It took two years of negotiations before the adventurers agreed with Isaac Allerton to accept the following terms for winding up the old stock. They signed them in London on November 16, 1626. Then, reluctantly but courageously, the members of the colony known as the “Undertakers” pledged their own credit to carry them out. The forty-two adventurers signing the composition in London[20] consented to sell to their associates in New Plymouth all the shares of the stock in the lands or merchandise up to now belonging to them both. The “generality” in Plymouth in turn undertook to pay £1800 in annual installments of £200 each, to be paid at the west side of the Royal Exchange in London, beginning in September 1628. The five merchants designated to receive the payments were John Pocock, John Beauchamp, Robert Keane, Edward Bass, and James Sherley. The Pilgrims also assumed £600 remaining of the debts of £1400 which Sherley reported the company owed in 1624. How this compared as a return with the original sums invested in the plantation at Plymouth, we do not know. Captain John Smith reported in 1624 that altogether £7000 had been spent, and it has been suggested that £5600 of this was share capital, and £1400 debts, so that in repaying £1800 the colony was giving back to the London adventurers only one third of the share capital.[21] The London investors were linked by common associations As we move beyond the period dominated by the company of merchant adventurers, how are we to characterize this group? What was their usual form of business, and had they other colonial interests besides Plymouth? Did they sympathize with the religious aims of the emigrants, or were they simply indifferent to them as long as profits beckoned? Captain John Smith’s statement that Plymouth was financed by “... about 70. some Merchants, some handy-crafts men, some adventuring great sums, some small, as their estates and affections served,” is revealing, but to discover answers to these questions requires close analysis of the names of the individual subscribers. This is the complete list of merchants known to have invested in the Colony. It includes the signers of the composition of 1626 as Bradford recorded them in his Letterbook, and, in brackets, five other persons. Names have been rearranged alphabetically. Spellings follow Bradford.