Plymouth’s business agent is dismissed for a “conflict of interest”
Until this 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 negotiation of 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 that a 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, the Friendship, was badly delayed by “foul weather” so that Allerton reached Maine, traveling on the White Angel, only just before Timothy Hatherley, one of the London associates, finally reached Boston in the Friendship. The latter revealed that most of the goods he carried were not for Plymouth at all, but for Massachusetts. Plymouth’s mounting annoyance and mistrust of Allerton reached its pinnacle with the disturbing revelation that the English partners had bought outright the White 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 the White Angel on 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 the Friendship was 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 the White Angel and the Friendship plagued 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 the White 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 the Friendship’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 the White 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, including his 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]