The partnership’s general account thus became simply a convenient place for Allerton to unload losses, with records “so large and intricate, as they could not well understand them, much less examine and correct them without a great deal of time and help....” His lists of all sorts of expenses took advantage of the Pilgrims’ weakness with accounts: “£30 given at a clap, and £50 spent in a journey.... Yea, he screwed up his poor old father-in-law’s [Elder Brewster] account to above £200 and brought it upon the general account ... because he knew they would never let it lie on the old man....” Puzzled, Bradford admitted that he did not know “how it came to pass, or what mystery was in it,” that Allerton even was able to present a list of all “disbursements,” though it was Sherley who made them during his own absence. In the final calculations a sizable discrepancy (£2300) arose. Whereas the agent claimed the partners owed him £300, the latter represented his debt to them as £2000. When Sherley wrote that “if their business had been better managed they might have been the richest plantation of any English at that time,” he could blame the financial incompetence of the “Undertakers” at Plymouth as well as Allerton’s deficiencies. Their initial trust in the honesty of others, however praiseworthy, was no match for the shrewdness of the businessmen who soon were to make Boston and the Bay colony the center of trade in New England. Consider how they accepted their associate Hatherley’s unauthorized “honest word” that they would be discharged from the _Friendship_’s account, thus permitting Allerton and him to collect all its returns, even though they paid the Pilgrims only £200. Then, after Hatherley’s London partners repudiated this discharge, the Pilgrims were billed for losses, but with no countervailing credits. “... they were ... now taught how to deal in the world, especially with merchants, in such cases,” Bradford sadly noted in comment, but the lesson unfortunately did not improve their keeping of accounts.[43]