December 16 marks the anniversary of one of the most iconic events in American history. On that night in 1773, about 150 men disguised their faces and tossed 340 chests of tea from three ships docked in Boston Harbor.
The already contentious relationship between the colonists and their English overseers deteriorated even further until April 19, 1775, when shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, and the American Revolution was fully underway.
You might have missed these five facts about the Boston Tea Party in your American history class.
1) The East India Company’s tea came from China, not India.
The British East India Company shipped Chinese teas from the port of Canton to their London docks and warehouses. From there, the tea was transported to American cities along the Eastern Seaboard.
Tea gardens in India and Ceylon were not planted until the mid-1800s, and Japanese tea would not be exported commercially until 1859.
2) 22% of the tea tossed overboard was green tea.
The English and Americans drank great amounts of green tea when the exotic beverage first appeared in London coffee houses in 1657.
One of the two green teas aboard the Boston ships was Hyson, a favorite early-spring green tea favored by Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. The other green tea was Singlo, which originated in the Sunglo mountain area of Fujian.
3) The East India Company was the first company deemed “too big to fail.”
Elizabeth I issued the charter for the East India Company (EIC) in 1600, allowing the corporation a monopoly on all imports and trade from the areas east of Africa. In exchange, Parliament received as much as 6% of its annual budget from commissions received from the sale of East India goods. As a result, only tea from Britain’s East India Company was officially allowed to be imported into British colonies – all taxed.
Unfortunately for King George III, his taxes on goods imported by The EIC into the Colonies led to widespread smuggling by the Dutch East India Company and declining revenue for both The EIC and Parliament. By 1772, the aging teas stored in London warehouses were nearing their expiration date, and the world’s most powerful company was about to fail.
The EIC pleaded its case that the British economy would come crashing down if The Company was allowed to fail. Parliament granted The EIC a reprieve in 1773, allowing them to ship 544,000 pounds of aging tea to the Colonies with no commission paid. The scheme was a clearance sale designed to save the first company deemed too big to fail.
4) Boston was one of four American cities commissioned to receive the 1773 tea shipments.
On September 27, 1773, seven chartered ships laden with two-thousand chests of East India Company tea left London. Four were heading to Boston aboard, while the other three were destined for New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. Three ships, the Dartmouth, Eleanor, and Beaver, eventually docked in Boston two months later, while one Boston-bound ship, the William, was lost in a gale off Cape Cod.
The Polly landed in Philadelphia on Christmas eve and was turned around, fully laden, for a return voyage to London. The chests of tea aboard the ship London were off-loaded in Charleston and held in the Customs House. The ship Nancy ran into horrendous storms, was blown off-course, and arrived in New York in April 1774, where it was met by resistance. The captain of the Nancy was persuaded to return to London with the despised tea aboard.
5) The tea rebellion in Boston was not originally called a “tea party.”
The rebellious act of tossing tea into Boston harbor would not be called a “tea party” until 1829 when the Providence Patriot reported the death of a ninety-seven-year-old resident named Nicholas Campbell. The newspaper noted that Cambell “was one of the ever-memorable Boston Tea Party, who committed one of the first acts of resistance to British oppression.”
It is worth noting that another member of the raiding party that night in Boston was Thomas Melville, grandfather of Moby Dick author Herman Melville.
The invoice prepared in 1774 for reimbursement of the teas destroyed in The Colonies.
The Five Chinese Teas aboard the ships in Boston Harbor were:
- Bohea
- Congou
- Souchong
- Hyson
- Singlo
Tea Maestro Bruce Richardson serves as Tea Master for The Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum. He is the co-author of A Social History of Tea.
Hear his interview on the Tea Biz Podcast…
Thank you for the article and for your amazing devotion to Tea. I have really enjoyed your Boston tea party Tea Talks as well.
thank you for this bit of trivia I did not know the whole story but as a child my mother told me about it she was british, no history book explained it as you have so thanks