There was, however, no surplus of food for export, and lumber and beaver were the only available commodities.[[258]] But the site that had been chosen for the colony was in a poor location for the Indian trade, which required access to the interior along some waterway; and the Pilgrims were therefore forced to resort to coasting voyages for their main supply of skins.
Not only had the London merchants received almost no interest upon their investment, but it began to seem evident to them that the principal itself was lost. Quarrels among themselves over the character of the colonists sent out, and mutual recriminations, completed the break-down of the company. Finally, in December, 1624, some of them wrote to Bradford and others that they had decided to abandon the venture and lose what they had already expended rather than risk any more, suggesting that the Pilgrims send over what they could to pay special debts, amounting to £1400. Those writing the letter also sent out, on their own account, some cattle and various useful commodities, to be sold to the settlers at seventy per cent advance, to cover the profits and risks. The latter were indeed great, insurance alone, at that time, consuming about twenty-five per cent for the round trip;[[259]] and the following year, Standish, who had been sent to London for the purpose, could not borrow money, for the purchase of trading goods, at less than fifty per cent. Goods and capital they must have, however, and the profits, when made, were correspondingly great. While Standish was in London, Winslow made a trip to the Kennebec, in a small vessel, laden only with a little of that surplus corn which they had raised, and there secured seven hundred pounds weight of beaver, besides other furs. In 1626, hearing that the trading station at Monhegan was going out of business, Bradford and Winslow, accompanied by Thompson from Piscataqua, went to attend the sale, at which the Pilgrims bought goods to the value of £400. An additional stock, amounting to £100, was bought from the wreck of a French ship in the ill-fated Damaris Cove, the purchases being paid for with the beaver which they had accumulated the winter before. The following spring, Allerton arrived from London with £200 more, which he had succeeded in raising at thirty per cent; so that their capital was now ample.[[260]] The greatest advance which they made in their trade with the Indians, however, was due to the friendly Dutch, who sold them some wampum, and taught them its great value in dealing with the savages. This appearance of the ubiquitous Dutch, helping a struggling colony to achieve economic strength by valuable advice or yet more valuable trading in needed goods, was a frequent one in the early seventeenth century, and in all quarters of the globe. The Pilgrims at Plymouth, the French at St. Christophers, and innumerable other little settlements on secluded bays or on lonely islands, owed their prosperity or preservation to the timely arrival of a “Dutch trading captain.” It would be interesting to trace how many little bands of people, abandoned by their own companies or governments, were thus nursed into strength by the Holland traders, who sought them out, and knew their needs.[[261]]
Assured now of sufficient food, and with the Indian trade well established, the settlers felt that their position in these respects was secure. There were, however, two matters which gave them cause for anxiety. One was the interference by outsiders with their trade on the Kennebec, and the other was their ill-defined situation in regard to the Adventurers in London. In spite of the abandonment of the enterprise by the latter, their claims would continue in existence unless legally extinguished; and it was essential for the settlers to come to some agreement with them, in order that their property and goods should not be liable to seizure in the future. Negotiations, begun by Allerton in 1626, were completed by him on a second trip the year after, when he not only secured a patent for a definite tract on the Kennebec from the Council for New England, but consummated the deal with the Adventurers by which all claims of every description were to be canceled by the payment to them of £1800, in annual instalments of £200 each. The payment of this sum, together with £600 of additional debt, was undertaken by Bradford, Brewster, Standish, and Winslow, with four others in the colony and four friends in England, in exchange for a monopoly of the colony's trade for six years.[[262]]
By their purchase of all the Adventurers' interest, the Pilgrims had thus practically eliminated the proprietary elements that had existed in their organization, and the settlement became what, for all practical purposes, it had been from the start—a corporate colony.[[263]] A new patent for Plymouth, granted them in 1630, in the name of Bradford and certain associates, assigned them a definite territory, which the earlier ones had not done, and a confirmation of the Kennebec holdings also straightened out boundary matters there. Their title-deeds, therefore, were now secure. Their powers of government, however, continued to rest solely upon the compact signed in the cabin of the Mayflower ten years before; for, in spite of their efforts, they were never able to obtain a royal charter with privileges similar to those enjoyed by Massachusetts. But in four of the most important elements in that larger migration,—the bringing of families to form permanent homes, the peculiar form of church government, the individual ownership of freely acquired land, and the severing of business and legal relations with any company in England,—the Massachusetts leaders but followed the ways laid out by the simple founders of Plymouth.
[190]. O. S. Davis, John Robinson, the Pilgrim Pastor (Boston, 1903), pp. 62-74. Cf. also C. Burrage, A Tercentenary Memorial; Oxford, 1910; and W. H. Burgess, The Pastor of the Pilgrims; New York, 1920.
[191]. Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation, ed. by C. Deane (Boston, 1861), pp. 409 ff.; H. M. Dexter, The England and Holland of the Pilgrims (Boston, 1905), pp. 216-320. Scrooby was a halting place on the great northern post-road, and the duties of “postmaster” were more varied and important then than now.
[192]. Bradford, Plymouth, p. 11; Dexter, England and Holland, pp. 379 ff.
[193]. J. Hunter, The Founders of New Plymouth (London, 1854), pp. 101-15.
[194]. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana (ed. Hartford, 1855), vol. I, p. 113.