By October 15, 1641, Atwood, Bradford, and Edward Winslow had come to terms ending the partnership. The agreement of 1627 was reacknowledged, but Plymouth, while admitting confusion in Josiah Winslow’s bookkeeping, again repudiated the debts of the White Angel and the Friendship. A full discharge from the obligations of the beaver trade, the charges of the two ships, and the £1800 purchase money agreed on in 1627 was promised by Atwood in behalf of the London associates. Bradford and his partners for their part guaranteed payment to them of £1400. £110 of this had already been paid to Winthrop for Andrews’ account, and eighty pounds of beaver to Atwood. The rest was to be discharged in appropriate commodities, at the rate of £200 per year.
1645—Plymouth’s debts “hopeful and desperate” at last are discharged
To execute this agreement across the distance of the broad Atlantic took some time. Recognizing the justness of the “Undertakers’” final account but calling the venture “uncomfortable and unprofitable to all,” James Sherley signed the release in June 1642. In the bargaining, the Reverend Hugh Peter, Thomas Weld, and William Hibbins, in England as agents of Massachusetts, put forth Atwood’s terms. At the same time they succeeded in persuading the London partners to surrender for charitable purposes in New England the £1200 debt. Three quarters, or £900, was set apart for Massachusetts, while Plymouth was to receive only £300.
A letter of Richard Andrews about this time fortunately permits us to break away from the divergent points of view set forth in Bradford’s narrative and Sherley’s letters. In many ways Andrews was the most straightforward of the London partners and the most generous. While forgiving the interest due on his own account, he charged that Sherley and Beauchamp had “wronged [the business] many £100 both in principal and interest” and knowingly presented unfair accounts. This remark suggests one solution to the problem as to why the seemingly excessive charges on the Pilgrims mounted year after year in spite of their returns. Hinting that Sherley had manipulated some private losses so as to place them on the general account, Andrews perhaps did not recognize the rapidity with which the debts accumulated because of the high rates of interest on them. The fact is that colonial ventures were considered such poor financial risks that their debts tended to multiply faster than they could be paid off. This explanation of their financial plight is probably closer to the truth than that the Londoners deliberately perpetrated a “manifest fraud” upon the plantation. It was Andrews also who echoed the complaint common to all the London merchants engaged in colonial enterprise. He wrote in 1645 that the conduct of the “Undertakers” did not become “fair dealing men who make not so much profession to walk according to the rule of the gospel as they.... I hope that seven years time is long enough to keep my money before they return the principal....”
John Beauchamp, unlike the more generous Andrews, continued to insist on collecting his debt even though it could never be proved. To settle this claim, Bradford and his partners in 1645 turned over to his attorney houses and lands in Plymouth, Rehoboth, and Marshfield worth £291.[48]
It is to Plymouth’s credit that all these obligations were met in the 1640s, because the colony was no longer as prosperous as in the preceding decade. Its wealth had come to consist increasingly of cattle, so that the price collapse which took place when the influx of new settlers into the Bay ceased, came suddenly and with severe effect. Cattle came to be worth perhaps 25% of its former value. Even the wealthier colony of Massachusetts discovered that it could no longer secure credit in England. The Pilgrims nevertheless continued to develop their modest resources in animal stock and land. A new land arrangement reflected the ending of the old debts. Governor Bradford, who had held title to the patent since 1630, along with the “old comers” or “purchasers,” turned over the grant to the whole body of freemen of Plymouth, retaining for himself only three reserved tracts as his reward for carrying the responsibility for repayment.
As to Plymouth’s fur trade, the complaint John Winthrop had once voiced that the colony had “engrossed all the chief places of trade” in New England was no longer true. The “Old Colony” had been edged out of the Connecticut River and Narragansett trade, some of its Maine posts had been attacked by the French, and rival settlers and competitors had made the rest less profitable. At Aptucxet commerce with the Dutch kept on for a time, and on the Kennebec there remained an echo of the busy activity of the 1630s. A small group farmed the Indian trade there so that at his death in 1657 Bradford’s stock of trading goods and debts due from it was worth £256. Within a few years, however, all trading goods were brought home and the Kennebec tract sold.[49]
Thus ended the history of Plymouth Colony as a business venture. Even after careful study of all the details we know, it is hard to interpret and correctly assess whether the London capitalists or the colony can really be blamed for the contradictory financial muddle. In their somewhat uneasy alliance, the Londoners with spare funds and the group of obscure artisans and small farmers, mostly dissenters from the established church, no doubt emphasized different goals. Most of the merchants, while Puritan in religious sympathies, nevertheless anticipated profits. This appeared to them fitting, since they risked great loss in so untried a speculation. Then, after Plymouth was settled and valuable returns established, the Londoners held an advantage to the end, for they were always in a creditor position as they continued to supply essential goods at high prices and rates of interest. The colonists’ payment was slow, interrupted by many misfortunes and contingencies, but eventually it was made. Although the investors in the original company lost most of their money, the businessmen who stayed with the enterprise, such as Sherley, seem to have increased their capital.
The Pilgrims, too, achieved success, for they had built the essentials of a free and self-sustaining community. If they were never wealthy in their new environment, the leaders of Plymouth, developing business experience and judgment, by 1645 enjoyed modest prosperity. They had paid off the expenses of shipping over their fellow exiles from Leyden and bought the livestock and equipment needed as the foundation for settlement. Ignorance, desertion by their first backers, cruel losses at sea, their agent’s misdeeds, all had been overcome. They were now rid of the burdens inherent in the London merchants’ sponsorship of the colony. Their debts, both “hopeful and desperate,” lay behind.