In 1623, Anne and Little James were the third and fourth ships financed by the London-based Company of Merchant Adventurers to travel together to North America in support of the Plymouth Colony, following Mayflower in 1620 and Fortune in 1621.
[1][2][3] Anne was a supply ship of about 140 tons displacement which was used in 1623, along with Little James, to deliver a large party of new settlers to the newly founded Plymouth Colony.
Anne's master was William Peirce, a young man of Ratcliffe, London who was a member of the Adventurers investment group and had made many trans-Atlantic voyages.
Soon after arrival, the crew of Anne went to work loading whatever timber and beaver skins could be provided as cargo and sailed straight back across the Atlantic to home.
[4][5][6][7] Little James was a full-rigged pinnace[a] of forty-four tons displacement, and for her voyage to America she had come brand-new from the builder’s yard.
Per Bradford: “a fine new vessel of about 44. tunne, which the Company had built to stay in the Countrie.” She was a small ship with about one-quarter the tonnage of Anne and a total crew of probably not more than fifteen men.
Her nominal captain was Emmanuel Altham, a 23-year-old Englishman of the landed gentry from Essexshire, a Merchant Adventurer, and a novice at the business of sailing.
En route from England to Plymouth, Captain Altham refused to capture a French ship sailing home to New Rochelle in France, which caused his crew much vexation.
Second, the ship was “rudely manned” by a crew that was not happy with their financial situation of being paid in company shares in lieu of true wages.
[14][8] As Little James returned from Rhode Island, the weather was calm, so her master anchored the ship at the entrance to Plymouth harbor.
While anchored at Pemaquid on a fishing and trading expedition, the crew mutinied and threatened Altham and master Bridges with the destruction of the ship.
They were within a day’s sail of reaching Little James when they found that a second storm had disabled the ship in the harbor at Damariscove Island (now in Maine) where English seamen maintained a small fishing station.
On the night of April 10, 1624, during another storm, the ship lost the grip of her anchors on the sea floor once again when wind and waves caused her to crash onto rocks and topple over.
[17][18] When the ship did reach London, Fell and Stephens left it “in the river of Thames in very disordered and evil manner.” They also promptly sued the investor group and Plymouth Colony for forty pounds, in the form of wages that William Bradford had promised and apparently not paid.
The monies they demanded amounted to 4–6 years of wages they should have received, notwithstanding the fact that they had mutinied and refused to help the ship and other crew when they were most needed.
The High Court of Admiralty, which had jurisdiction over maritime matters, took custody of the ship and all her goods and furnishings pending the outcome of these lawsuits.
But the Colony did arrange for Little James to transport about five hundred beaver furs back to England to assist in paying their debts.
[23] Little James, which was built by the Adventurers to remain in New England, could have been of great assistance to the colonists in matters of trade and fishing, but seemed to have endless ill fortune (see the following for the fate of her captain) which included lack of support by the investors, a mutinous crew, a shipwreck, seizure by the Admiralty Court and creditors in England and finally capture by Barbary pirates.
There are no separate passenger lists for Anne and for Little James as those who came over on these ships were grouped together in official records when the 1623 division of land was made for them.