Some London merchants offer to invest in the colony
Fortunately, there now appeared in Leyden the venturesome fellow countryman whose encouraging new proposals soon gave a lift to low spirits. This was Thomas Weston, a London merchant who had trading interests in the Low Countries. He persuaded the congregation to reject the offers the Dutch West India Company had made to induce them to plant in their territory. He promised, instead, that if the Virginia Company failed to assist, he and his partners would do so.
Weston had served his apprenticeship and been admitted to the Ironmongers Company, one of the London livery companies. A citizen of London, he was altogether a minor figure in the English business world. He engaged in the somewhat hazardous task of selling cloth and other wares to the Low Countries as an “interloper,” that is, a trespasser on the tight monopoly the Merchant Adventurers Company of London held there. Although not an investor in Virginia, he evidently shared the fever which was stimulating dreams of profit even in highly speculative colonial ventures, and was willing to shift part of his funds to the relatively untried business of shipping settlers to fish and trade in the New World. It is also likely that he had some sympathy with the religious views of the Leyden group.
For some years Weston’s agent at Amsterdam had been Edward Pickering, a merchant married to a member of the Leyden congregation. He had left England for religious reasons and enjoyed a reputation for honesty and success as Weston’s factor. Perhaps it was during a routine visit of Weston to his shop in Amsterdam that Pickering informed him of the plans for emigration. None of the leaders at Leyden suspected that in the long run Weston’s conduct would not bear out the brisk confidence and easy promises with which he soon persuaded them to accept his promise of assistance. Indeed, in a short time Pickering himself was unable to obtain a proper reckoning of accounts with his employer without returning to England and suing him for a large sum. Weston’s finances finally became so crippled by debts, including those to some of the partners in the Plymouth venture, that he left the country and turned to small fishing voyages in New England.[5] This is looking ahead of our story, however.
Weston had come to discern in the colonizing scheme commercial prospects attractive enough to induce several other London businessmen to join in an unincorporated company to send the Leyden congregation overseas. Besides evidence to be presented later that to a certain extent Puritan religious inclination prompted this support, it is likely that the slump in the trade in woolen cloth, the traditional mainstay of English commerce abroad, was also a factor influencing their decision. The disturbance in the course of that trade due partly to its reorganization by the Crown in 1614 helped favor an interest in various new money-making projects. In the rapid growth and dislocation characteristic of early seventeenth-century London relatively few merchants had heard of New England, but Virginia’s financial difficulties were well known. Captain John Smith had appealed in 1616 to investors in London and the ports of southwestern England to support colonies to produce profits from the fish and furs of New England. Fishermen, some sent by Londoners, already were sailing off the coast, but Smith recommended settling there so that permanent posts could lengthen the fishing season and permit cargos to be prepared for the arrival of the fleets in the spring. Weston and his partners may have regarded the Pilgrims as the human material to carry out such a plan. Perhaps he suggested planting further north than Jamestown.
Be that as it may, this promoter was welcomed with enthusiasm when he came to confer with Pastor Robinson and to reassure the discouraged that there was no want of shipping or money. The next step was to persuade his Leyden friends to draw up an agreement with his “merchant adventurers,” and set forth in black and white the terms under which they would receive aid and he could persuade his fellow-investors to contribute.