In the spring of 1687, a ship’s carpenter from the Maine frontier who could barely read pulled roughly £205,000 in Spanish silver, gold, and jewelry off a reef north of Hispaniola — a sum equivalent to tens of millions of dollars today, recovered in a matter of weeks. It made William Phips one of the richest self-made men in the English-speaking world and turned a failed shepherd’s apprentice into Sir William Phips, governor of Massachusetts.
From Sheep to Ships
Phips was born in 1651 in what is now Maine, one of many children in a family with no money and no schooling to offer him. He worked as a shepherd until he was eighteen, then apprenticed as a ship’s carpenter, teaching himself to read and write along the way. He spent the next years working the New England coastal trade, but he had heard the stories, common in the Caribbean, of a Spanish treasure galleon lost decades earlier and never recovered.
The Wreck of the Concepción
That ship was the Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, part of the annual Spanish treasure fleet, which struck a reef and sank in 1641 while carrying silver and goods from the colonies to Spain. Spanish salvage attempts at the time recovered only a fraction of the cargo before the wreck’s location was lost. Phips spent years chasing leads and financing on the strength of the story, eventually securing backing from a group of London investors led by the Duke of Albemarle. In 1686 they outfitted two ships and diving equipment worth roughly £3,210 and sent Phips back across the Atlantic to find it.
Striking the Wreck
On January 20, 1687, divers working the reef north of the Dominican Republic located the wreck. Over the following weeks Phips’s crew, using native divers working without modern equipment, brought up silver coin, silver bars, gold, and jewelry. Estimates of the total haul vary by source, from roughly £205,000 to as much as £300,000 — the higher figure has been put at close to $78 million in modern terms — but by any account it was one of the largest single salvage hauls of the century. Phips’s own share came to £11,000, after paying his crew roughly £8,000 in shares, at a time when a skilled tradesman might earn £20 to £30 a year.
Knight, Then Governor
King James II knighted Phips in June 1687 and made him provost marshal general of the Dominion of New England. His treasure hunt inspired a wave of imitators across the Caribbean over the following decades, part of what made the region’s wrecks and rumored wrecks such a draw for the pirates who followed. Phips himself went on to a stranger second act: in 1692 he became the first royal governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, where he established the Court of Oyer and Terminer that tried the Salem witchcraft cases. After twenty executions he shut the court down and pardoned those still accused, a decision as abrupt as the one that had made his fortune five years earlier. He died in London in 1695, having gone from an illiterate shepherd to a knight of the realm inside a single decade.
Sources consulted: Wikipedia, “William Phips”; New England Historical Society, “William Phips Finds Sunken Treasure, Named Massachusetts Governor.”
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