Where does this venture belong in the larger canvas of English expansion into the New World? An Englishman wrote recently[A] that the Pilgrims’ importance has been greatly exaggerated. This is bound to be the point of view of the mother island, from whose shores, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there scattered in various directions a multitude of explorers, traders, and colonizers. Compared with their total accomplishment, the work of the small band of emigrants to Plymouth and of their petty capitalist backers appears insignificant. To the American, on the other hand, their victory over Plymouth’s starkness and meager resources, together with the leaders’ articulate faith and common sense, have taken on a symbolic quality which tends to magnify their place in his early history. In fact, students both of English expansion and of American origins find in the materials for Plymouth’s history a rare opportunity to observe from within the operation of one of the kind of small business partnerships which originated many early English settlements. [A] A. L. Rowse, _The Elizabethans and America_ (London, 1959), 130. PART I Financing the Plymouth Colony The Pilgrims decide to emigrate to America Of the motives which prompted the founding of New Plymouth, the search of the members of John Robinson’s little English congregation at Leyden for an assured religious freedom was certainly the foremost. If this had been their only prospect, it appears that they might have remained in Holland without persecution. They were dissatisfied, however, with their hard economic lot. The most diligent labor brought them little security even in the midst of the prosperous urban life of the Netherlands. There were “fair and beautiful cities flowing with abundance of all sorts of wealth.... Yet it was not long before they saw the grim and ugly face of poverty coming upon them like an armed man, with whom they must buckle and encounter....” The university town of Leyden proved to be “not so beneficial for their outward means of living and estate,” yet they “fell to such trades and employments as they best could,” until they attained “a competent and comfortable living ... with hard and continual labor.”