Colonists dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor
On this day · 16 December 1773
Disguised men boarded three ships at night and threw a fortune in British tea overboard rather than pay the tax on it.
On the night of December 16, 1773, dozens of men, some disguised as Indigenous Americans, slipped aboard three East India Company ships at Boston’s Griffin’s Wharf. Over about three hours they pried open and emptied 342 chests of tea into the harbor.
The protest targeted the Tea Act of 1773, which propped up the struggling East India Company and let it undercut local merchants while preserving a tax the colonists never consented to. Their rallying cry was no taxation without representation.
The ships were the Dartmouth, Eleanor, and Beaver, and the tea destroyed was worth a small fortune at the time.
Britain answered not with compromise but with the punitive Coercive Acts of 1774, closing Boston’s port and tightening control over Massachusetts. Rather than cowing the colonies, the crackdown helped unite them. The harbor full of ruined tea became one of the sparks that lit the American Revolution.
Sources & references
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