The London partners quarrel among themselves
To the problem 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 Andrews revealed 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.