About the middle of the seventeenth century, during the Civil War and the Restoration, there dwelt in Bristol one James Phipps, a gunsmith by trade. He was blessed with a numerous progeny; of him it might truly be said that "his quiver was full of them," for he had eventually twenty-six children, of whom twenty-one were boys. Having only his gunmaking trade to depend upon for a living, he found it difficult to provide means for feeding, clothing, and educating them, and often lay awake long at nights, pondering in his mind what he should do to meet the necessities of the case. At that time, and for two or three reigns previously, we had been at work laying the foundations of the present great American Republic, by establishing plantations of colonists, aristocratic and Episcopalian, in the south, and Puritanical in the north, most of whom had been driven thither by the persecutions they had undergone in the mother country. Bristol was then the great port of imports and exports of the Western Continent, and James Phipps naturally heard of the unbounded capabilities of the new continent, as also he heard, by tradition, of the vast wealth which the buccaneers of Elizabeth's reign--the old Vikings of Devonshire--brought from the West Indies, Peru, Mexico, etc., into the ports of Bristol, Barnstaple, Bideford, etc., and it occurred to him that here was scope enough for him and all his sons, and he emigrated with them to New England, where William, his youngest son, was born, and he seems to have died soon after, as this son is stated to have been brought up by his mother until he was eighteen years of age. This William Phipps was the founder of that family who are now lords of Mulgrave Castle, and whose dignity has culminated in a Marquisate. He had received no education, but taught himself to read and write when apprentice to a ship carpenter. At the expiration of his apprenticeship he married the daughter of Captain Robert Spencer, and relict of a rich merchant of the name of Hull, who brought him a small fortune, with which he commenced business, but his speculations were not successful. But he did not despair, although fortune did seem to frown. He was a man of unbounded enterprise and energy, and he said to his wife, who was lamenting the loss of her money, "Be not cast down, my dear; I will live to be the commander of better men than I myself am now. Providence has great things in store for me, and the time shall come when I will build a fair brick house in the green lane of North Boston, of which you shall be the mistress." When casting about for employment, he chanced to hear of a Spanish galleon, laden with specie and plate, which had been wrecked half a century previously somewhere in the Bahamas, and he resolved to go in search of it, and to endeavour the recovery of the cargo by means of the diving-bell.