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]