Today, a community received another patent.
When the Pilgrims set sail for North America in 1620 in search of religious freedom, they were backed by entities in search of things far more tangible. They’d secured a grant from The London Company, which had been formed in 1606 with monopoly rights for developing large tracts of North America. Financing to buying ships and supplies came from another, source, the Merchant Adventurers, who’d had exclusive grants for wool export dating back to King Henry IV in 1407. Both groups had high expectations for a return on their investments. The Merchants tried to hedge their bets by adding their own group of veteran adventurers to the group; the Pilgrims called them “The Strangers,” and they included Myles Standish, the colony’s military leader, and named its first governor.
Like today’s hedge funds, these investments were high risk, and the Pilgrims proved to be a complete disappointment. They couldn’t make their debt payments, in part because so many of them insisted on dying, which put a real crimp on income-producing activities. A settlement in nearby Cape Ann (set up by the Plymouth Company, a competitor) also couldn’t turn a profit, which stiffed its secondary backers, the Dorchester Company. So one of its leaders cut a new deal and secured a patent in 1627 for the Massachusetts Company, and then got a new Royal Charter in 1629 that threw Plymouth and Cape Ann into a newly renamed Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Then a third patent, issued by yet another financial interest called the Council for New England, was writ on this day in 1630, defining the size of the colony which had already got to work drawing up boundaries for towns, electing officers in its newly-founded city of Boston, and collecting taxes for the benefit of its investors.
How communities are formed and then succeed or fail is often very different from the reasons we’re given for why.
