The
Weight, However, Of Evidence And Of Probability Must Be Held To Support
The Conclusion That In June, 1620, The Organization Was Voluntary, And
That The Charter-Party Of The MAY-FLOWER Was Signed - " On The One Part
" - By Each Of The Enrolled Adventurers Engaged In The Leyden
Congregation's Colonization Scheme.
Goodwin' alone pretends to any
certain knowledge of the matter, but although a veracious usually
reliable writer, he is
Not infallible, as already shown, and could hardly
have had access to the original documents, - which alone, in this case,
could be relied on to prove his assertion that "Shortly articles were
signed by both parties, Weston acting for the Adventurers." Not a
particle of confirmatory evidence has anywhere been found in Pilgrim or
contemporaneous literature to warrant this statement, after exhaustive
search, and it must hence, until sustained by proof, be regarded as a
personal inference rather than a verity. If the facts were as appears,
they permit the hope that a document of so much prima facie importance
may have escaped destruction, and will yet be found among the private
papers of some of the last survivors of the Adventurers, though with the
acquisition of all their interests by the Pilgrim leaders such documents
would seem, of right, to have become the property of the purchasers, and
to have been transferred to the Plymouth planters.
This all-important and historic body - the company of Merchant
Adventurers - is entitled to more than passing notice. Associated to
"finance" the projected transplantation of the Leyden congregation of
"Independents" to the "northern parts of Virginia," under such patronage
and protection of the English government and its chartered Companies as
they might be able to secure, they were no doubt primarily brought
together by the efforts of one of their number, Thomas Weston, Esq., the
London merchant previously named, though for some obscure reason Master
John Pierce (also one of them) was their "recognized" representative in
dealing with the (London) Virginia Company and the Council for the
Affairs of New England, in regard to their Patents.
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