Foreword
The storyof Plymouth’s founding has been told many times, its simple details transformed into a national legend. To reinterpret it and see it in a new light is difficult, if not impossible. Yet the business side of the Pilgrims’ undertaking is a relatively neglected aspect, though Governor Bradford himself devoted many chapters to it. The story has several familiar episodes—the support of Thomas Weston and the company of merchant adventurers, the break-up of the company, and the efforts of the leaders in Plymouth to pay its debts. The London adventurers have often been described as hard-hearted profiteers, whose innocent victims, the Pilgrims, were governed by religious enthusiasm and without any business sense. We can understand better the real financial problems in planting Plymouth by examining each one in turn. We must begin with events in Holland and England and conclude with the payment of all debts at the end of several decades.
The commercial affairs of this small colony have their own importance, even if they are less acclaimed than the religious and political experiment of the Pilgrims. They, too, reflect a constancy of purpose and eventual success in mastering the practical requirements of the first permanent settlement in New England. Regardless of hardships, Plymouth held firm and survived, whereas earlier efforts to colonize the rugged coasts to the north of Virginia had failed. As a business venture, the colony provides an early example of business integrity and responsibility.
Where does this venture belong in the larger canvas of English expansion into the New World? An Englishman wrote recently[A]that the Pilgrims’ importance has been greatly exaggerated. This is bound to be the point of view of the mother island, from whoseshores, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there scattered in various directions a multitude of explorers, traders, and colonizers. Compared with their total accomplishment, the work of the small band of emigrants to Plymouth and of their petty capitalist backers appears insignificant. To the American, on the other hand, their victory over Plymouth’s starkness and meager resources, together with the leaders’ articulate faith and common sense, have taken on a symbolic quality which tends to magnify their place in his early history. In fact, students both of English expansion and of American origins find in the materials for Plymouth’s history a rare opportunity to observe from within the operation of one of the kind of small business partnerships which originated many early English settlements.
[A]A. L. Rowse,The Elizabethans and America(London, 1959), 130.
[A]A. L. Rowse,The Elizabethans and America(London, 1959), 130.