Looking for a good read? Here is a recommendation. I have an unusual approach to reviewing books. I review books I feel merit a review. Each review is an opportunity to recommend a book. If I do not think a book is worth reading, I find another book to review. You do not have to agree with everything every author has written (I do not), but the fiction I review is entertaining (and often thought-provoking) and the non-fiction contain ideas worth reading.
Book Review
Massachusetts’s First American-Born Governor
Reviewed by Mark Lardas
June 8, 2025
“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)
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, 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 a ship. After his shipyard was destroyed during the King Phillips War, he went to Boston as a sailor and shipbuilder. 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 took place against the backdrop of the English Civil War, Restoration, and 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 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 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.
Mark Lardas, an engineer, freelance writer, historian, and model-maker, lives in League City. His website is marklardas.com.