Mayflower

add to their already considerable personal wealth, two groups of noblemen—one based in London, the other to the west in Plymouth—were eager to underwrite British settlements in America, and in 1606, James created the Virginia Company. But after the Plymouth group’s attempts to found a colony in modern Maine failed miserably and Jamestown proved to be something less than a financial success, the two branches of the Virginia Company realized that they, too, lacked the resources required to colonize America. They then resolved to franchise future settlements by issuing subsidiary, or “particular,” patents to those interested in beginning a plantation. These conditional patents gave the settlers the right to attempt to found a colony in five to seven years’ time, after which they could apply for a new patent that gave them permanent title to the land.
    With Brewster in hiding, the Pilgrims looked to their deacon John Carver, probably in his midthirties, and Robert Cushman, forty-one, to carry on negotiations with the appropriate officials in London. By June 1619, Carver and Cushman had succeeded in securing a patent from the Virginia Company. But the Pilgrims’ plans were still far from complete. They had a patent but had not, as of yet, figured out how they were going to finance the endeavor. But William Bradford’s faith in the undertaking was so strong that he sold his house in the spring of 1619.
    Soon after, disturbing news came from London. Robert Cushman reported that a group very similar to their own had recently met with disaster on a voyage to America. Led by a Mr. Blackwell, 180 English Separatists from Emden, Holland, had sailed that winter for Virginia. By the time the ship reached America, 130 of the emigrants, including Blackwell, were dead. “[T]hey were packed together like herrings,” Cushman wrote. “They had amongst them the flux, and also want of fresh water, so as it is here rather wondered at that so many are alive, than so many are dead.” Still, the news was deeply troubling to those in Leiden, and many of them began to have second thoughts about sailing to America. Even Cushman had to admit that he, a grocer and wool-comber originally from Canterbury, felt overwhelmed by the challenges and responsibilities of organizing the voyage. “It doth often trouble me,” he wrote, “to think that in this business we are all to learn and none to teach.”
    About this time some representatives from Holland, having heard of the Pilgrims’ intention to relocate to America, “made them fair offers” concerning a possible settlement. But the Pilgrims declined. It would have been impossible to reassert their English identity in a Dutch colony. What they do not seem to have taken into account was the possible danger of spurning this particular overture. The Dutch, still several years from founding a colony at Manhattan, appear to have begun to work covertly to block the Pilgrims’ subsequent attempts to settle in this strategic location.
    Instead of looking to Holland, the Pilgrims threw in their lot with a smooth-talking merchant from London named Thomas Weston. Weston represented a group of investors known as the Merchant Adventurers—about seventy London merchants who viewed the colonization of America as both an investment opportunity and a way “to plant religion.” Most of them appear to have shared Puritan spiritual leanings, although some were clearly wary of the radicalism of the Pilgrims’ Separatist beliefs. Even though the Pilgrims had secured a patent the year before, the Merchant Adventurers obtained a patent of their own for a settlement in the northern portion of Virginia at the mouth of the Hudson River.
    In the beginning, Weston seemed a godsend—a man sympathetic to their religious goals who also claimed to have the means to make their cherished dreams a reality. Weston proposed that they enter into a joint stock company. The Adventurers would put up most of the capital with the expectation that, once they were settled in America, the Pilgrims would quickly begin to generate considerable profits, primarily through codfishing and the fur trade. The Pilgrims would each be given a share in the company valued at ten pounds. For the next seven years they would work four days a week for the company and two days a week for themselves, with the Sabbath reserved for worship. At the end of the seven