I "met" him again later on, leafing through the Enciclopedia Treccani (1929 edition), where a man by the same name was referred to as Governor of Massachusetts. The Italian Encyclopaedia suggested a different spelling of the man’s surname: Phipps, with double "p". The date of birth of the "two" men were identical, but not their birth places, located somewhere in what today is the State of Maine, and the date of death was vaguely indicated as well, sometime between February 1694 and February 1695.

Reconstructing the life of a man who was born in 1651 and died in his forties, buried God knows where, a man who might have been at the same time a treasure hunter, a Governor and who knows what else, was decidedly intriguing. I decided to investigate and the adventure began.

That’s how the idea of The seventh wave was born. Tickling the pride of professional librarians in Boston and exploiting the formidable power of Internet, within a couple of weeks I received the photocopies of two books: "The life of Sir William Phips" by Cotton Mather, published in the Colonies in 1697 two years after Phips’s death, and "Life of William Phips" by Francis Bowen (London, 1837). Although contradicting each other in a few points, the two books were, however, rather detailed to profile a man whose life had not been ordinary at all from the very beginning: William Phips was the twenty-fifth of twenty-six children fathered by James Phips, a gunsmith emigrated from Bristol to Woolwich, a small village in Maine surrounded by mountains and vast forests inhabited by Indian tribes.

Each man is worth a story: Phips’s life was pieced together from details lost in three hundred years. But there was a fil rouge guiding my research, helping me combine all the elements into a striking mosaic: an illiterate and a ram shepherd till the age of eighteen, he worked in a shipyard in Boston and became a skilled carpenter; still young, he married Mary Spencer, a rich widow. He became a ship owner, a Captain, a treasure hunter, a sheriff and Governor of Massachusetts.

Fundamental details of his life also emerged as marginal notes in anecdotes or fragmentary second-hand accounts found in heavy tomes: the Caribbean voyages, the Spanish galleon sunk in 1641 off the coast of Santo Domingo, the dramatic story of Melchor Gomar, the sailor, the lone survivor of the shipwreck of Nuestra Señora de la Pura y Limpia Concepciòn, the "excitement" at the daring ambitious enterprise, the recovery of a huge amount of gold and silver buried under rocks of coral.

I "knew" that greediness and sheer thirst for excitement were not the reason that moved Phips to action, although the treasure was worth a huge amount of money, equal in our days to millions of pounds.

It might have been a story for men, with Indians, galleons, sailors and soldiers, but it turned out differently, because of two women who influenced Phips’s life decisively: his wife Mary, who taught him how to read and write and whose mature days he made shining, and the beautiful courtier Gwenn Ballard, who introduced our hero to the joys and sorrows of the high society in London.

Love, friendship and loyalty. Phips was a man with strong beliefs, a man of his word, a man of honour, with admirable qualities such as courage, reliability, devotion, stubborness, prudence. He was a passionate man but could also accurately weigh the pros and cons of any move.

The seventh wave is all that.

All events of great historical significance have been accurately reported with just a few "poetic" adjustments for the sake of fiction: I called Phips’s wife Elizabeth, even though I knew her name was Mary, and his ship Noah was renamed Saint Louis, as a token of appreciation for a beautiful schooner I had steered during an unforgettable voyage in the Mediterranean Sea.

I am a journalist and I am now begging the reader’s pardon for the rather vain display of journalistic abilities that will follow.

I contacted Mrs Nora Callahan, a descendant of William Phips and most importantly, I found the tomb of our hero in a cemetery in a suburb of London.

Phips died on the 18^th of February, 1695 and was buried in the crypt of St. Mary Woolnoth, in Lombard Street, in the City of London on the 21^st of February. For two centuries he "rested in peace" under a white marble monument bearing two cherubs, a vessel and a lenghty inscription summirizing his achievements.

For my research I used the two books I mentioned before, but also the Dictionary of National Biografy published by the Oxford University Press in 1913 and later updated in 1968 where I read that "[Phips] was buried in the Church of St. Mary Woolnoth in Lombard Street". The Cambridge Encyclopaedia, published in 1990 by the Cambridge University Press, only mentioned the place where Phips died, while the Chambers Biographical Dictionary (1997 edition) gave no indication of either the date of death or the man’s burial place. In the Encyclopaedia Britannica I could only find the date of death. And finally, in the Dictionary of American Biography published in 1962, there was vague information about the date of birth (2^nd of February, 1650/1651) and the date of death (18^th of February, 1694/1695), but there was no indication as to where the tomb was.

Well, anyone looking for Phips’s grave in London in the church of St. Mary Woolnoth will not find it. The tombstone was destroyed along with all the others in December 1892 to allow the construction of the underground. Thirty years before, another attempt had been made by the Royal Mail, round 1860, to enlarge the nearby office. That time the parishioners won their case and the church was not pulled down. But three decades after that attempt, the City and South London Railways Company, what we call today "the underground", gave admissible reasons that led to a shrewd compromise between the two parties: only the Vaults would be pulled down. Actually, the strategy of the Railway Company was rather sophisticated: they "convinced" a Medical Officer of Health to report that unwholesome effluvia permeated from the Vaults into the Church and on sanitary grounds the said Church had to be closed for public worship. Which led to the demolition of the crypt.

The remains of the people who still had descendants or representatives were reinterred in other consacrated ground selected by them. The "forgotten" bones of Phips and all the other people, instead, were removed to "a consacrated burial ground in which interments might legally be made". But where?

The Rector of St. Mary Woolnoth leafed through papers and Indexes before spreading his hands in a discomforting gesture and indicating as a "possible" area the village of Ilford, Essex. The East Anglia Tourist Office told me to ask the Essex branch of the Historical Association. A lovely lady rerouted my investigations towards the Essex Burial Index, where, unfortunately so, they only keep record of the people buried in the region in the period 1813 - 1865. Once again I had to start from Ilford. The Canon of St. Mary’s Church suggested that there might be another area for the interments, but the following Monday would be a better time to ask, as at the moment he was rather busy organizing a Charity bazaar.

It was not just a problem of plane tickets and hotel reservation: during that cloudy weekend spent in Greenwich and in marine antique shops and bookshops, I began to fear that the fil rouge leading to Phips had broken.

It was not true and I realised that in Hyde Park while I was watching a raven hopping on the grass surprisingly green considering it was only January. The question was: "Where is the most suitable place to inter the bones of neglected people, dead for two centuries and whose final destination nobody cared about?" The answer came (almost) naturally: in a suburban cemetery, and very likely so, in a recently built one. Therefore, I found out what cemeteries, not far from Ilford, fitted that description.

The following Monday morning, the Canon of St Mary’s Church referred me to the Ilford Central Library where the librarian confessed he didn’t know who Phips was, but told me a decidedly illuminating detail about St Mary Woolnoth: the remains from the Vaults were moved to the London City Cemetery.

The efficiency of the clerks of the Cemetery Office was flawless: that very morning they referred me to Manor Park. It was a neogothic, well-kept building with a secluded corner enveloped in a rather ghostly atmosphere with tombs half-sunk into the soft ground, gravestones covered in moss, empty flower vases, and splinters of green glass marking the boundary of concrete sepulchres: everything conveyed the impression of a neatness frozen for decades. It looked as if I was on the home straight; but I cheered too early, because Phips’s name was not on the Cemetery Registers, more than once consulted by the helpful clerks.

The maze seemed again to be endless.

I left the Cemetery Office to take the bus, then the underground, then a taxi to the London Metropolitan Archives. Books and tomes by the thousand and no clue. A young librarian suggested looking in the "Churches of London" section. On a shelf a little red book caught my eye: I opened it and with a start I read "St. Mary Woolnoth". I learned that Phips was at first buried near a great pipe-organ with a set of bellows, made by Father Smith. I copied the epitaph and drew a sketch of the tomb. While serious students and eager bookworms passed by in perfect silence, I began to realize I had had the solution of the enigma right under my eyes: there was a distinct possibility that the remains of Phips and all the other people once buried with him in the Vaults of St Mary Woolnoth might be under a gravestone only showing the name of the church where they had been previously interred.

It was too late to go back to Manor Park and so I spent the remains of that afternoon going over the details and facts I had collected in my investigation.

At nine sharp of the following morning, the clerk of the Cemetery Office showed a map, pointing at a place near a cypress: "St. Mary Woolnoth and St. Mary Woolchurch Haw". I walked slowly, fighting back emotions. For a few yards I had to walk along with a funeral procession: someone even took me for a relative of the departed . I left the "beaten track" and went along a secluded path lined with tombs of people who had died before 1900. The small asphalt road made a sharp swerve to the left opposite a memorial stone covered in moss, with a long, barely readable epitaph the reader will find at the end of the book, before the index. I looked around and with a pocket-knife I took some moss off the stone and read "Beneath this spot are deposited all that is mortal of those who for centuries past have been buried in the vaults of the church of St Mary Woolnoth and St Mary Woolchurch Haw in the City of London … The remains were removed pursuant to an order in Council dated 25^th of August 1892, and by virtue of a faculty issued by the Consistory Court of London dated 1^st December 1892 under the supervision of the Rector and the Churchwardens of the above parishes, with all care and reverence in the month of December, 1892…."

I sat near the gravestone and lit a toscano. I didn’t know why, but I felt at home there: "I have found Phips" I thought, but soon I realized that it was not true: it was Phips who had helped me find him by removing problems and disclosing clues when I felt I had come to nothing in my investigations.

I was overcome by emotion, and excitement stirred inside me, although I knew I still had something to do: finding the document that had ratified the removal of Phips’s bones.

As a sort of porte-bonheur I kept the moss I had taken off the memorial stone and went back to London for a shopping spree in a bookshop with plenty of books about the Navy and the Airforce, a few yards away from Trafalgar Square, and later treated myself to dinner at Bentley’s. Yet another night had to pass before I could say "Phips is right here".

A librarian at the London Metropolitan Archives referred me to the Guildhall Library. It was a matter of a few minutes: I rushed there to consult the faculty issued on the 1^st of December, 1892. The clerk frowned and after ten minutes, he came back with a thick folder: five hundred sheets of paper that could be photocopied only in the first few pages owing to risk of damage (that was the rule): "Here it is, sir".

The book by Riffaud, the Treccani, the two biographies contradicting each other, the English and American Dictionaries of Biography, the Boston Library and the Navy Archives in Seville, where all the documents about the sunken galleon are jealously kept, the Nora Callahan’s family tree that reached me through the information highways, the Records of Salem trials Phips stopped. That was what I had in my mind.

The manuscript was sent to "the Worshipful Thomas Hutchinson Trisham, Doctor of Laws Vicar general of the Right Honorable and Right Reverend Father in God Frederick by Divine permission Lord Bishop of London and Official Principal of the Consistorial and Episcopal Court of London lawfully constituted ". It was a "petition to decree a licence or faculty to authorize the removal of the human remains from the Vaults underneath the Church of St. Mary Woolnoth and St. Mary Woolchurch". Point 2 of the petition read: "Dr Sedgivick Sanndan, medical Officer of the Health for the City of London reported that the effluvia of the remains in former times buried in the vaults underneath the floor of the Church … permeated into the Church itself … and were injurious to the health of the congregation … ".

Therefore, on sanitary grounds the Church had to be closed for public worship until the remains from the crypt were removed under proper care. The document, dated 29^th September 1892, was signed by J.M.S.Brooke, Joseph Savory, W. M. Cross, Joseph Bowels and Joseph H. Batty, Churchwardens of the Parish of St. Mary Woolnoth and St. Mary Woolchurch Haw in the Consistory Court of London.

The Petition was granted on the 1^st December, and in a cold morning of the same month, Sir William Phips’s remains were moved to Manor Park.

I went there by taxi, with a bunch of roses dyed blue, like the ocean, and I told him only three words : "Welcome back, Captain".

Donatello Bellomo