PART IIPlymouth Reorganizes Financially
The methoddevised for repaying what was a stiff debt for the young colony, as one writer puts it, “shows considerable business ingenuity.” With ownership transferred from London to Plymouth, the plantation became a virtual corporation in fact. Two important matters still had to be decided. Should all the settlers share in the disposition of the corporate lands and assets and in the obligation of repayment to the adventurers? How would they be able to guarantee satisfaction of the London men? It was wisely decided to include as holders of shares, or “purchasers,” all men, whatever their former status, who were either heads of families or single and not indentured servants. At the 1627 division of assets in the form of land and cattle, every such person received twenty acres of tillable land to add to the one-acre portion allotted him when the plantation had ended the “common course.” The livestock was parceled out for a time among twelve groups, a total of 156 individuals, with every six persons receiving one cow and two goats. These “purchasers,” of whom in 1640 fifty-three were listed as living in Plymouth and five in England, were to benefit from subsequent divisions of land as the colony opened up.
The immediate task of paying the Londoners fell upon a group of eight leaders, including William Bradford, Miles Standish, Isaac Allerton, Edward Winslow, William Brewster, John Howland, John Alden, and Thomas Prence, known as the “Undertakers.” These men founded a partnership to manage the fur trade of the colony for six years, the time during which the returnsfrom the Pilgrims’ most profitable business enterprise were to be devoted to paying the debt and importing essential English goods. This became the business of the eight who took possession at once of the company boats and “the whole stock of furs, fells, beads, corn, wampampeak, hatchets, knives, &c.”
It may be asked why the “Undertakers” were willing to saddle themselves with such a responsibility. The answer is their sense of obligation to their old friends in Leyden, as well as their fidelity to the London merchants. Most of the former adventurers had so opposed sending over any more people from Leyden that the beloved Pastor Robinson prophetically, before his death, looked for no further help until means came from Plymouth itself. The first example of such aid would cost the partnership £500, the amount paid for the emigration in 1629 of what was a welcome but “weak” addition to the colony.
It wasextremely important to tap resources of English credit to secure new working capital for the trade. It might have to be borrowed at rates as high as 30–50%, instead of the 6–8% Sherley reported as current for English business loans in 1628. This explains why Allerton was sent to London to persuade the former treasurer of the company, Sherley, and others in England to join the “Undertakers” as partners. Together with Sherley, John Beauchamp and Richard Andrews consented to the proposal. One immediate result was that Sherley forebore collection of £50 he had lent at 30% two years earlier, and induced John Beauchamp and Richard Andrews to do the same for goods they had provided while the negotiations were in progress. At Bradford’s request, Sherley and Beauchamp were designated as factors to receive the furs shipped to London, while Allerton, long since Bradford’s right hand as chief of theassistants in the colony, continued to act as business agent of the “Undertakers.”[36]
Underskillful and energetic management the Plymouth traders soon succeeded in expanding their collection of pelts from the Indians. The trade in furs had begun in 1621, when Squanto guided the Pilgrims’ shallop to the Massachusetts Indians. Unluckily, the first return to England of two hogsheads, estimated to be worth about £400, was captured in theFortune. In fact, a considerable quantity of what was collected in the first years never reached England at all and thus produced no credit for the colony. Instead, Weston’s malice was all they got for 170 pounds of beaver lent him on his arrival in 1623. Another part of their precious hoard of skins paid some fishermen for raising theLittle James, while Turkish pirates seized an additional 800 pounds on its way to England in 1625. Finally, the colony purchased with beaver about £500 worth of trading goods, including Biscay rugs, from a wrecked ship they learned was for sale at Monhegan.
After the joint stock company had broken up, Standish took £277 worth of beaver with him to pay Sherley. A large haul of 700 pounds was the result of a single autumn voyage to the Kennebec, purchased, remarkably enough, with home-grown corn. No lack of energy on the part of the Plymouth traders had prevented returns, but scarcity of the kind of English trading goods, such as hatchets, knives, and trading cloth, which the Indians wanted. In the early stages such goods had to be bought from passing vessels. On at least one occasion valuable coat beaver, which Bradford expected to bring about 20s. per pound in England, was sold to these at 3s. a pound, in exchange for beads and knives.
As the “Undertakers” took over management, it was evidentthat numerous competing trading posts, settled up and down the New England coast, were beginning to cut into Plymouth’s sources of fur and to raise the price the Indians demanded for it. The scapegrace, Thomas Morton of Merrymount, in particular, aroused their ire by selling the natives the forbidden articles, liquor, guns, and powder. On top of this, his introduction of such pastimes as setting up a May Pole and “drinking and ... dancing and frisking together” with Indian maidens so seriously offended their religious sensibilities that they sent Captain Standish to evict Morton in 1628.
In the early stages of the fur trade, transportation presented considerable difficulty. Shallops or open boats were used at first, but a small vessel was needed to coast in and out of the little harbors for several weeks at a time, carrying a few traders and their supplies. To provide for this, an ingenious house carpenter lengthened one of the shallops and built a deck, affording a hold for long voyages in the winter.[37]
The “Undertakers” now decided to build a pinnace on the Manomet River, twenty miles south of Plymouth, and to erect there a permanent trading house of hewn oak planks, furnished with trading goods and in the care of two men the year round. Aptucxet was the name of their first post; it was located so strategically in relation to Buzzard’s Bay that its site is at the edge of the modern passage, the Cape Cod Canal. In the seventeenth century a short overland portage, probably accomplished in about six hours, took one across the neck of the Cape from a few miles up the Scusset River, entered from Cape Cod Bay, and thus avoided the hazards of sea passage around the Cape.
Just at this time the Pilgrims took advantage of a new contact. Responding to earlier Dutch offers to trade for beaver, Governor Bradford invited Isaack de Rasieres, the chief merchant in New Amsterdam, to pay a visit. The portly burgher arrived at the Aptucxet post in October 1627 and came ashore “accompanied with a noise of trumpeters.” Finding the journey overland toPlymouth too far to walk, he requested that a small boat be sent for him, visited the little town, and in due course wrote a description of it. The intercourse thus opened with the Dutch plantation at the mouth of the Hudson lasted several years. It not only offered the Pilgrims desirable goods, such as sugar, linen cloth, and other stuffs, but in the long run greatly enhanced the colony’s opportunities for Indian trade by selling them a quantity of wampum. This valuable native shell money, made by the Narragansetts, now promoted gainful dealings with the Abnakis of the Kennebec country and other tribes. De Rasieres felt it necessary to justify his selling the Pilgrims the first fifty fathom of sewan (wampum) by saying that he hoped to keep them from seeking it themselves at its source of manufacture and so discovering the profitable fur trade inland. He must have meant by this the trade with the Iroquois the Dutch had tapped through their control of the Hudson River, or that of the upper Connecticut Valley.[38]
Therival shipmasters and settlers now ranging along the rocky coves and inlets of the Maine coast alarmed Plymouth lest they take control of the mouth of the Kennebec River. Since the autumn of 1625, most of the beaver collected had been furnished by the Abnaki Indians of this region. To secure this area and to define the boundaries of the colony, which had been unspecified in the Peirce patent, Isaac Allerton was directed to seek a new patent from the Council for New England. Some money was laid out for this purpose in his accounts with Sherley in 1628. The first grant he obtained proved to be so “strait and ill bounded,” however, that he had to apply for its enlargement. Sherley reported that Allerton was “so turmoiled about it” that he would not have undertaken such trouble, even for a thousand pounds.
The fruit of these efforts was a patent the Council issued in 1630, signed by the Earl of Warwick. It gave Plymouth not only its first exact boundaries, but a strip of land along the Kennebec, with control of fifteen miles on either side of the river, running up the river as far as the site of Cushenoc or present-day Augusta, Maine. This document, in the name of William Bradford and his associates, the first of their grants reflecting the complete shift in ownership from London to the New World, provided the basis for the colony’s land rights. At the same time Allerton did not succeed in getting past the seals a charter from the King, such as Massachusetts Bay had. He was criticized for this, somewhat unjustly, on the grounds that he failed because he and Sherley included among its terms some special customs privileges. Yet several charters, notably that of Massachusetts Bay, carried privileges similar to those Allerton requested, so it is more likely that a lack of funds and influence at court blocked passage. Allerton had apparently influenced Sherley to persuade Bradford that this charter could be secured only if he was allowed to go back to England. In fact, nothing more came of it, although £500 was reported to have been spent on the patent.[39]
Untilthis time everyone had relied on Allerton; now the “Undertakers” began to look on their business agent with disfavor. His previous long record of helpfulness had caused them to disregard the grumblings of the new settlers from Leyden, who were dissatisfied with his treatment of them. Allerton had belonged to the original Leyden congregation and had helped advise Carver and Cushman about preparations for the voyage to America, had signed the Mayflower Compact, and had assisted Governor Bradford after Carver’s death. As a member of the governing circle and a trusted official, he completed negotiationof the dissolution of the merchant adventurers for New Plymouth during trips to London in 1626–27. Quite naturally, Sherley’s praise of him as an “honest and discreet agent” bolstered the colony’s belief in his “good and faithful service.”
While this enterprising man began his mission without deliberately dishonest intent, he expected successfully to combine with it the pursuit of his own private interests. He soon joined Sherley in a private arrangement, for in 1628 the London man referred to an “account betwixt you and me,” which was separate from Allerton’s purchases for Plymouth. There it was known and accepted that he brought over some goods “upon his own particular, and sold them for his own ... benefit.” His frequent journeys to England and the intimate knowledge he had of the needs of New England obviously gave him special opportunities. One of these was to buy provisions for the settlers of Massachusetts Bay, a contract perhaps dating from a visit he made aboard the ship carrying John Winthrop to New England in 1630. Emmanuel Downing and John Humfrey, two leading supporters in London of the Bay colony, thought highly of his advice that they move this plantation to the Hudson River. Allerton’s relation with the Bay leaders outlasted those with the Pilgrims.[40]
Plymouth’s agent nonetheless revealed an indifference to her wishes when he brought back from England the very same Thomas Morton whom she had expelled. It was an insult to shelter this man right on the main street and even to employ him for a short time as a business secretary. Then, too, while buying a much bigger quantity of goods to be sold to the settlers than instructed, Allerton neglected to secure proper supplies of trading goods. Sherley had pressured him into exceeding the small quotas ordered by the “Undertakers,” he said in his defense. Sherley’s letters did stress, of course, the need to turn over as large an amount as possible during the relatively short duration of the partnership’s monopoly of trade, arguing thata large outlay was required to make a good profit in so short a time. “... we must follow it roundly and to purpose, for if we piddle out the time in our trade, others will step in and nose us....” Bradford and the others, understandably, were much more anxious to pay off the debts already owed than to overextend themselves just to make a profit.[41]
Such disagreements between Allerton and Sherley on the one hand, and Bradford, Winslow, and others at Plymouth, multiplied as the result of a new Maine venture, devised in 1629, which rivaled the Kennebec. Sherley and three other Londoners sent Edward Ashley, a keen trader but “a profane young man” by Pilgrim standards, to found a rival post at Pentagoet, near the Penobscot River. Allerton had refused to commit the Plymouth partners to the scheme without their consent, but on the basis of later correspondence Bradford decided that he had been an instigator of the plan. Since they had to send Ashley supplies, the Pilgrims had little choice anyway but to come in, if they wished to have some control of this potential competitor. Ashley soon was better supplied with trading goods than Plymouth, which, indeed, had to buy from Allerton himself, in return for part of their beaver taken at reduced prices. Without their knowledge, their versatile agent next borrowed money on their account at Bristol, at 50% interest, ostensibly so that goods might be shipped early with the fishing fleet headed for New England waters in the spring of the year.
Meanwhile, Winslow had conceived a plan to send a fishing ship laden with trading goods from the West Country in England directly to Maine, where a cargo of salt purchased the season before would await the ship’s arrival. In fact, the vessel thus hired, theFriendship, was badly delayed by “foul weather” so that Allerton reached Maine, traveling on theWhite Angel, only just before Timothy Hatherley, one of the London associates, finally reached Boston in theFriendship. The latter revealed that most of the goods he carried were not for Plymouth at all, butfor Massachusetts. Plymouth’s mounting annoyance and mistrust of Allerton reached its pinnacle with the disturbing revelation that the English partners had bought outright theWhite Angel, not merely hired her, as was customary. The “Undertakers” suddenly were confronted by fresh, crushing debts, for each English partner had contributed two or three times as large an investment as before. Meanwhile, with a subtle note of mistrust of Plymouth’s dealings with them, the latter had designated Hatherley as a confidential agent to be informed of “the state and account of all the business.”[42]
Thus commenced a new and tedious financial wrangle between Plymouth and London. The former felt that the necessary control of their own business and obligations ceased when the English members could “run into such great things, and charge of shipping and new projects in their own heads, not only without but against all order and advice....” Confronted by their objections, Allerton undertook to convince them that they need not have theWhite Angelon the general account, if they did not wish to. Years later, in 1639, he testified that he had bought her at Bristol in 1631 only for the inner group comprising himself, Sherley, Andrews, and Beauchamp, and even Hatherley, whereas theFriendshipwas hired for all the partners of Plymouth. London contradicted this, saying that the ship would not have been purchased at all, if it hadn’t been for the interests of Plymouth.
The disagreement over theWhite Angeland theFriendshipplagued the partnership for some time to come, but the leaders on both sides of the Atlantic now concurred in the dismissal of Allerton as agent. Hatherley’s tour of inspection of the “down east” trading posts before his return to London demonstrated to him that “Allerton played his own game and ran a course not only to the great wrong and detriment of the Plantation who employed and trusted him, but abused them ... in possessing them [in England] with prejudice against the Plantation ...that they would never be able to repay their moneys....” Winslow, one of the most enterprising traders among the “Undertakers,” had journeyed to London earlier in 1631 and succeeded the discredited agent.
Should Allerton flatly be called a cheat? Unable to “be brief in so tedious and intricate a business,” Bradford himself struggled not to impute to Allerton thoroughly dishonest motives. The Governor even admitted that the agent’s commission to act in Plymouth’s behalf had given him a certain freedom of action. That Allerton had been led aside from the main desires of the Plantation by “his own gains and private ends,” we conclude from his managing to invest £400 under Sherley’s name in the brewhouse belonging to one of the former London adventurers, William Collier. Bradford became convinced that the agent had inspired both the schemes of Ashley’s rival trade and the purchase of theWhite Angel, persuading his London friends that the Kennebec trade alone was insufficient to pay them.
The partnership’s general account thus became simply a convenient place for Allerton to unload losses, with records “so large and intricate, as they could not well understand them, much less examine and correct them without a great deal of time and help....” His lists of all sorts of expenses took advantage of the Pilgrims’ weakness with accounts: “£30 given at a clap, and £50 spent in a journey.... Yea, he screwed up his poor old father-in-law’s [Elder Brewster] account to above £200 and brought it upon the general account ... because he knew they would never let it lie on the old man....” Puzzled, Bradford admitted that he did not know “how it came to pass, or what mystery was in it,” that Allerton even was able to present a list of all “disbursements,” though it was Sherley who made them during his own absence. In the final calculations a sizable discrepancy (£2300) arose. Whereas the agent claimed the partners owed him £300, the latter represented his debt to them as £2000.
When Sherley wrote that “if their business had been better managed they might have been the richest plantation of any English at that time,” he could blame the financial incompetence of the “Undertakers” at Plymouth as well as Allerton’s deficiencies. Their initial trust in the honesty of others, however praiseworthy, was no match for the shrewdness of the businessmen who soon were to make Boston and the Bay colony the center of trade in New England. Consider how they accepted their associate Hatherley’s unauthorized “honest word” that they would be discharged from theFriendship’s account, thus permitting Allerton and him to collect all its returns, even though they paid the Pilgrims only £200. Then, after Hatherley’s London partners repudiated this discharge, the Pilgrims were billed for losses, but with no countervailing credits. “... they were ... now taught how to deal in the world, especially with merchants, in such cases,” Bradford sadly noted in comment, but the lesson unfortunately did not improve their keeping of accounts.[43]
Without a single surviving letter of Allerton’s, stating his point of view about the Pilgrims, it is difficult to judge his career. We know that as a busy merchant and projector he continued to shuttle back and forth across the Atlantic and up and down the American coast from northern Maine to New Amsterdam. His own ventures in theWhite Angel, which he hired and later bought from Sherley, turned out badly, but the fault of placing part of its debts on Plymouth’s account seems to have been Sherley’s. Allerton set up a rival post at Machias, Maine, “to run into every hole and into the river of the Kennebec to glean away the trade ... there”; after its capture by the French, his pinnace traded in the Penobscot region. During a season of fishing at Marblehead for Matthew Cradock, a London promoter of the Massachusetts Bay Company, Allerton nevertheless continued to be named an assistant of the Plymouth colony and was a freeman there as late as 1637. In 1633 he was the richest man in Plymouth; he lent large sums of money to other settlers, includinghis sister’s husband. Merchants of Massachusetts and New Netherland did not distrust him, even though Winslow wrote from England in 1637 to warn Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts that Allerton was too friendly with “our common adversaries,” those who were thinking of securing a royal commission to govern all of New England. He wrote: “... the truth is he loveth neither you nor us.”
The former agent was, in fact, primarily a businessman, without strong religious or sentimental ties. He certainly “abused” the trust of his old comrades by saddling them with such heavy debts, but his acts seem unscrupulous rather than calculated dishonesty. He took risks which, if they turned out badly, hurt other people. In short, this maker of “fair propositions and large promises” was led into temptation by dreams of wealth; in this he was like many another promoter. Ultimately, his bad judgment and ill luck brought him losses, and he died insolvent in New Haven in 1659.[44]
The stressesbetween the “Undertakers” and the London partners were not relieved simply by Allerton’s dismissal. A decade of acrimonious exchange of letters followed from 1631 to 1641. It was not easy for the Londoners to balance off Allerton’s debts, along with new expenses, against the receipt of furs shipped from Plymouth. They were determined to hold out until a settlement profitable to them was reached. Throughout this quarrel Bradford’sHistoryhas to be our guide for the most part, for only one fragment of reckoning between Sherley and Allerton has been found. Undoubtedly, when the great governor wrote his narrative he was trying to rehabilitate the Pilgrims’ financial reputation and counter the rumors in London and Boston mercantile circles that they were in default. In his chapterson finance he is repetitious, sometimes confusing, and yet omits certain business details. His judgment was charitable, however, and by recording Sherley’s letters he preserved at least some of London’s side of the controversy.
The first dispute arose from Edward Winslow’s unwillingness to accept theWhite Angel’s losses on the “Undertakers’” account. Sherley was displeased and warned that this “unreasonable refusal” might “hasten that fire which is a kindling too fast already....” Plymouth nonetheless declined to take on all the debts which appeared in Sherley’s accounting of 1631. It was found that in arriving at a total of £4770, in addition to £1000 unpaid of the purchase money, he had charged twice and even three times for certain items. £600 of this amount even Allerton could not identify.
The London partners’ dissatisfaction with the records kept in Plymouth led Sherley to insist on the appointment of Josiah Winslow, younger brother of Edward, as their accountant. The Pilgrims remarked crustily “that if they were well dealt with and had their goods well sent over, they could keep their accounts ... themselves.” Certainly, the new accountant, with his hopeless inaccuracy and carelessness, did little to mend matters. In fact, he “did wholly fail them, and could never give them any account; but trusting to his memory and loose papers, let things run into such confusion that neither he, nor any with him, could bring things to rights.” Ultimately, they lost several hundreds of pounds in this way for goods trusted out without any record clear enough to call in the payments. Also, goods arrived from England without prices or invoices.
Meanwhile, several circumstances fed Plymouth’s dissatisfaction with James Sherley, including his continuing to do business with Allerton. After selling the latter the controversial ship, Sherley nevertheless could write with unctious fervor, “Oh the grief and trouble that man, Mr. Allerton, hath brought upon you and us! I cannot forget it, and to think on it draws many asigh from my heart and tears from my eyes.” Yet he rescued Allerton from trouble with his ship, sent Plymouth’s supply on board it in 1632, and allowed him easy terms. It was hard to reconcile Sherley’s depressing complaints about his own heavy debts with this extension of credit to Allerton and participation in other ventures, such as sending Captain William Peirce to Massachusetts Bay. Unfortunately, Peirce’s ship met disaster on her way home in 1632, so the beaver that Plymouth had entrusted to her, along with some of their accounts, was “swallowd up in the sea.”
By 1636 Bradford reckoned that Plymouth had sent to England about 12,530 pounds of beaver estimated to be worth more than £10,000, with 1,156 otter skins to pay the freight charges. Because of Winslow’s shaky accounts, they could only estimate the receipts of English goods. They thought these cost about £2000, and even if the debt of £4770 was increased, they could not understand why the fur receipts would not have more than paid it off. One explanation probably is that Sherley was unable to sell all of the beaver at the high prices they had counted on. During the plague year of 1636 he complained that prices dropped to 8s. a pound. Also, Sherley was unable to determine just how many skins belonged to the “Undertakers’” account, and how many Winslow had bought from settlers who had no part in the “Undertakers’” scheme.[45]
To theproblem of extricating the Plymouth venture from its financial straits a new one was now added. A quarrel had broken out among the English partners themselves, James Sherley, John Beauchamp, and Richard Andrews. These men had shared in the debts incurred after 1626 to keep Plymouth supplied. The Pilgrims had expected all three to profit from the large quantities of furs shipped after 1631. Instead, in 1640 Beauchamp and Andrewsrevealed a rift with Sherley of several years standing. They complained in court that they had not received a fair share of the returns on their investment and tried to force a full accounting of Sherley’s transactions with Plymouth. This suit, with its contradictory sets of figures, exposed the nature of their association.
In the joint adventure to trade with the Governor and the rest of the Plymouth “Undertakers,” each of the three Londoners had promised to put £1100 into stock. Richard Andrews paid in £1136, John Beauchamp £1127, and, they claimed, James Sherley pretended to put in £1190 (a total of about £3500). To meet pressing debts about 1636 Beauchamp contributed £500 more. It was expected that Sherley, acting as sole factor, would dispose of returns from the plantation, report occasionally to them, and distribute any profits. In a few years, they asserted, he handled beaver and otter worth from £12,000 to £13,000 but ignored their requests to show his accounts; thus they had no way of checking whether he had used some of the profits for his own business. He had exhibited “a covetous disposition to gain ... [their dues] himself ...” and to their “loving” pleas replied violently that he would rot and die before giving an account. They suspected him of withdrawing his own stock and profits.
How did Sherley answer these charges? First, he denied that Andrews was a party to the suit, since before going abroad, he had told Sherley of Beauchamp’s plan to sue and refused to join in it. Not he, but Allerton, had been the “Undertakers’” agent, accredited to buy and sell; he acted only in Allerton’s absence, although permitting his warehouse in London to be used for Plymouth’s goods. In 1632 he had given Edward Winslow copies of all his receipts and payments. Since the chief function of all three London merchants had consisted of making good Allerton’s demands for credit for Plymouth, they had laid out sizable sums of money, urged on by hope of preventing loss of what they had already invested. Sherley alone found himself“out of purse” some £1866 in March 1631/32. If he was able to collect £675 owed to Plymouth, this still left him with £1190 tied up in their enterprise. The debts of the London men, on Plymouth’s behalf, ran up to £5900 in 1631, but Sherley had been paying these off slowly, as the planters’ returns trickled in. Indeed, had it not been for his own “deep engagements” and his partners’ “earnest request,” Sherley protested, he would have given up the business long before. He was not obliged to give a detailed accounting to his copartners, but only to the Plymouth associates. Actually, it was up to the latter to produce an exact accounting to the three London men, not the other way about. Sherley was anxious to reconcile his accounts with them and was willing to meet their agent even in France or Holland; until then, he could not even “book” (enter) the items for which he had loose records.
Sherley insisted that he had sold no furs for his own profit, but had informed Beauchamp and Andrews when he disposed of any. In a final balance of all records he was sure that Plymouth would still owe him money, not he owe his copartners, for the latter had adventured absolutely nothing since 1631. He, not they, had carried the burden in London in the “sickly” years of 1635 and 1636. With this defense, Bradford says, Beauchamp and Andrews failed to win the suit,[46]and indeed, Sherley’s letters confirm that his credit was sorely taxed in the 1630s.
Whilethis dispute was in progress, however, the Pilgrims were so perplexed about its rights that they were persuaded to send 1,325 pounds of beaver directly to the other two partners, hoping to satisfy their claims that Sherley had paid them nothing. After selling it, Beauchamp chalked off £400 of theirdebt, but Andrews, through mismanagement, sold his at a loss and in 1642 still claimed between £500 and £600. He finally agreed to accept payment in cattle to Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay and designated the “godly poor men” and “poor ministers” of that colony as the beneficiaries of Plymouth’s debt. In addition, Andrews and Beauchamp received land in Scituate, one of several flourishing daughter towns now settled in Plymouth.[47]
Meanwhile the business with Sherley was wound up at last. Trade with him had already broken off because of distrust of his repeated delays in accounting to his London partners. For fear of legal reprisals from any of these, it was decided not to risk sending another agent to London but to have some “gentlemen and merchants in the Bay” hear the dispute. Even “though it should cost them all they had in the world,” the “Undertakers” promised to accept their award. This decision was prompted by two considerations. First, they feared that the price of cattle, by now a greater source of income than furs, might drop and change their circumstances. Also, the colony’s founders, surviving into old age, wished to clear up their affairs before death overtook them. Sherley himself believed that lawyers would be “the most gainers” from legal action, and therefore selected John Atwood and William Collier, recent merchant arrivals in Plymouth from London, to draw up a composition. Another participant in the settlement was Edmund Freeman, Beauchamp’s brother-in-law, and now the leading citizen of Sandwich. After laborious days of investigation of accounts, they estimated everything left in Plymouth of the old stock, housing, boats, the bark and goods for the Indian trade, and “all debts, as well those that were desperate, as others more hopeful,” at £1400.
By October 15, 1641, Atwood, Bradford, and Edward Winslow had come to terms ending the partnership. The agreement of 1627 was reacknowledged, but Plymouth, while admittingconfusion in Josiah Winslow’s bookkeeping, again repudiated the debts of theWhite Angeland theFriendship. A full discharge from the obligations of the beaver trade, the charges of the two ships, and the £1800 purchase money agreed on in 1627 was promised by Atwood in behalf of the London associates. Bradford and his partners for their part guaranteed payment to them of £1400. £110 of this had already been paid to Winthrop for Andrews’ account, and eighty pounds of beaver to Atwood. The rest was to be discharged in appropriate commodities, at the rate of £200 per year.
To executethis agreement across the distance of the broad Atlantic took some time. Recognizing the justness of the “Undertakers’” final account but calling the venture “uncomfortable and unprofitable to all,” James Sherley signed the release in June 1642. In the bargaining, the Reverend Hugh Peter, Thomas Weld, and William Hibbins, in England as agents of Massachusetts, put forth Atwood’s terms. At the same time they succeeded in persuading the London partners to surrender for charitable purposes in New England the £1200 debt. Three quarters, or £900, was set apart for Massachusetts, while Plymouth was to receive only £300.
A letter of Richard Andrews about this time fortunately permits us to break away from the divergent points of view set forth in Bradford’s narrative and Sherley’s letters. In many ways Andrews was the most straightforward of the London partners and the most generous. While forgiving the interest due on his own account, he charged that Sherley and Beauchamp had “wronged [the business] many £100 both in principal and interest” and knowingly presented unfair accounts. This remark suggests one solution to the problem as to why theseemingly excessive charges on the Pilgrims mounted year after year in spite of their returns. Hinting that Sherley had manipulated some private losses so as to place them on the general account, Andrews perhaps did not recognize the rapidity with which the debts accumulated because of the high rates of interest on them. The fact is that colonial ventures were considered such poor financial risks that their debts tended to multiply faster than they could be paid off. This explanation of their financial plight is probably closer to the truth than that the Londoners deliberately perpetrated a “manifest fraud” upon the plantation. It was Andrews also who echoed the complaint common to all the London merchants engaged in colonial enterprise. He wrote in 1645 that the conduct of the “Undertakers” did not become “fair dealing men who make not so much profession to walk according to the rule of the gospel as they.... I hope that seven years time is long enough to keep my money before they return the principal....”
John Beauchamp, unlike the more generous Andrews, continued to insist on collecting his debt even though it could never be proved. To settle this claim, Bradford and his partners in 1645 turned over to his attorney houses and lands in Plymouth, Rehoboth, and Marshfield worth £291.[48]
It is to Plymouth’s credit that all these obligations were met in the 1640s, because the colony was no longer as prosperous as in the preceding decade. Its wealth had come to consist increasingly of cattle, so that the price collapse which took place when the influx of new settlers into the Bay ceased, came suddenly and with severe effect. Cattle came to be worth perhaps 25% of its former value. Even the wealthier colony of Massachusetts discovered that it could no longer secure credit in England. The Pilgrims nevertheless continued to develop their modest resources in animal stock and land. A new land arrangement reflected the ending of the old debts. Governor Bradford, who had held title to the patent since 1630, alongwith the “old comers” or “purchasers,” turned over the grant to the whole body of freemen of Plymouth, retaining for himself only three reserved tracts as his reward for carrying the responsibility for repayment.
As to Plymouth’s fur trade, the complaint John Winthrop had once voiced that the colony had “engrossed all the chief places of trade” in New England was no longer true. The “Old Colony” had been edged out of the Connecticut River and Narragansett trade, some of its Maine posts had been attacked by the French, and rival settlers and competitors had made the rest less profitable. At Aptucxet commerce with the Dutch kept on for a time, and on the Kennebec there remained an echo of the busy activity of the 1630s. A small group farmed the Indian trade there so that at his death in 1657 Bradford’s stock of trading goods and debts due from it was worth £256. Within a few years, however, all trading goods were brought home and the Kennebec tract sold.[49]
Thus ended the history of Plymouth Colony as a business venture. Even after careful study of all the details we know, it is hard to interpret and correctly assess whether the London capitalists or the colony can really be blamed for the contradictory financial muddle. In their somewhat uneasy alliance, the Londoners with spare funds and the group of obscure artisans and small farmers, mostly dissenters from the established church, no doubt emphasized different goals. Most of the merchants, while Puritan in religious sympathies, nevertheless anticipated profits. This appeared to them fitting, since they risked great loss in so untried a speculation. Then, after Plymouth was settled and valuable returns established, the Londoners held an advantage to the end, for they were always in a creditor position as they continued to supply essential goods at high prices and rates of interest. The colonists’ payment was slow, interrupted by many misfortunes and contingencies, but eventually it was made. Although the investors in the originalcompany lost most of their money, the businessmen who stayed with the enterprise, such as Sherley, seem to have increased their capital.
The Pilgrims, too, achieved success, for they had built the essentials of a free and self-sustaining community. If they were never wealthy in their new environment, the leaders of Plymouth, developing business experience and judgment, by 1645 enjoyed modest prosperity. They had paid off the expenses of shipping over their fellow exiles from Leyden and bought the livestock and equipment needed as the foundation for settlement. Ignorance, desertion by their first backers, cruel losses at sea, their agent’s misdeeds, all had been overcome. They were now rid of the burdens inherent in the London merchants’ sponsorship of the colony. Their debts, both “hopeful anddesperate,” lay behind.