Debts hopeful and desperate

by Ruth A. McIntyre

Quarrels develop among the London merchants

Up to now Weston had been the Pilgrims’ chief supporter in all the business dealings with the London group. He had promised never to fail them if only they signed the onerous terms required by the latter. Before the plundered Fortune returned to port, this giver of plausible assurances was the first to desert them. One reason probably was the dispute with his former factor in the Low Countries, Edward Pickering. Near the end of 1621 Pickering left Amsterdam and broke off dealings with Weston. In the suit about accounts connected with their Dutch business, he asserted that Weston owed him hundreds of pounds. A protracted legal wrangle, continued even after Pickering’s death and after Weston had departed for New England, revealed the latter’s word to be far from reliable. One witness claimed that he heard Weston’s brother promise to give some kind of an accounting, not necessarily a true account. Arbitrators investigating the contradictory claims of both parties finally concluded that a matter of some £200 prevented a settlement, but Weston, stubborn and contentious, filed a countersuit against Pickering for a bond of £1500. It seems clear that other adventurers for Plymouth agreed with Pickering in this contest, since John Fowler, James Sherley, and Richard Andrews, as his executors, continued the case after his death.

Weston meanwhile had written Bradford that he disagreed with the rest of the adventurers over their course of action, reproaching them for their “parsimony” in waiting for favorable receipts before they sent provisions. Then he and another stockholder, John Beauchamp, sent out a group of settlers on their own account as a private venture, entirely distinct from the general stock. Weston’s men not only brought no victuals for the colony, but relied on the Pilgrims to furnish them necessary shelter and obliged them to dip into their own precious stores of seed corn and salt.

Weston’s break with the company in London soon followed. The adventurers held a meeting early in 1622, when the majority agreed to put into the common fund what we might call an additional assessment of one third of their original holding of stock. Those anxious to go on with the business believed it should not be hindered by the laggards, so they resolved to break off the joint stock as soon as the shareowners in the colony should agree. This report of a decision to break up came from Weston and his supporters, but it proved premature, as indeed Bradford suspected so strongly that he did not show their letter to more than a handful of intimates in counsel. Instead, Weston got out. He wrote in April 1622: “I have sold my adventure and debts unto them so as I am quit of you, and you of me....” The company’s reaction was that they were “very glad they are freed of him, he being judged a man that thought himself above the general....” Not unrelated to his coming in person to New England in disguise and under an assumed name may have been a large debt he owed the Crown for alum; a Treasury warrant accused him of withdrawing beyond the seas with the purpose of taking his estate after him.

Weston’s subsequent projects for colonizing and trading in New England for some time created problems for the settlement at Plymouth. The Pilgrims’ leaders more than repaid him for his early support by receiving his men kindly and rescuing his rival colony on Massachusetts Bay from imminent destruction by the Indians. When the promoter himself arrived at their door, virtually destitute, but convincing in his excuses, they fitted him out with enough furs to begin trade again.

Master John Peirce was the next to quarrel with his fellow adventurers in London. A member of the Clothworkers’ Company, Peirce claimed that he once employed more than a hundred persons. He was the merchant who had received patents for the Leyden settlers from the Virginia Company in 1620 and later from the Council for New England. He had helped negotiate the terms of agreement between the merchants and the planters. It was under his name that they held the right to take up land around Plymouth. This had made him important enough for Cushman to dedicate Mourt’s Relation to him. In April 1622, according to the story Bradford told, a version accepted uncritically by many writers, Peirce secretly obtained from the Council for New England a new grant, making the associates hold the lands at Plymouth as his tenants, rather than of the Council. The London adventurers objected and forced him to assign the grant to their Treasurer, now James Sherley, in return for which Peirce demanded £500. The impression is left that Peirce deceived the company and that they were justified in breaking with him.

Peirce, on the other hand, presented his side in a lawsuit in Chancery against Sherley and the other New Plymouth adventurers. It is unfortunate that the answers to the charges do not survive. Peirce claimed an investment of £300 in the colony, reporting that when the adventurers, “being moved by the distressed condition of the Planters ... in that place foreign to them and a vast desert,” wished to furnish relief, they couldn’t raise the money. At the request of Sherley, Peirce then tried to sustain the plantation by putting up funds to outfit the ill-starred Paragon. This vessel, hired from Peirce by the adventurers, sailed twice in the fall and winter of 1622–23 with freight and passengers, chiefly women and children. When wintry seas forced her to turn back the second time, Peirce said that, although the adventurers had promised that he should not suffer any losses from the voyage, contrary to such agreement, he bore the entire loss. After Peirce was unable to refit his ship at Portsmouth quickly enough to suit the adventurers, the latter sent a writ from Admiralty to arrest him for £600. Under his brother Richard’s bond, the merchant returned to London, where the adventurers “made a great clamour against ... [him] for some supposed unjust dealing....” They attempted to buy out his indenture, ultimately succeeding in obtaining from Peirce’s brother a £500 bond to deliver it. This compelled Peirce to sign it over to Sherley; besides he lost the chance to recoup his loss by another voyage. In spite of a complex series of legal maneuvers (Bradford wrote that Peirce “sued them in most of the chief courts in England ... [and] brought it to the Parliament”), he was unable to regain his investment and reported that he suffered such inconvenience and damaged reputation that he emerged a poor man.

While John Peirce held the title to the Plymouth lands “in trust,” he seems to have acted within his legal rights in his maneuver to exchange the indenture of 1621 for a new patent, but his purpose in doing so without informing his associates in London and New Plymouth is not clear. It evidently so angered them that when they found out they stubbornly refused to settle with him and pay the £500 fee he demanded. They probably were not unwilling to ruin him. Bradford, on the other hand, gave short shrift to the fact that the Paragon sailed at Peirce’s charge and clearly accepted the opinion of the adventurers that God had directed her mishaps against him because of his action on the patent.[13]