was effected before 1624—­in most cases by the purchase of the interests of certain ones by their associates—­for we find their holdings spoken of in that year as “sixteenths,” and these shares to have sometimes been attached for their owners’ debts.  A letter of Shirley, Brewer et als., to Bradford, Allerton et als., dated London, April 7, 1624, says:  “If it had not been apparently sold, Mr. Beauchamp, who is of the company also, unto whom he [Weston] oweth a great deal more, had long ago attached it (as he did other’s 16ths),” etc.  It is exceedingly difficult to reconcile these unquestionable facts with the equal certainty that, at the “Composition” of the Adventurers with the Planters in 1626, there were forty-two who signed as of the Adventurers.  The weight, however, of evidence and of probability must be held to support the conclusion that in June, 1620, the organization was voluntary, and that the charter-party of the may-Flower was signed—­” on the one part “—­by each of the enrolled Adventurers engaged in the Leyden congregation’s colonization scheme.  Goodwin’ alone pretends to any certain knowledge of the matter, but although a veracious usually reliable writer, he is not infallible, as already shown, and could hardly have had access to the original documents,—­which alone, in this case, could be relied on to prove his assertion that “Shortly articles were signed by both parties, Weston acting for the Adventurers.”  Not a particle of confirmatory evidence has anywhere been found in Pilgrim or contemporaneous literature to warrant this statement, after exhaustive search, and it must hence, until sustained by proof, be regarded as a personal inference rather than a verity.  If the facts were as appears, they permit the hope that a document of so much prima facie importance may have escaped destruction, and will yet be found among the private papers of some of the last survivors of the Adventurers, though with the acquisition of all their interests by the Pilgrim leaders such documents would seem, of right, to have become the property of the purchasers, and to have been transferred to the Plymouth planters.

This all-important and historic body—­the company of Merchant Adventurers—­is entitled to more than passing notice.  Associated to “finance” the projected transplantation of the Leyden congregation of “Independents” to the “northern parts of Virginia,” under such patronage and protection of the English government and its chartered Companies as they might be able to secure, they were no doubt primarily brought together by the efforts of one of their number, Thomas Weston, Esq., the London merchant previously named, though for some obscure reason Master John Pierce (also one of them) was their “recognized” representative in dealing with the (London) Virginia Company and the Council for the Affairs of New England, in regard to their Patents.