Town Born: The Political Economy of New England from Its Founding to the Revolution

SEVEN: Crews

chapter seven Crews New England’s first knight was William Phips, a mariner and shipbuilder from the Kennebec River in what is now Maine. In 1687, with English and Boston financial backing, he discovered and retrieved a treasure of some£300,000 in gold and silver from the sunken Spanish galleon Concepcion in the shallows north of Hispaniola. Finding and retrieving the treasure was easy compared to returning it intact to England. As Cotton Mather described it, ‘‘But there was one extraordinary distress which Captain Phips himself plunged into: for his men were come out with him upon seamen’s wages, at so much per month; and when they saw such vast litters of silver sows and pigs, as they call them, come on board them at the captain’s call, they knew not how to bear it, that they should not share all among themselves, and be gone to lead a short life and a merry, in a climate where the arrest of those that had hired them should not reach them.’’ Phips promised the crew that if they refrained from mutiny, which would have enabled them to divide the£300,000 among themselves and desert their duty and their families, but instead, obeyed his commands and returned home, he would make sure each of them got a sizeable bonus, even if it reduced his own share. He also swore that in the future he would work for the benefit of Boston, which he and some of his sailors called home. As Mather put it, he took a vow that he ‘‘would for ever devote himself unto the interests of the Lord Jesus Christ, and of his people, especially in the country which he did himself originally belong unto.’’ Apparently impressed by these promises, the crew of the James and Mary sailed peaceably to England with their outrageous booty. Each of the seventy-some common sailors on the expedition got a bonus of £50, and 208 development Phips got £11,000 and a knighthood.1 England and its establishment reaped a bonanza—but Boston held his loyalty. Why did Boston mean so much to Phips and his men? Was it some kind of mariners’ paradise in whose name Phips could gain the allegiance of his crew? Promising to invest the money there seems an implausible way to avoid a mutiny, yet Phips fulfilled his vow. A native of coastal Maine, Phips had only lived in Boston for a year, working as a shipwright and marrying Mary Spencer Hull, a merchant’s widow. He learned to read and write in Boston, though rather badly. After being knighted at court, Sir William Phips returned to Boston with his booty and built a ‘‘fair brick house in the green lane of north Boston,’’ the rough waterfront neighborhood. He joined the Mather party in opposing the Dominion of New England under Governor Andros that suppressed the normal political economy of the city, and after it was overturned in revolution he supported the new charter that restored the town’s autonomy. In 1690, at the age of thirty-nine, he was finally baptized, becoming a member of Mather’s North Church and proclaiming publicly in his profession of faith ‘‘that if God had a people anywhere, it was ‘here’; and I resolved to rise and fall with them; neglecting very great advantages for my worldly interest, that I might come and enjoy the ordinances of Lord Jesus here.’’ He commanded and funded an unsuccessful expedition against the French in Montréal and was appointed royal governor of Massachusetts. His knighthood notwithstanding, Phips continued to represent, and feel most comfortable with, the sailors and shipwrights of Boston’s North End.2 Mather wrote and published Phips’s biography in 1697 and incorporated it in his Magnalia Christi Americana in 1702. Chief among its purposes, alongside documenting the role of divine providence in shaping New England ’s history, was to advertise Boston as the best city for poor sailors, a place where a humble man by hard work and honesty with the help of God could become rich—even a knight with a stately mansion in the North End. In truth, the relatively privileged position of mariner families in eighteenthcentury Boston and its outports did attract able men, initially advancing and ultimately challenging the British Empire. Mariners had a stronger attachment to locality and more access to legitimate political power in New England than in other colonial ports because of the region’s distinctive town labor...