"'Near this place is interred the Body of Sir William Phips, knight; who in the year 1687, by his great industry, discovered among the rocks near the Banks of Bahama on the north side of Hispaniola a Spanish plate-ship which had been under water 44 years, out of which he took in gold and silver to the value of £300,000 sterling: and with a fidelity equal to his conduct, brought it all to London, where it was divided between himself and the rest of the adventurers. For which great service he was knighted by his then Majesty, King James the 2nd, and at the request of the principal inhabitants of New England, he accepted of the Government of the Massachusetts, in which he continued up to the time of his death; and discharged his trust with that zeal for the interests of the country, and with so little regard to his own private advantage, that he justly gained the good esteem and affection of the greatest and best part of the inhabitants of that Colony. "'He died the 18th of February, 1694, and his lady, to perpetuate his memory, hath caused this monument to be erected.'" It is far better to know the man as he was, rough-hewn, hasty, unlettered, but simple and honest as daylight, than to accept the false and silly epitaph of Cotton Mather, that "he was a person of so sweet a temper that they who were most intimately acquainted with him would commonly pronounce him the Best Conditioned Gentleman in the World." After he had wrested his fortune from the bottom of the sea in circumstances splendidly romantic, he used the power which his wealth gained for him wholly in the service of the people of his own country. During his last visit to London, when he had grown tired of being a royal governor, he harked back to his old love, and was planning another treasure voyage. "The Spanish wreck was not the only nor the richest wreck which he knew to be lying under the water. He knew particularly that when the ship which had Governor Bobadilla aboard was cast away, there was, as Peter Martyr says, an entire table of Gold of Three Thousand Three Hundred and Ten Pounds Weight. And supposing himself to have gained sufficient information of the right way to such a wreck, it was his purpose upon his dismission from his Government, once more to have gone upon his old Fishing-Trade, upon a mighty shelf of rocks and bank of sands that lie where he had informed himself." ====================================================================== [Illustration: The oldest existing print of Boston harbor as it appeared in the time of Sir William Phips, showing the kind of ships in which he sailed to find his treasure.] ======================================================================