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William Phipps (or Phips) was the first Royal Governor of Massachusetts to be born in the state. He made his fortune in an improbable way, through successful treasure hunting. Controversial during his life in Colonial Massachusetts, he is largely forgotten today.
William Phipps and the Diving Bell Bubble: Sunken Treasure, Witches and the Route to Empire, by Leon Hopkins, tells his story. It is a biography of the man.
Phipps was born in 1651 on a frontier plantation in today’s Maine, on the Kennebec River. His father arrived in the New World during the Great Migration of 1620 to 1640 as an indentured servant. He became a gunsmith, moved to the frontier with his family and a partner, but died when Phipps was a child.
Phipps grew up on the frontier, taught himself shipbuilding, and built one. After his shipyard was destroyed during the King Phillips War, he went to Boston as a sailor and shipbuilder. Though unlettered, he was tall, strong and intelligent. He became friends with the Mather family and married a rich widow, Mary Spencer Hull, and joined a Puritan church to gain entrance to Boston society.
Hopkins shows the Boston of the day as insular and status-driven. He shows how Phipps, an illiterate outsider, was never fully accepted by Boston’s elite. Phipps’s life unfolded against the backdrop of the English Civil War, the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The Massachusetts colony was struggling to maintain its autonomy.
While Phipps was never fully accepted in Boston, he proved popular in England, where he gained favor at the highest levels, including with James II and William I. Phipps led a successful effort to recover treasure from a Spanish treasure galleon wrecked off the Bahamas, gaining himself a knighthood. Hopkins shows how Phipps navigated changes in government to retain favor with competing monarchs.
This included appointment as Massachusetts’s Royal Governor. While rough-hewn, pugnacious, and overbearing, Hopkins shows how Phipps proved a competent governor. He proved a competent leader during the Indian wars, quenched the Salem witch trials, and represented both Massachusetts’s desire for autonomy and the King’s interests.
William Phipps and the Diving Bell Bubble is a fascinating book. Hopkins brings the world of the turbulent 1670s through 1690s to light. He shows the contradictions and controversies swirling on both sides of the Atlantic, showing Phipps’s role within them. It is an excellent book for anyone interested in early American history.
“William Phipps and the Diving Bell Bubble: Sunken Treasure, Witches and the Route to Empire,” by Leon Hopkins, Pen and Sword History, May 2025, 232 pages, $39.95 (Hardcover), $16.99 (E-book)
This review was written by Mark Lardas, who writes at Ricochet as Seawriter. Mark Lardas, an engineer, freelance writer, historian, and model-maker, lives in League City, TX. His website is marklardas.com.
Discussion (8)
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My knowledge of King Philip's War is thin as paper, but now I have to find out how Phipps lost a shipyard in an Indian War.
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I did some reading on King Philip's war 15 years ago and have wanted to get back to the topic. I now have the same question.
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The Indians sacked the town he was in and burned the shipyard. We are talking frontier Massachusetts. (It's now part of Maine, but was Massachusetts then.)
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Boston insular and status-driven? How things change…
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Seems like a fresh book topic. This touches on some things that are not widely known.
I recall that old area of frontier NE was sometimes subject to captive raids. There was a book years ago that I now have vague memory of. The book covered settlers kidnapped by Indian tribes to integrate them to replenish the ranks. I think a couple fiction novels have been written about the topic too.
Kennebunk is a Maine town and a current FAA aviation fix (ENE). It sounds similar to Kennebec (more of a French sound). Not sure if that is derived from the same source or just coincidence. According to the towns website it stands for "long cut bank", I assume one of many Indian derived names. Kennebunk had a port area in which ships used to be built. Certainly access to timber up there. Kennebunk was once a active pre-historic hunting area for Indians which has yielded archeology finds.
kennebunkmaine.us
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