Image above is : Passengers of the Mayflower signing the "Mayflower Compact" including Carver, Winston, Alden, Myles Standish, Howland, Bradford, Allerton, and Fuller. 1 photomechanical print : halftone, color (postcard made from painting). Postcard published by The Foundation Press, Inc., 1932. Reproduction of oil painting from series: The Pageant of a Nation. by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris (1863–1930).
Isaac Allerton was born in Suffolk, England, in 1586. He emigrated to Plymouth Colony on the Mayflower in 1620 with his wife Mary Norris and three young children. For eleven years he served as Governor William Bradford’s assistant, but his ambitions led him into situations that displeased and angered Bradford with their financial complications. However, historians have found him to have been a complex figure, with many good traits, whom one has labeled enigmatic. “A mariner, merchant, burgher, attorney, and diplomat, both an Englishman and a Dutchman, a resident of New Plimouth, New Haven, and New Netherland, he was an important, energetic, yet enigmatic entrepreneur.” David Furlow, in M. Bruijn Lacy, Ch. Gehring, and J. Oosterhoff, eds., From De Halve Maen to KLM: 400 Years of Dutch-American Exchange (Munster, 2008, pp. 105-118). As a merchant in New Netherland in the 1630s, he is frequently mentioned in the published records of New Netherland, where he appears as a supple and talented trader and go-between among the various ethnicities, and a trusted agent of the government. He died in New Haven in 1659, and David Furlow notes that “his estate was so complex that the New Haven and New Netherland probate proceedings” went on for two years. Ibid., p.114,