Meanwhile, several circumstances fed Plymouth’s dissatisfaction with James Sherley, including his continuing to do business with Allerton. After selling the latter the controversial ship, Sherley nevertheless could write with unctious fervor, “Oh the grief and trouble that man, Mr. Allerton, hath brought upon you and us! I cannot forget it, and to think on it draws many a sigh from my heart and tears from my eyes.” Yet he rescued Allerton from trouble with his ship, sent Plymouth’s supply on board it in 1632, and allowed him easy terms. It was hard to reconcile Sherley’s depressing complaints about his own heavy debts with this extension of credit to Allerton and participation in other ventures, such as sending Captain William Peirce to Massachusetts Bay. Unfortunately, Peirce’s ship met disaster on her way home in 1632, so the beaver that Plymouth had entrusted to her, along with some of their accounts, was “swallowd up in the sea.”
By 1636 Bradford reckoned that Plymouth had sent to England about 12,530 pounds of beaver estimated to be worth more than £10,000, with 1,156 otter skins to pay the freight charges. Because of Winslow’s shaky accounts, they could only estimate the receipts of English goods. They thought these cost about £2000, and even if the debt of £4770 was increased, they could not understand why the fur receipts would not have more than paid it off. One explanation probably is that Sherley was unable to sell all of the beaver at the high prices they had counted on. During the plague year of 1636 he complained that prices dropped to 8s. a pound. Also, Sherley was unable to determine just how many skins belonged to the “Undertakers’” account, and how many Winslow had bought from settlers who had no part in the “Undertakers’” scheme.[45]
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.
Through arbiters, Plymouth and London reach a financial settlement
While this dispute was in progress, however, the Pilgrims were so perplexed about its rights that they were persuaded to send 1,325 pounds of beaver directly to the other two partners, hoping to satisfy their claims that Sherley had paid them nothing. After selling it, Beauchamp chalked off £400 of their debt, but Andrews, through mismanagement, sold his at a loss and in 1642 still claimed between £500 and £600. He finally agreed to accept payment in cattle to Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay and designated the “godly poor men” and “poor ministers” of that colony as the beneficiaries of Plymouth’s debt. In addition, Andrews and Beauchamp received land in Scituate, one of several flourishing daughter towns now settled in Plymouth.[47]
Meanwhile the business with Sherley was wound up at last. Trade with him had already broken off because of distrust of his repeated delays in accounting to his London partners. For fear of legal reprisals from any of these, it was decided not to risk sending another agent to London but to have some “gentlemen and merchants in the Bay” hear the dispute. Even “though it should cost them all they had in the world,” the “Undertakers” promised to accept their award. This decision was prompted by two considerations. First, they feared that the price of cattle, by now a greater source of income than furs, might drop and change their circumstances. Also, the colony’s founders, surviving into old age, wished to clear up their affairs before death overtook them. Sherley himself believed that lawyers would be “the most gainers” from legal action, and therefore selected John Atwood and William Collier, recent merchant arrivals in Plymouth from London, to draw up a composition. Another participant in the settlement was Edmund Freeman, Beauchamp’s brother-in-law, and now the leading citizen of Sandwich. After laborious days of investigation of accounts, they estimated everything left in Plymouth of the old stock, housing, boats, the bark and goods for the Indian trade, and “all debts, as well those that were desperate, as others more hopeful,” at £1400.