Nothing has been discovered about the remaining adventurers to alter the character of the group as described above; they were chiefly Puritan merchants, possessed of substantial means but not great wealth. It is true that Robert Alden, a prosperous salter, at the opening of the Civil Wars adhered to the Royalist minority of London citizens. William Greene, described as “one of the most religious of the adventurers,” was among those whose opposition to sending out any more emigrants from Leyden, made him withdraw his support. Another, Thomas Brewer, lumped together and imprisoned by the royal authorities with Brownists, by 1640 had become Anabaptist, a sect not tolerated by the Pilgrims.[35] For the most part, however, a consistency of business, religious, and political purposes seems to have prevailed among those who closed out the Company of Adventurers to New Plymouth. PART II Plymouth Reorganizes Financially The colony looks to the fur trade to pay its debts The method devised for repaying what was a stiff debt for the young colony, as one writer puts it, “shows considerable business ingenuity.” With ownership transferred from London to Plymouth, the plantation became a virtual corporation in fact. Two important matters still had to be decided. Should all the settlers share in the disposition of the corporate lands and assets and in the obligation of repayment to the adventurers? How would they be able to guarantee satisfaction of the London men? It was wisely decided to include as holders of shares, or “purchasers,” all men, whatever their former status, who were either heads of families or single and not indentured servants. At the 1627 division of assets in the form of land and cattle, every such person received twenty acres of tillable land to add to the one-acre portion allotted him when the plantation had ended the “common course.” The livestock was parceled out for a time among twelve groups, a total of 156 individuals, with every six persons receiving one cow and two goats. These “purchasers,” of whom in 1640 fifty-three were listed as living in Plymouth and five in England, were to benefit from subsequent divisions of land as the colony opened up. The immediate task of paying the Londoners fell upon a group of eight leaders, including William Bradford, Miles Standish, Isaac Allerton, Edward Winslow, William Brewster, John Howland, John Alden, and Thomas Prence, known as the “Undertakers.” These men founded a partnership to manage the fur trade of the colony for six years, the time during which the returns from the Pilgrims’ most profitable business enterprise were to be devoted to paying the debt and importing essential English goods. This became the business of the eight who took possession at once of the company boats and “the whole stock of furs, fells, beads, corn, wampampeak, hatchets, knives, &c.”