Thus ended the history of Plymouth Colony as a business venture. Even after careful study of all the details we know, it is hard to interpret and correctly assess whether the London capitalists or the colony can really be blamed for the contradictory financial muddle. In their somewhat uneasy alliance, the Londoners with spare funds and the group of obscure artisans and small farmers, mostly dissenters from the established church, no doubt emphasized different goals. Most of the merchants, while Puritan in religious sympathies, nevertheless anticipated profits. This appeared to them fitting, since they risked great loss in so untried a speculation. Then, after Plymouth was settled and valuable returns established, the Londoners held an advantage to the end, for they were always in a creditor position as they continued to supply essential goods at high prices and rates of interest. The colonists’ payment was slow, interrupted by many misfortunes and contingencies, but eventually it was made. Although the investors in the original company lost most of their money, the businessmen who stayed with the enterprise, such as Sherley, seem to have increased their capital. The Pilgrims, too, achieved success, for they had built the essentials of a free and self-sustaining community. If they were never wealthy in their new environment, the leaders of Plymouth, developing business experience and judgment, by 1645 enjoyed modest prosperity. They had paid off the expenses of shipping over their fellow exiles from Leyden and bought the livestock and equipment needed as the foundation for settlement. Ignorance, desertion by their first backers, cruel losses at sea, their agent’s misdeeds, all had been overcome. They were now rid of the burdens inherent in the London merchants’ sponsorship of the colony. Their debts, both “hopeful and desperate,” lay behind. Notes [1] William Bradford, _Of Plymouth Plantation_, ed. Samuel E. Morison (New York, 1952), 16–17, 24, 27, 33, 49. Quotations will ordinarily be from this modernized version of Governor Bradford’s history. Quotations from other sources have been modernized. Henry Martyn Dexter, _The England and Holland of the Pilgrims_ (Boston, 1905), App. 601–641, for list of occupations; Roland G. Usher, _The Pilgrims and Their History_ (New York, 1918), 35–40, on the economic and religious motives for removal. [2] John Smith, _Description of New England_ (1616), is in Smith, _Works_, ed. Edward Arber (Westminster, 1895), II; for Brewster’s copy, see “Plymouth Colony, Wills and Inventories,” 1641–1649 (typescript, Pilgrim Hall, Plymouth, Mass.), 49; Bradford, _Of Plymouth Plantation_, ed. Morison, 28–29; Smith’s comment on the Pilgrims, Bradford, _History of Plymouth Plantation_, ed. W. C. Ford, 2 vols. (Boston, 1912), I, 192n. Edward Winslow, _Hypocrisie Unmasked_ (1646), told the story about consulting God’s will, cited _ibid._, 66n.