The urgency of sending returns to these investors pressed on the Pilgrims from the start. When the Mayflower sailed home in 1621 without a profitable lading, Weston wrote a sharp criticism to the Governor. He had been informed about how the high death rate and short supplies had weakened the colony during the first dreadful winter, yet he charged the settlers with greater “weakness of judgment than weakness of hands. A quarter of the time you spend in discoursing, arguing and consulting would have done much more.... The life of the business depends upon the lading of this ship, which if you do to any good purpose, that I may be freed from the great sums I have disbursed for the former and must do for the latter [the Fortune], I promise you I will never quit the business....”
Robert Cushman, the business agent in England, brought this rebuke from the partners in November 1621. He came in the Fortune to inspect the colony briefly and to persuade the colonists to agree to the conditions the adventurers had insisted on. He returned at once to report his findings. The accomplishments of the first year appear in the lively narrative, Mourt’s Relation or A Relation of the beginning ... of the English Plantation settled at Plimoth, printed in 1622. Cushman, George Morton, William Bradford, and Edward Winslow compiled this little tract to encourage the investors about the colony’s progress. Although a bit rosy in coloring, it relates what Cushman found.
New Plymouth was situated on a good harbor with plenty of fish and woods close at hand. The settlers had built a fort at the top of the hill and common storehouses containing the first harvest, the colony’s precious arsenal and supplies from England. In the small, sturdy, frame houses with roofs of thatch, scattered along the street running up the hill, lived the survivors of the first winter’s illness and privation. Their Indian friends, Squanto and Samoset, had helped them conciliate the neighboring Indians and begin trade with them. William Bradford had succeeded Governor Carver, with Isaac Allerton as his assistant.[10]
Yet an undercurrent of discontent and friction Mourt’s Relation did not mention disturbed the settlers. The system of sharing equally in all the arduous labor and what it produced, was one source of unrest. Upon the unloading of thirty-five newcomers sent in the Fortune without proper clothing or “so much as a biscuit-cake or any other victuals,” the most stout-hearted had a right to murmur at the addition of extra consumers before another crop could be harvested. A gap persisted between the Leyden immigrants and religious exiles, who had ventured their persons and savings, and the London contingent, some of them merely hirelings of the company. Bradford himself wrote Weston about being “yoked with some ill-conditioned people who will never do good....”
Since these strains threatened the successful execution of the conditions with the London backers which he had just persuaded the Pilgrims to sign, Cushman preached a sermon the Sunday before he left on the text, “Let no man seek his own, but every man another’s wealth” (1 Corinthians 10:24). Urging his hearers not to labor for self-love or self-profit, he said: “Let there be no prodigal person to come forth and say, Give me the portion of lands and goods that appertaineth to me, and let me shift for myself.” No one must think of gathering riches for himself until “our loving friends, which helped us hither, and now again supplied us ...,” were paid off.[11]
Certainly the leaders of the colony had not been unmindful of their responsibilities to the adventurers. Cushman’s ship was freighted with good clapboard and two hogsheads of beaver and otter, a return cargo they judged worth £500. Bad luck assailed them, however, in the first of a series of disasters. A French privateer seized the vessel on its way home and pillaged the returns they had collected with so much effort.
Even so, it is hard for us to understand why the Pilgrims were forced to endure such bitter hardship, indeed, at times, virtual starvation, for a period of about two years after the Fortune’s visit. They were continually disappointed at the failure to receive replenishment of their scanty provisions, yet they had to share these with newcomers whose arrival they did not expect. The explanation for these harsh circumstances is to be found not so much in the colony as among the partners in England. The situation was the result of three major events: the defection of Thomas Weston from the ranks of the adventurers; a quarrel with John Peirce over their patent; and the irreparable rift developing inside the partnership itself, which was to precipitate its final dissolution.
Quarrels develop among the London merchants
Up to now Weston had been the Pilgrims’ chief supporter in all the business dealings with the London group. He had promised never to fail them if only they signed the onerous terms required by the latter. Before the plundered Fortune returned to port, this giver of plausible assurances was the first to desert them. One reason probably was the dispute with his former factor in the Low Countries, Edward Pickering. Near the end of 1621 Pickering left Amsterdam and broke off dealings with Weston. In the suit about accounts connected with their Dutch business, he asserted that Weston owed him hundreds of pounds. A protracted legal wrangle, continued even after Pickering’s death and after Weston had departed for New England, revealed the latter’s word to be far from reliable. One witness claimed that he heard Weston’s brother promise to give some kind of an accounting, not necessarily a true account. Arbitrators investigating the contradictory claims of both parties finally concluded that a matter of some £200 prevented a settlement, but Weston, stubborn and contentious, filed a countersuit against Pickering for a bond of £1500. It seems clear that other adventurers for Plymouth agreed with Pickering in this contest, since John Fowler, James Sherley, and Richard Andrews, as his executors, continued the case after his death.
Weston meanwhile had written Bradford that he disagreed with the rest of the adventurers over their course of action, reproaching them for their “parsimony” in waiting for favorable receipts before they sent provisions. Then he and another stockholder, John Beauchamp, sent out a group of settlers on their own account as a private venture, entirely distinct from the general stock. Weston’s men not only brought no victuals for the colony, but relied on the Pilgrims to furnish them necessary shelter and obliged them to dip into their own precious stores of seed corn and salt.