Origins
The colony was coordinated by Thomas Weston, a London merchant and ironmonger. Weston was associated with the Plymouth Council for New England which, fifteen years earlier, had funded the short-lived Popham Colony in modern Maine. During the period when the Pilgrims were in the Netherlands, Weston helped to arrange the colonists' passage to the New World with help from the Merchant Adventurers. Historian Charles Francis Adams, Jr. writing in 1870s glowingly called him a "sixteenth century adventurer" in the mold of John Smith and Walter Raleigh and that his "brain teemed with schemes for deriving sudden gain from the settlement of the new continent". In later years, Plymouth Governor William Bradford called him "a bitter enemy unto Plymouth upon all occasions."
The primary purpose of Weston's new colony was profit, rather than the religious reasons of the Plymouth settlers, and this dictated how the colony would be assembled. Weston believed that families were a detriment to a well-run plantation and so he selected able-bodied men only but not men experienced in colonial life. In total, there were several advanced scouts and fifty to sixty other colonists. The final complement also included one surgeon and one lawyer. The party was outfitted with enough supplies to last the winter.
Read more about this topic: Wessagusset Colony
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