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.
1620—Pilgrims and merchants form a joint stock company
The discussions in England and Leyden over the articles of agreement were protracted. Robert Cushman, as intermediary, thought he closed a hard bargain with the “grasping” merchants. The terms of July 1, 1620, were not unlike those of other colonial enterprises tried in Virginia and Bermuda. The entire capital, including lands, was to be a joint stock fund, divided into shares. Every person over the age of sixteen going to the new colony was rated at £10, and £10 was accounted a single share. Any emigrant outfitting himself with £10 worth of provisions was considered worth £20 or a double share. For example, William Mullins, a well-to-do investor-planter, who died in the first year, left in his will his stock of £40 worth of boots and shoes, expecting it to increase to nine shares at the end of seven years. The adventurers who contributed only money and stayed at home, and the planters, were to continue the joint stock for seven years during which time all profits from “trade, traffic, trucking, working, fishing, or any other means” must remain in the common stock. Then they would divide equally the capital and profits, viz., lands, houses, and goods. The common stock would furnish food, apparel, and provisions.
A good deal of controversy arose when it was learned that the adventurers insisted on harsher terms than those in the original agreement. The assets of the common stock, it was claimed, had not included the houses and home lots of the settlers, nor were they to work seven days a week, two days having been reserved for employment for their own families. The future planters had some right here, for they were the full partners and not the servants of the company. Robert Cushman, who seems to have concealed the stiffer terms, nevertheless vigorously defended them. When criticized by Pastor Robinson, who considered him “... (though a good man and of special abilities in his kind) yet most unfit to deal with other men by reason of his ... too great indifferency for any conditions ...,” Cushman retorted to Carver: “... what it is you would have of me I know not; for your crying out, ‘Negligence, negligence,’ I marvel why so negligent a man was used in the business.” If the disheartening new conditions insisted on made many “ready to faint and go back,” he could only say that the adventurers, other than Weston, would have withdrawn their help if he had not altered the original ones. With much irritation he objected to the “querimonies and complaints against me, of lording it over my brethren and making conditions fitter for thieves and bondslaves than honest men....” Bradford suggests that Carver never forwarded this heated letter to Leyden, but its indignant tone suggests the vexations which fretted the Pilgrims in their undertaking.[6]
The emigrants objected to the new articles and upon arrival in Southampton from Holland rejected Cushman’s pleas. This refusal, even though backed by their friends at Leyden and held to until Cushman secured their adherence to the terms in 1621, unfortunately embittered relations with the adventurers. Weston, coming down to Southampton to see them off, “was much offended and told them they must then look to stand on their own legs.” Bradford saw in this episode the origin of the “discontent” which later developed between the planters and their chief financial backer.