Excerpt from a letter written by Mr. Weston, one of the Pilgrims’ financial sponsors, to Mr. Carver, governor of the Massachusetts settlement. This letter arrived by a second ship about a year after the Pilgrims’ arrival:

That you sent no lading in the ship [i.e. sent the Mayflower back empty] is wonderful [i.e. surprising], and worthily distasted. I know your weakness was the cause of it, and I believe more weakness of judgment than weakness of hands. A quarter of the time you spent in discoursing, arguing and consulting would have done much more, but that is past, etc. If you mean, bona fide, to perform the conditions agreed upon, do us the favor to copy them out fair and subscribe them with the principal of your names. And likewise give us account as particularly as you can, how our moneys were laid out. And then I shall be able to give them some satisfaction, whom I am now forced with good words to shift off. And consider that the life of the business depends on the lading of this [second] ship, which if you do to any good purpose, that I may be freed from the great sums I have disbursed for the former and must do for the latter, I promise you I will never quit the business, though all the other Adventurers [i.e., sponsors] should.

Thomas Weston, London, July 6, 1621

Here is an excerpt from William Bradford’s reply to Weston:

Your large letter, written to Mr. Carver and dated 6th of July 1621, I have received the 10th of November, wherein after the apology made for yourself you lay many heavy imputations upon him and us all. Touching him, he is departed this life and now is at rest in the Lord from all those troubles and encumbrances with which we are yet to strive. He needs not my apology; for his care and pains was so great for the common good, both ours and yours, as that therewith (it is thought) he oppressed himself and shortened his days; of whose loss we cannot sufficiently complain.

At great charges in this adventure I confess you have been, and many losses may sustain; but the loss of his and many other honest and industrious men’s lives cannot be valued at any price.

You greatly blame us for keeping the ship so long in the country, and then to send her away empty. She lay five weeks at Cape Cod whilst with many a weary step (after a long journey) and the endurance of many a hard brunt, we sought out in the foul winter a place of habitation. Then we went in so tedious a time to make provision to shelter us and our goods; about which labor, many of our arms and legs can tell you to this day, we were not negligent. But it pleased God to visit us then with death daily, and with so general a disease that the living were scarce able to bury the dead, and the well not in any sufficient measure to attend the sick. And now to be so greatly blamed for not freighting the ship doth indeed go near us and much discourage us.

William Bradform, Plymouth, November 1621

In fact, as Bradford writes, “Mr. Weston, who had made that large promise in his letter that if all the rest should fall off, yet he would never quit the business but stick to [the Pilgrims], if they yielded to the conditions, and sent some lading in the ship. But all proved but wind, for he was the first and only man that forsook them, and that before he so much as heard of the return of this [second] ship, or knew what was done.” (Of Plymouth Plantation, p. 104)