Weston’s break with the company in London soon followed. The adventurers held a meeting early in 1622, when the majority agreed to put into the common fund what we might call an additional assessment of one third of their original holding of stock. Those anxious to go on with the business believed it should not be hindered by the laggards, so they resolved to break off the joint stock as soon as the shareowners in the colony should agree. This report of a decision to break up came from Weston and his supporters, but it proved premature, as indeed Bradford suspected so strongly that he did not show their letter to more than a handful of intimates in counsel. Instead, Weston got out. He wrote in April 1622: “I have sold my adventure and debts unto them so as I am quit of you, and you of me....” The company’s reaction was that they were “very glad they are freed of him, he being judged a man that thought himself above the general....” Not unrelated to his coming in person to New England in disguise and under an assumed name may have been a large debt he owed the Crown for alum; a Treasury warrant accused him of withdrawing beyond the seas with the purpose of taking his estate after him.
Weston’s subsequent projects for colonizing and trading in New England for some time created problems for the settlement at Plymouth. The Pilgrims’ leaders more than repaid him for his early support by receiving his men kindly and rescuing his rival colony on Massachusetts Bay from imminent destruction by the Indians. When the promoter himself arrived at their door, virtually destitute, but convincing in his excuses, they fitted him out with enough furs to begin trade again.
Master John Peirce was the next to quarrel with his fellow adventurers in London. A member of the Clothworkers’ Company, Peirce claimed that he once employed more than a hundred persons. He was the merchant who had received patents for the Leyden settlers from the Virginia Company in 1620 and later from the Council for New England. He had helped negotiate the terms of agreement between the merchants and the planters. It was under his name that they held the right to take up land around Plymouth. This had made him important enough for Cushman to dedicate Mourt’s Relation to him. In April 1622, according to the story Bradford told, a version accepted uncritically by many writers, Peirce secretly obtained from the Council for New England a new grant, making the associates hold the lands at Plymouth as his tenants, rather than of the Council. The London adventurers objected and forced him to assign the grant to their Treasurer, now James Sherley, in return for which Peirce demanded £500. The impression is left that Peirce deceived the company and that they were justified in breaking with him.
Peirce, on the other hand, presented his side in a lawsuit in Chancery against Sherley and the other New Plymouth adventurers. It is unfortunate that the answers to the charges do not survive. Peirce claimed an investment of £300 in the colony, reporting that when the adventurers, “being moved by the distressed condition of the Planters ... in that place foreign to them and a vast desert,” wished to furnish relief, they couldn’t raise the money. At the request of Sherley, Peirce then tried to sustain the plantation by putting up funds to outfit the ill-starred Paragon. This vessel, hired from Peirce by the adventurers, sailed twice in the fall and winter of 1622–23 with freight and passengers, chiefly women and children. When wintry seas forced her to turn back the second time, Peirce said that, although the adventurers had promised that he should not suffer any losses from the voyage, contrary to such agreement, he bore the entire loss. After Peirce was unable to refit his ship at Portsmouth quickly enough to suit the adventurers, the latter sent a writ from Admiralty to arrest him for £600. Under his brother Richard’s bond, the merchant returned to London, where the adventurers “made a great clamour against ... [him] for some supposed unjust dealing....” They attempted to buy out his indenture, ultimately succeeding in obtaining from Peirce’s brother a £500 bond to deliver it. This compelled Peirce to sign it over to Sherley; besides he lost the chance to recoup his loss by another voyage. In spite of a complex series of legal maneuvers (Bradford wrote that Peirce “sued them in most of the chief courts in England ... [and] brought it to the Parliament”), he was unable to regain his investment and reported that he suffered such inconvenience and damaged reputation that he emerged a poor man.
While John Peirce held the title to the Plymouth lands “in trust,” he seems to have acted within his legal rights in his maneuver to exchange the indenture of 1621 for a new patent, but his purpose in doing so without informing his associates in London and New Plymouth is not clear. It evidently so angered them that when they found out they stubbornly refused to settle with him and pay the £500 fee he demanded. They probably were not unwilling to ruin him. Bradford, on the other hand, gave short shrift to the fact that the Paragon sailed at Peirce’s charge and clearly accepted the opinion of the adventurers that God had directed her mishaps against him because of his action on the patent.[13]
The joint stock company breaks up
Meanwhile the most active of the remaining adventurers had determined to forget the fiasco of the Paragon and prepared two vessels, the Anne and the Little James, to carry a “large and liberal” supply and a contingent of passengers intending to settle. Both arrived in Plymouth in the summer of 1623. A great part of the adventurers’ hope for profit rested in the Little James, a small pinnace built to remain in the colony for its use. Bradford said “the adventurers did overpride themselves in her,” for her troubles began even on the way over. Because her commission allowed her to capture prize vessels, when the captain failed to seize a French vessel, the crew became “rude” and mutinous, claiming they were hired on shares for privateering, and not for employment in fishing or trade. Before they would sail on colony business, Bradford was obliged to negotiate wage contracts with them. The Little James’ first voyage to the Narragansett country returned without success, because she was not equipped with trading goods to match what the Dutch could offer the Indians. A series of calamities assailed her; she lost her mast, and later, through negligence, sank off the Maine coast. The loss of this voyage and the cost of raising her came to about £400 or £500. In the next step of her unhappy career, she was seized on her return to England by one of the adventurers for a debt owed him by the others.[14]
Emmanuel Altham, the Little James’ captain, himself an adventurer, expressed the hopes of the English businessmen for the little plantation. He had observed the efforts of the “honest men” of Plymouth to “do, in what lies in them, to get profit to the adventurers,” and he anticipated that fishing voyages, collection of beaver, as well as of timber, were all ways of raising their returns. Yet he warned those back home that provisions for twelve months at least were needed to allow the settlers time for building houses and making a success of these different enterprises.[15]
New Plymouth at first had expected to engage in fishing, by now the source of successful returns to many small West Country merchants whose ships were cruising up and down the New England coast and then carrying dried fish to market in southern Europe. The colony’s most ambitious attempt in this direction did, indeed, secure a patent for Cape Ann from Lord Sheffield, taken in the names of Robert Cushman and Edward Winslow. Yet the hope that the Pilgrims “could fall once into the right course” for profitable fishing and saltmaking proved unfounded. The first fishing season was a failure; the boatmaker died; the saltmaker turned out to be incompetent. The colony almost lost to rivals the fishing stage erected on Cape Ann. Even the title to the land had flaws in it. In short, this ended “that chargeable business” and added only bitterness to the adventurers’ cup.[16]
The seven-year partnership between the London adventurers and the planters at Plymouth, unless renewed, as once had been suggested, was to end about 1627 or 1628. In fact, the succession of blighted hopes and dissensions just described dissolved it earlier. Several innovations prepared the way for a new arrangement satisfactory both to the colonists and to their English supporters.