Radio Script #1246

Little Talks on Common Things
September 21, 1980

One of the most distinguished citizens of 17th century Maine was William Phipps born in a pioneer cabin near the mouth of the Kennebec in 1651. Only 44 years later, in 1695, he died in London, a knight of the British realm and heaped with honors including the royal governorship of Massachusetts Bay.

His childhood was filled with hardship for he was one of 26 children, and one of the youngest left with his widowed mother when his father died. Almost entirely without education, young William was working on farms and at shipyards before he was 20 years old. As a boy he spent much time tending sheep. After serving a brief apprenticeship in a Woolwich shipyard, he went to Boston. There he met and married Mary Hall, who herself had been born in Saco. Maine. She had inherited enough money to enable her new husband to build his own ship.

With other capital obtained from Boston merchants, Phipps returned to Woolwich, built another ship and was ready to load it with lumber when Indian raids threatened the settlements at the mouth of the Kennebec. Phipps offered his ship as a refuge for the settlers and took them to Boston without recompense.

By that time in the 1670’s the Spanish galleons had been carrying Mayan and Aztec metal across the Atlantic for a century, and the wealth of that gold and silver had become well known. Stories of such treasure as more and more ships were wrecked in the Caribbean were common in Boston. Phipps heard of such a wreck off the Bahamas and decided to seek its treasure. He made an unsuccessful attempt, but did manage to get a Caribbean cargo for England, his first visit to London.

Before leaving the Bahamas,Phipps had learned of another sunken treasure ship, and he was determined to get the necessary finances to find it. Somehow he managed to get an audience with King Charles II, and the King supported Phipps’ venture. In 1683 the Maine adventurer set forth on the second attempt in a royal frigate with 18 guns and a crew of 95 men. Twice Phipps had to quell mutineers on the frigate. He set the mutineers ashore on Jamaica and replaced them with another crew. Two years went by, with Phipps getting nowhere near the sunken ship, so he sailed back to England for repairs. A new King James, was on the throne, and his government told Phipps that no ship could be spared for treasure hunting because of threatened war with France.

With his usual tenacity, Phipps turned to powerful friends, one of whom was the Duke of Albermarle, one of England’s wealthiest men. The Duke and his friends supplied Phipps with a new ship. Arriving at a port on Santa Domingo, the Maine adventurer was ready at last for his self-appointed task. Day after day he sent sailors out in small boats to search the reefs and shoals for sign of wrecks. One day a sailor noticed a bit of seaweed growing out of a rock crevice. Sent down
to bring up the seaweed, a Caribbean native diver reported he had found on the bottom some big guns. Diving again the man brought up a lump of some heavy substance. Washed of its clinging debris, the substance proved to be a bar of silver. The party rowed back to the ship and showed the bar to Phipps. There followed exciting days. There seemed tobe no end to the treasure. In less than a week they brought up 32 tons of silver. Also found were gold bars, coins and jewels.

In 1687 Phipps brought the treasure safely to London, where it was valued at 360,000 pounds, equal to about one and a half million dollars. The King’s share was so great that, in gratitude, he conferred a knighthood on the former Maine shepherd boy, William Phipps. The young man from Woolwich was thus the first native born American to be knighted by the King. The wealth of the Duke of Albermarle, already a rich man, was so increased that he sent to the former Saco girl, Lady Phipps a golden cup worth $5,000. Phipps’ own share in the treasure amounted to $80,000. Gratefully remembering that he had first earned a living wage in a shipyard, one of Phipps’ first acts on returning to Boston was to put on a big banquet for the ship carpenters of that port.

In 1690, when war between England and France was still waging, Phipps led an expedition to Nova Scotia and captured Port Royal from the French. The subsequent attempt to capture Quebec failed, just as it would fail again for Benedict Arnold’s expedition in 1775. Later in that same year of 1690, when the charter of Massachusetts Bay expired, Phipps joined with Increase Mather of Boston in seeking a new charter from King William III. Under that charter Phipps became Governor of the combined colonies of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, which of course gave him mastery of the District of Maine that included his old birthplace on the Kennebec.

Under his governorship the old fort at Pemaquid was replaced by a new impressive structure, Fort William Henry. During his tenure in office, Phipps made several trips up the river which as a boy he had known so well, going up as far as Merrymeeting Bay. When one of the several communities near the river mouth was incorporated, it took the name of Phippsburg in honor of the former shepherd boy. While Phipps was governor, the New England witchcraft mania broke out, and he appointed a commission to investigate witchcraft curses though he took no part in the Salem nightmare.

William Phipps was on a visit to England in 1695 when he was strickened with a malignant fever that proved fatal. He was buried in the little churchyard of St. Mary Wardsworth in London. Still preserved in Phippsburg, is the ornately engraved invitation to his funeral, issued by the King in February 1695. It reads: “You are desired to accompany the body of Sir William Phipps, knight, from Salter Hall in Swithin Lane to the Parish Church of St. Mary Wardsworth in Lombard Street, on Thursday, the 21st day of February, 1695, at five of the clock in the afternoon precisely, and bring this ticket with you.” So slow was communication across the Atlantic at that time that the news of Sir William’s death did not reach Boston until early May, when the evening guns were fired to announce important news to the town.

Nearly a half a century later, another Maine man, William Pepperell of Kittery, also a hero of an attack on Nova Scotia in a later war, was knighted by the King. Thus, before the American colonies secured independence and the U. S. Constitution forbade a citizen to accept honors of nobility, Maine had two knights of the realm, both named William – William Phipps of
Woolwich and William Pepperell of Kittery.

Now let us devote part of this broadcast to another Maine pioneer, Benjamin Vaughan. When Dr. Sylvester Gardiner headed the group of Boston men who made the famous Kennebec Purchase in 1749, one of those whose- interest he successfully solicited was Samuel Vaughan, who, together with Gardiner’s son-in-law, Benjamin Hallowell, started the two most prominent early families of Hallowell, Maine.

Benjamin Vaughan was born on the island of Jamaica in 1751. His father, a man of some means, moved to London when Benjamin was a small boy and the lad became a student at Cambridge University. Because the family was Unitarian, and Cambridge degrees were restricted to communicants of the Church of England, Vaughan received no degree from the university.

When Vaughan fell in love with Sarah Manning, daughter of a wealthy London merchant, her father would not allow them to marry until Benjamin settled down in some vocation instead of a political career. So the young man studied medicine at Edinburgh University, then started medical practice in London. Now securely married to Sarah, he entered upon a business partnership with his father-in-law. Still interested in politics, he secured election to Parliament. Years later, in the pioneer land of Maine, he used his knowledge of medicine to give free service to the sick of Hallowell, though he never again became a professional doctor.

When,representing the Lord Shelburne government in the British embassy at Paris, Vaughan became an ardent supporter of the French Revolution, he fell into disfavor in England. When he tried to clarify his true position in support of British royalty, Vaughan was in equal trouble with the French, and he had to flee Paris for Switzerland. He was in a desparate situation. He could return neither to France nor to England. He decided to go across the Atlantic to America, where he already had a brother living near Boston. From his grandfather he had inherited some of those Kennebec lands of 1749. There he decided to settle.

Vaughan and his wife made their way by sloop from Boston to the shores of the Kennebec at what was the new settlement called the Hook. On the hilltop he built a fine home, that became widely known as the Vaughan mansion. He proceeded to import choice fruit trees and seeds for what became an extensive farm. From Europe he brought in highly bred cattle. For many years, farmers seeing cattle driven over the road to the Brighton market at Boston would exclaim, “There goes some of the Vaughan breed!” At the Manchester Crossroads, Benjamin Vaughan opened the first agricultural fair ever held in Maine. For a national farm journal he wrote articles signed “A Kennebec Farmer.”

An avid reader, Vaughan collected a library of 10,000 volumes, the largest private library in all New England. At his Hallowell home Vaughan entertained many distinguished guests. One was Count Talleyrand, whom Vaughan had known in France. Exiled from France, the Count brought with him a younger man whose true identity was revealed only several years later. He was Louis Phillippe, heir to the French throne, whose father had died under the guillotine at the hands of the Revolutionists. When the monarchy was later restored, that visitor to Hallowell became King of France.

Benjamin Vaughan counted among his political acquaintances John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, both of whom be had known in France. In fact the Philadelphian gave Vaughan a copy of Franklin’s memoirs in his own handwriting. Unlike most of the Kennebec Proprietors, Vaughan left the Federal Party and became a Jeffersonian Democrat. As such he carried on a long correspondence with Thomas Jefferson.

A big event in Maine in 1825 was the visit of General Lafayette to Portland, just 50 years after the firing of the first shots that opened the American Revolution. A public reception was arranged by Governor Parris for the distinguished visitor. The Governor’s aides took pains to protect the Frenchman from annoyance or possible danger. One of them said to the Governor, “See that man in black, small clothes, talking with Lafayette. I’ll go send him away.” “What?” cried the Governor, “Send away that man. Not by any means. That is Benjamin Vaughan of Hallowell, an old and intimate friend of Lafayette.”

Benjamin Vaughan did much to make Hallowell Maine’s leading Kennebec town, with a population at one time exceeded in all of Maine only by the city of Portland. Besides being a successful farmer, lumber dealer and land developer, Vaughan was one of the finest scholars in early Maine. He received the honorary degree of LL.D. from both Bowdoin and Harvard. He was a member of literary societies not only in this country but also in England and France. He had deep love for Maine and was an original incorporator of the now old and distinguished Maine Historical Society.

Benjamin Vaughan died in Hallowell in 1835, ten years after he had welcomed General Lafayette in Portland. Some of his descendants still live in Old Hallowell on the Kennebec.

And with these tributes to those men of Maine – William Phipps and Benjamin Vaughan, we say goodbye until next week.

Year: 1980