In spite of rebuffs, the agents from Leyden kept trying to secure a patent for land from the Virginia Company. Crushing financial difficulties had recently forced this body to give up underwriting the Virginia colony by a single joint stock. Instead, small groups of associates or partners were authorized to invest in separate stocks for special purposes, such as selling supplies to the settlers. Several groups of partners were also applying to the Company for grants of land they meant to settle at their own expense. In fact, a few such financially independent “private plantations” had already sent over tenants and servants whom they were permitted to direct. It was probably on such terms that the Leyden group hoped to obtain land and to share in its control until the investors were paid off. At the time of their first application to the Virginia Company the little band of emigrants were depending upon certain “merchants and friends” who had agreed to adventure with them, for the provision of shipping and means. Bradford’s obscure chronology makes it puzzling as to who these men were. Writing his _History_ much later than the events he described, he seems to place in about February 1620 the offer of support by Thomas Weston they finally accepted, although Weston must have been associated with earlier plans. Several months before, the Virginia Company had already granted them a patent in the name of John Wincob, but the discouragement over the religious negotiations and the state of turmoil in the Virginia Company’s management had made some people withdraw their original promise to help. Meanwhile, two members of the Leyden congregation, William Brewster and Thomas Brewer, were in trouble with the English government for illegally publishing some religious tracts. The danger of their capture was disheartening, as was the news about Francis Blackwell, an elder of the English congregation at Amsterdam, who had conducted a group to settle in Virginia. Together with most of his shipmates Blackwell had perished in a vessel so crowded that the 180 passengers were “packed together like herrings.”[4] Some London merchants offer to invest in the colony Fortunately, there now appeared in Leyden the venturesome fellow countryman whose encouraging new proposals soon gave a lift to low spirits. This was Thomas Weston, a London merchant who had trading interests in the Low Countries. He persuaded the congregation to reject the offers the Dutch West India Company had made to induce them to plant in their territory. He promised, instead, that if the Virginia Company failed to assist, he and his partners would do so.