Isaac Allerton

BIRTH: About 1586. Birthplace not yet known.

MARRIAGE: * Mary Norris, 4 November 1611, Leiden, Holland.
* Fear Brewster, c1626, Plymouth.
* Joanna Swinnerton, between 1634 and 1644, possibly at Marblehead

Death: Between 1 and 12 February 1658/9, New Haven.

Children: Children by Mary: Bartholomew, Remember, Mary, an unnamed child buried in Leiden, Holland, and an unnamed son stillborn in Plymouth Harbor.
Children by Fear: Sarah and Isaac.

Isaac Allerton was about 34 years old when he came to Plymouth on the Mayflower in 1620. He had been a long-time member of the Pilgrims' church in Leiden, and was recorded as having been a tailor from London. He married his first wife, Marry Norris, in Leiden, in 1611, and there had children Bartholomew, Remember and Mary, all of whom came on the Mayflower with him. He and Mary buried a child, not yet named, at St. Peters on 5 February 1620. Isaac Allerton had a sister Sarah in Leiden, who married to Mayflower passenger Degory Priest. Mayflower passenger John Allerton, also a Leiden resident, most likely was a relative as well, although the exact relation has not been discovered.

Isaac Allerton was one of the more active and prominent members of early Plymouth. He was elected as Governor Bradford's assistant in 1621, and continued as an assistant into the 1630s. In 1627, he was sent to negotiate the Plymouth Colony's buyout of the Merchant Adventurers, the investors who had originally funded (and had hoped to profit from) the Colony. The Colony was about £2500 in debt; a small group of Plymouth's residents, including Bradford, Brewster, Standish, Fuller, and Allerton, sought to assume the debt themselves in return for the rights to profit from the company. Allerton was sent to England to negotiate further, and would return to England on several more occasions. Unfortunately for the others, Allerton began to use his "free" trips to England to engage in some private gains, purchasing goods and selling them in the Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth. He also used his capacity as Plymouth's designated negotiator to engage the Colony in a number of unapproved money-making schemes: he went so far as to purchase ships (which he partially used for his own private trading), and to attempt to negotiate grants and patents for trade--all at great cost to the company and none of it approved by the others back at Plymouth. When his trading schemes failed, the Company found itself in far greater debt than it ever started out with.

When Allerton's wife Fear died at Plymouth about 1634, and with the general ire of the Colony against him, he had little reason to stay. He moved to the New Haven Colony, and by 1644 had remarried to his third wife, Joanna Swinnerton. Isaac Allerton remained an active trader, and did regular business with the Dutch at New Netherland in modern-day New York. Records of his trading can be found in numerous other colonies as well, including Virginia and Barbados.