him sufficient occupation, and he was wanting neither in energy nor ability to meet the exigency. But he is better remembered as a benefactor of Harvard College, where a hall still makes his name familiar to each successive generation; less pleasantly remembered as one of Andros's judges in the Ipswich and other trials, where the people resisted the despotic Governor; while as the Chief Justice of the province in the witchcraft persecution, which marked the period of Phips's administration, the distinction he achieved was that of a cruel magistrate in whom superstition overcame all sense of justice.

Before, however, that gloomy page in the history of Massachusetts is turned, it is necessary to revert to a previous bitter experiencethe last great war in New England with the Indians, an account

of which, in chronological order, would have interrupted the consecutive narrative of events relating to the charters.

Outbreak of

war.

The origin of this war, which broke out in 1675 and lasted for two years, was, of course, in that hidden but inextinguishable Philip's hatred which the red man felt for the white intruder, - a hatred that might, at any moment, be lit by a single spark and blaze up at once into a mighty flame. Philip, the chief of the Wampanoags, or Pokanokets, who was at the head of this decisive struggle, did not, perhaps, premeditate a war until the temper of his tribe made it inevitable; even when his intentions were suspected, there was no wish, perhaps, for a conflict with the Indians, on the part of the colonists, but rather a dread of it, while the memory of the fate of the Pequots, it was hoped, would deter the savages from so desperate a measure. But there came the inexorable point of time and circumstance where race and interest, civilization and savage freedom, clashed, and forced the bloody conclusion.

Causes of

If it were easier to disentangle the web of Indian politics in New England through the last two thirds of the seventeenth centuryfrom the settlement of New Plymouth to the time when the native tribes were subdued or annihilated, it would be possible, perhaps, to trace events to their immediate causes, to understand that sudden outbreak of relentless hate which blazed through the provinces from Narragansett Bay to the extreme northern and eastern borders. But this we know, the very presence of the whites was a provthe conflict. ocation; instinct alone soon taught the savages that civilization must crowd them out of lands which were useless except they remained a wilderness. Purchase, so far as they understood what purchase meant, was no equivalent for the loss of the hunting-grounds from which they mainly drew the means of existence; practically an exchange of a cart-load or two of clothing and trinkets, a few guns and a little ammunition, for hundreds of square miles, was as much an infringement of the Indians' right to the soil as it was for the whites to take possession of the lands by violence. Purchase meant to the Indian, in the first place, only toleration of a joint occupancy: but when in the course of time it was plain that joint occupancy was impossible, that to the whites there came absolute possession, to themselves absolute expulsion, then the purchase, which they had misunderstood, was as much a robbery as if no price had been paid. Herein was the bitter root of deadly hostility.

Other provocations there were, known and unknown. Personal wrongs and outrages were committed on one side and the other, impossible to be avoided in frontier settlements, however peaceful in theory and even in practice may have been the policy of the state.