Episode 16: The Tea

Worlds Turned Upside Down
Episode 16: The Tea

Written by Jim Ambuske, Ph.D.
Published July 23, 2025

JIM AMBUSKE: This episode of Worlds Turned Upside Down is made possible with support from a 2024 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

AMBUSKE: Captain Benjamin Lockyer’s ship was lost somewhere in the Atlantic. God knew where. In early October 1773 his ship, the Nancy, had cleared out of the Port of London and headed down the River Thames, the beginning of a weeks-long voyage to New York laden with a heavy cargo.

AMBUSKE: The north Atlantic could be unforgiving with the onset of winter and the journey out of London slow. The Nancy lumbered its way down the Thames to Gravesend on October 6th, not far from where the river meets the North Sea, before calling at Deal on England’s southeast coast. There the ship remained for several days, with winds blowing hard out of the southwest. 

AMBUSKE: By late October, the weather turned more favorable. The Nancy headed west, hugging England’s southern coast until on October 22nd when it reached Portsmouth, long the home of the Royal Navy.  But as any good sailor knew, the winds around Portsmouth respected neither commoner nor king. Nearly 230 years earlier, King Henry VIII watched in horror from Portsmouth’s shore as a violent gust of wind tipped over his prized warship, the Mary Rose, during a battle with the French. Water poured into her open gunports, sending the proud king’s ship and her crew to the bottom of the English Channel.

AMBUSKE: If the Nancy began its trek across the Atlantic within a day or two of its arrival in Portsmouth, it didn’t get very far. The ocean had other ideas, and the winds blew harder still. In early November, London newspapers reported the ship off the coast of the Isle of Wight. By then, six other ships like the Nancy were already well underway to Charleston, Philadelphia, and Boston. They carried a combined 1,353 chests of East India Company tea.

AMBUSKE: Over the course of more than a century, the East India Company had grown from a lucrative trading venture in the Indian Ocean to nearly a sovereign power in its own right, and the de facto ruler over much of subcontinent India. However much some Members of Parliament bristled at the company’s power, charged it with corruption, and lamented the blurred lines between its shareholders and the British state, through it the government could rule its distant Indian empire and exploit its riches. From India the company sent home spices, textiles, and curiosities. From China, the company sent tea.

AMBUSKE: But by the early 1770s, the East India Company was teetering on the edge of collapse. The costs of running an empire and an enterprise were very great. War in Madras and famine in Bengal weighed on Indian communities and the company’s finances. Protests in British America over the Townshend Acts turned into non-importation movements, crippling the company’s ability to sell tea in the colonies. Smuggled tea only made matters worse. In early 1773, the company’s warehouses were bursting with eighteen million pounds of unsold tea.

AMBUSKE: Parliament could not afford to let the company fail nor could it ignore the solution British America presented either. By 1773, with most of the Townshend taxes already repealed, British Americans proved more than willing to purchase and drink legal, dutied tea.

AMBUSKE: If Parliament allowed the company to sell its unwanted leaves directly to Pennsylvanians, South Carolinians, and other colonial consumers, that might help bring the company back from the brink of bankruptcy, and have an even happier effect: cheaper tea for the king’s subjects.

AMBUSKE: The tea in the Nancy and in the other six ships sailing for British America were part of this grand experiment. In 1773, Parliament passed the Tea Act to begin this work, but rough waters lay ahead.

AMBUSKE: By mid-November 1773, the Nancy was finally under sail for North America with 698 chests of company tea in her cargo, weighing an astonishing 106 tons. Captain Lockyer had given bond to deliver the tea safely into the hands of its New York consignees. The voyage should have taken at most nine weeks. But foul winds and foul weather blew the Nancy far off course, damaging the ship, and testing the crew’s faith in the Almighty.

AMBUSKE: Weeks later the battered Nancy managed to find safe haven at the sugar island of Antigua, nearly 2,000 miles south of where the ship and her crew were supposed to be. Since the seventeenth century, Antigua had been a critical way point for ships and information passing between Great Britain and North America. When the Nancy arrived at Antigua in mid-February 1774, an unexpected stay that lasted several weeks, Captain Lockyer learned of incidents in Charleston, Philadelphia, and Boston.

AMBUSKE: What precisely Lockyer learned as he lingered in Antigua, we do not know. Was he told that Charlestonians stored their tea in the town’s Merchant Exchange while they debated what course to set? Did he learn that Philadelphians had turned back their ship and returned its tea to England? Did he catch wind of the wreck of a tea ship off Cape Cod, leaving its tea open for the taking? Did someone whisper that a mob of men, some dressed as Mohawk warriors, had boarded three tea ships in Boston Harbor, broke into their cargo holds, smashed open the chests, and spent hours dumping 46 tons of tea into the waves? 

AMBUSKE: Lockyer may have learned from fellow captains or from newspapers that when the Nancy eventually arrived in New York, he “will be made acquainted with the Sentiments of the Inhabitants respecting” the tea, his ship would be resupplied, and he would be strongly encouraged to sail for England immediately. Following these “discreet intentions,” would prevent “every Fatality, both to this Colony and the Honourable Company.” 

AMBUSKE: Lockyer might have chosen to unload his tea in Antigua, paid the required customs duties, and sailed home, washing his hands of all of it. The tea would have found its way into the pots of British Americans in the Caribbean and the mainland. But he had a contract to deliver his cargo to New York. Still, the captain was no fool. He sent word by another ship that he was willing to cooperate with the New Yorkers’ demands, hoping that by the time the Nancy arrived all would be well and the tea could be landed.

AMBUSKE: With the ship repaired and reprovisioned, Captain Lockyer and his crew set sail for New York, leaving the warm waters of the Caribbean behind, carrying the tea at the heart of a tempest. It had been a rough crossing already, and now, in the early spring, as the Nancy approached the mainland, Lockyer and his crew could feel the ship pitch and roll as the waves grew higher, the winds blowing harder. Dark clouds gathered in the distance. A storm was on the horizon.

AMBUSKE: I’m Jim Ambuske, and this is Worlds Turned Upside Down. A podcast about the history of the American Revolution.

AMBUSKE: Episode 16: The Tea

AMBUSKE: On March 5, 1770, hours before the Boston Massacre, Parliament took its first steps to repeal some of the Townshend Duties. The taxes on imported paper, paint, lead, glass, and tea were introduced three years earlier, a key element of Charles Townshend’s strategy to reform British America. The late Chancellor of the Exchequer intended for the revenue raised from his scheme to stay in North America to fund the salaries of colonial governors and judges, a plan to make them less beholden to the whims of provincial legislators, and more accountable to Parliament and the king.

AMBUSKE: But many British Americans in Boston, New York, Charleston, Philadelphia, and beyond decried Townshend’s duties as unconstitutional infringements on their rights and liberties as British subjects. In their view, it was taxation without representation, and to some a diabolical plot to erode legislative oversight of provincial officials.

AMBUSKE: British Americans responded with petitions, protests, rioting, intimidation of customs officials, and local boycotts of British goods. These non-importation agreements rattled British merchants, who watched as their exports and their incomes sank with each passing month. They pressured Members of Parliament to change course. In the spring of 1770, Parliament relented, but only just. 

JAMES FICHTER: Parliament did partially repeal the Revenue Act in April of 1770 and this was in the midst of the North American boycotts and protests against this act. My name is James Fichter. I'm an historian at the University of Hong Kong, where I'm an associate professor of global and Area Studies. Parliament took the tax off on lead paint, glass and paper, not the tax on tea, which it left in place simply to prove the point that it could and should maintain some sort of tax. And the Customs Administration Townsend had put in stayed in place as well.

AMBUSKE: Parliament left in place the three pence per pound duty on tea, a token measure of Parliament’s sovereignty and power.

FICHTER: But the non importation movement was really leaky. Colonists stocked up on goods before the non importation movement began, and they continued to import goods from Britain, even though they promised each other that they wouldn't. So at the height of the non importation movement in the early to mid 1770s some colonists are still importing tea and other goods. In Boston, for example, patriots find it so difficult to stop tea imports that for merchants who refuse to abide by the non importation movement, including Thomas and Elijah Hutchinson, they simply have to lock their tea up. So patriots take the Hutchinson's tea and lock it up to prevent it from being sold,

AMBUSKE: Although British Americans celebrated the repeal of the taxes on paper, paint, lead, and glass:

FICHTER: Colonist were supposed to continue boycotting British tea even after they resumed trade with Britain for other goods. But strikingly in almost every colony, including major market colonies like Virginia, South Carolina, Massachusetts, colonists resume importing duty tea from England after the Revenue Act is partially repealed and they do not faithfully adhere to the continued boycott on tea. Only in two major market colonies is the boycott on duty tea continued, and that's in New York and Pennsylvania. It's effective there because merchants there have trade networks with continental Europe allowed them to get tea and other goods from European sources. How do you make sense of this protest movement? Patriots and Parliament can both see themselves as winners out of this that it's only partially repealed and that the tea tax remains and is paid after 1770 looks like a victory to Parliament, that the other taxes are repealed and that the Patriots have managed to continue not importing duty tea in some colonies, looks like a victory to the Patriots. Both sides look at this and tell themselves that they won, even though in many ways they're also both losers.

AMBUSKE: British Americans’ willingness to resume importing taxed tea in 1770 gave Parliament and the king’s ministers a false sense of confidence that colonists were beginning to accept what Parliament had long claimed: that it could “legislate for the colonies in all cases whatsoever.” In a very real sense, buying and drinking the tea was an acknowledgement of that claimed right. 

AMBUSKE: But another tea crisis was quickly coming to a boil. The boycotts in British America over the Townshend duties reverberated on the far side of the world, compounding the British East India Company’s mounting financial problems, pushing it ever closer to disaster.

AMBUSKE: So, why did Parliament pass the Tea Act of 1773? And why did some British Americans believe that East India Company tea was a tool of tyranny?

AMBUSKE: To begin answering these questions, we’ll first sail east to explore the East India Company’s reign over Britain’s distant Empire. We’ll then begin the long voyage back to London, back to Parliament, to consider British plans for resolving a crisis in one part of the empire without provoking one in the other, before sailing west with the doomed tea to British America, to steep in the rhetoric and the realities that led to its destruction.

AMBUSKE: In the early seventeenth century, just as the Virginia Company of London was drawing up plans to settle Jamestown in Virginia, the British East India Company began making inroads in Southeast Asia and most especially the subcontinent of India.

DEEPTHI MURALI: The British East India Company was established in 1600 as a joint stock company that the Queen Elizabeth the first gave them a royal monopoly to go and trade in the quote Easter days. And this company was given a really wide open charter to do whatever they wanted in the East Indies in terms of trade and. As they started in 1600s there were still competitors for them, in terms of the Portuguese, the French, the Dutch, but essentially, they were still supposed to be a trade entity in India. I'm Deepthi Murali, Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. In the early part of the 18th century, the British India Company is basically about four factories, and factories essentially mean trading posts. They have Surat in the West, a little south of Surat, they have Bombay, then further south, they have Madras. And in the east, they have Calcutta. And essentially they have very limited ruling authority in these trading posts. The French have the same ruling authority in the areas that they control. The Dutch have their own areas. There are Danish traders with the Danish trading company there as well, even the Swedish at some point. So there are a lot of Europeans and European trading companies, and they have these areas over which they had absolute control, but these are very small areas.

AMBUSKE: These trading posts were minor footholds on a crowded subcontinent. 

MURALI:  Unlike in the North American context, in the Indian context, the British are one among many. Even in the 18th century, they're one among many. And India's rulers are used to, quote, unquote, foreigners coming and becoming part of the system. In many cases, this idea of India as a whole is still not present in the subcontinent. They're still different groups, and they've always been sort of multi ethnic, multicultural groups, or at least had been for centuries. If you think about the Mughals, the Mughals are the Central Asian dynasty that then comes and becomes Indian. If you look at the Mughal world, the Mughals then integrate all these other people who come from Central Asia, from other parts of India, into their system. They are all very multicultural. So in many ways, the British, the French, the Dutch and the Portuguese are sort of the new ones into an existing system of trade.

AMBUSKE: To participate in that trade, the East India Company and its European competitors had to work with local rulers and Indian communities.

MURALI: It is happening in collaboration with Indians. But it depends from region to region on how that is carried out. But across the East India Company world, most of the people who, at least in the early stages, work with East India Company are what they were called the dubashis, or literally, the people who can speak two languages, so the scribes, and they are the peons and the clerks, and they are the Indians who run that administrative unit, because there are not that many British people to go around. There's a lot of Indians working with the British. In that sense, you have the soldiers who are Indian, the sepoys. You have a lot of middlemen that comes from different caste and occupational groups for different kinds of industry and trade. They're also working with rulers as well. They're in partnership with many Indian rulers, and so they do have friendly trade agreements and treatises with various rulers.

AMBUSKE: By the second half of the eighteenth century, the development of that trade entangled British America and British India.

MURALI: Cotton goods are the biggest part of that trade. They are exported to Britain, and they're exported directly to the Caribbean. And in the Caribbean they're being used to clothe enslaved people. There is the Indigo, which is the dye that's shipped from India to the Americas to be used as a dye. There is also trade in the other direction. They take Caribbean sugar rum through North America, sell it in Britain, and then take that money to go to India to buy goods. A lot of these ships are going to India and China are made out of North American timber. And then towards the end of the 18th century, you see them growing opium, and then they're taking opium to China to buy tea from China and bring them to the North American markets.

AMBUSKE: The company’s expanding presence soon brought the British into conflict with local rulers and their European adversaries. In the late 1750s, while British forces suffered repeated humiliations at the hands of the French and their Indigenous allies in North America, the British East India Company recovered from an early defeat to win a decisive victory.

MURALI: In 1756 Siraj-ud-Daulah, who was the Nawab of The Bengal Province, which is where Calcutta is attacks the British Trading Post, the factory in Calcutta.

AMBUSKE: In response to Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah’s attack, the company mobilized an army of British soldiers, hired Europeans, Sepoy Indian soldiers, and company men to retaliate.

MURALI: In 1757, there's a battle which is called. Battle of Plassey or Palashi, where Robert Clive defeats Raja Dawla very decisively and takes over the Bengal province. Now, Bengal is the richest Mughal province at the time. So suddenly, the British is near. Company has a lot of money and a lot of land and revenue from these lands, even though they are administering these lands in name for the Mughal emperor, and they just take over this nawabi system and the diwani system that the Mughals practice.

AMBUSKE: In 1765, the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II granted the diwani rights to the British East India Company, empowering it to collect revenue from lands in Bengal and two other territories in eastern India.

MURALI: And once again, they are now swimming in cash. They are really wealthy, and that starts their territorial conquest of the rest of the subcontinent.

AMBUSKE: By the early 1770s, the company’s successes in India and elsewhere in Asia left it in control of vast territories, trade networks, and wealth. But those successes came at a price. 

MURALI: Well, they grew too big for their boots. There are many different factors. One is the territorial expansion itself. If you're expanding and if you're conquering new territories, it costs money if you're establishing new administrative units and creating this vast administrative network that's going to cost you money. Towards the end of the 18th century, Bengal, which is the richest province, goes through a famine that really restricts how much money they can make off the land, and and then the Seven Years' War, the British and French are fighting the proxy wars in the Americas as well as in South Asia. And one of the proxy wars they had is with the state of Mysore. And those were some very, very expensive wars.

AMBUSKE: And

MURALI: Most important thing corruption, the term nabobism comes from this British officials start living like Indian Nawabs, living the life of princes, trading a lot of wealth and lot of the company's money into their personal coffers, becoming really, really rich, especially in that mid to late 18th century period. So corruption is also draining the British East India Company.

AMBUSKE: The vast distances between Great Britain and India meant that reports on the Company’s activities in South Asia took six to eight months to reach London. Even as they celebrated the success of British arms on the subcontinent and the wealth that came with it, the king’s ministers, as well as Members of Parliament, questioned what role the government should play in regulating the company and whether it was growing too powerful.

AMBUSKE: Benjamin Carp, the Daniel M. Lyons Professor of American History at Brooklyn College explains:

BENJAMIN CARP: A lot of them were invested in the East India Company directly. They also felt that they represented shareholders who expected their dividends to keep rolling in. They also knew that the territorial gains that the East India Company had made had encroached upon British diplomatic relations with other countries, and that it was obvious that the British government was going to have to get directly involved. And so the East India Company's extension into all these various places, east of the Cape of Good Hope had made it unavoidable that Parliament would have to be involved one way or another in the doings of the East India Company.

AMBUSKE: In the mid-1760s, Prime Minister William Pitt, Earl of Chatham argued that some of the Company’s revenue ought to be made available for the public benefit. Chatham believed it could help reduce the debt that Britain had incurred to win the Seven Years’ War. King George III concurred. In 1767, the Company committed to contributing £400,000 to the government annually, a value of over £56 million in our own time, in exchange for maintaining its nearly autonomous control over Indian territory.

IAMBUSKE: Ironically George Grenville, the architect of the disastrous Stamp Act, argued against Chatham’s plans, calling them a violation of the Company’s charter rights. The Anglo-Irish MP Edmund Burke feared that intervening in the Company’s administration would entangle the British government in an enterprise that would bring about the nation’s ruin.

AMBUSKE: Some members did not like the idea of ruling over peoples they saw only in aggregate, who they believed had no concept of British liberty, and would require a “despotick” hand to govern them. Nor did they approve of the ways some British subjects adopted South Asian customs and culture. In their view, these British nabobs were degenerating from civility to savagery.

AMBUSKE: But in London, the king’s ministers and Parliament could see the totality of Britain’s empire in ways that British Americans often never could. British America and British India were two key pillars of an interconnected system of global trade in orbit around the Mother Country.

CARP: East India Company was supposed to pay some portion of its revenue to Parliament in taxes. In the same way that Parliament is concerned with tobacco growers in Virginia, because they got taxes from the tobacco trade, they're also interested in what's happening with the East India Company, because they expect the tap of money to the British Empire to support the navy and troops and all the other things that Britain wants to spend money on. They expected that money to keep flowing.

AMBUSKE: In November 1772, one Member of Parliament stated the paradox plainly. He lamented that Britons ever had cause to utter the words “our Indian empire” and that “the wealth of Bengal had never been wrung from the hands of its innocent possessors,” but:

MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT: “When we recollect the riches brought from the East Indies, the duties and excises on the imports, and what will be the fatal consequence of the annihilation of them, let every creditor of the public think and tremble…Let every one recollect, how intimately his fortune and estate, his comfort, and if I may so call them, his innocent luxuries, are connected with this vast object of trade.”

AMBUSKE:  And that “vast object of trade” was in danger of faltering. In the early 1770s, the Company’s directors received a series of troubling reports. Even as it continued to pay out generous dividends to its shareholders, the company faced bills totaling more than £1,500,000. In 1772, bankruptcy loomed. A Scottish banker named Alexander Fordyce suffered serious losses when he shorted the Company’s stock, triggering a wider financial crisis in Britain that led to several bank failures with a cascading effect on the Atlantic economy. To stay afloat, the Company requested a loan of £1,400,000 from the British government.

AMBUSKE: The 9,000 tons of unsold tea valued at £2 million pounds sitting in the Company’s London warehouses waiting to rot didn’t help matters either. The protests and non-importation movements in North America over the Townshend Acts cratered the Company’s tea sales in the colonies. In 1768, the Company exported nearly 150 tons of tea to the New England colonies; two years later it exported only about 43 tons. During the boycotts, merchants sold legal tea they had stockpiled before they took effect, lessening their need to purchase new stocks of tea.

AMBUSKE: Even when British Americans in most colonies resumed purchasing legal, dutied tea in the early 1770s, New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians continued the boycott, London wholesalers cut into the Company’s potential profits, and:

CARP: It had competitors via smuggling. Some of this competition from smugglers meant that tea was piling up in its warehouses. It wasn't able to take the kinds of profits that it potentially could have realized on tea, which is a particularly important commodity.

AMBUSKE:  In 1773, then, the British faced a series of questions with global consequences: How far should the government intervene in the East India Company’s operations? How could it ensure better rule in British India? And what role could British America play in this puzzle?

AMBUSKE: To address some of the problems, Parliament passed the Regulating Act of 1773. The act created a crown-appointed governor-general of Bengal, and reorganized Madras and Bombay beneath the wealther province. It also established a supreme court based in Calcutta, with British judges appointed to oversee the British legal system in place there.

AMBUSKE: Parliament limited the Company’s dividends until it repaid its loan to the government, forbade Company employees from conducting private trade on the side, and limited the Company’s directors to 4-year terms.  

AMBUSKE: It was the first step in a very long history of more direct British rule in India.

AMBUSKE: But what to do about all that bloody Company tea festering in London warehouses? As the end of 1772 neared, many British Americans continued importing legal tea under the last surviving provision of Charles Townshend’s revenue Act. 

CARP: The 1767 Revenue Act, popularly called the Townsend Act, is actually the act that imposes the three penny per pound duty on tea. All of the Townsend acts, except for the duty on tea, were repealed in 1770 Parliament wanted to maintain the principle of continuing to tax Americans.

FICHTER: One other thing worth noting, the initial Revenue Act have a five year sunset clause. They're going to end in 1772 anyway. So there's a need for a new act. Either they revert to the old super high tariffs and the smuggling network continues, or the three pence a pound. Tax needs to be renewed.

AMBUSKE: Dumping Company tea on the North American market would not by itself resolve the Company’s immediate financial woes, but a new Tea Act passed alongside the Regulating Act could be an important part of a global solution.

FICHTER:  Previously, the company had been required to sell all of its tea at auctions in London, this introduced this new tranche of middlemen London wholesalers, who would add the cost for their services to buying the tea at auction, putting it in with the other goods that they shipped to North America on their seasonal shipments across the Atlantic.

CARP: Then British says, All right, well, our East India Company is in trouble. What if we continue to maintain this duty on the Americans that the Americans are paying, but simultaneously make it easier for the East India Company to ship its tea to the American colonies by eliminating the middlemen, setting up a situation where they can hand pick certain consignees to receive tea shipments, pretty much directly from the East India Company and sell it to the American colonists.

FICHTER: So the main innovation of the Tea Act is it allows the English East India Company to directly ship its tea to North America. By allowing the company to ship tea directly to North America without auctioning, it could either cut out those wholesalers or put them in competition with other wholesalers. So now the company was empowered to sell tea directly in North America. It hired merchants in North America to do this. We call these men the consignees. They were the men to whom the company's tea was sent in 1773 and the company instructed them to wholesale this tea at a fixed price, and it gave them a fixed percentage commission rate that they could charge. They couldn't really have any incentive to hold on to the tea and for prices to go up, they just had to get it out there, and they were positioned to be in competition with the London wholesalers. The Tea Act is like the earlier Townsend act. Supposed to be a reform, a benevolent, if marginal improvement, which is supposed to be a win win. It would marginally benefit the crown by increasing tax revenue, marginally benefit the East India Company by increasing some tea sales, perhaps and benefit North American colonists by keeping tea costs down and tea supplies up.

CARP: Why would the colonists object? This is going to make tea cheaper for them.

AMBUSKE: Parliament might be forgiven for believing that British Americans would begrudgingly if not happily accept the new Tea Act, despite their dismay at earlier British reforms. Once the trade boycotts collapsed, colonists resumed importing legal tea, even as they continued smuggling in leaves from cheaper Dutch sources. The act would lower the cost of tea for all colonists. And while British America wasn’t the empire’s largest tea market:

FICHTER: Tea was a part of everyday consumer life. By the 1770s most North American colonists were in the economic range where they could afford to drink tea. Most estimates of per capita tea consumption North America suggests North Americans drank between a half to three quarters of a pound of tea per person per year. Now that's less than in Britain. In Britain, per capita consumption levels at this time are about 1.4 pounds of tea per person per year. These are estimates because so much tea was smuggled into both locations. But nevertheless, what this indicates is that North Americans didn't drink as much tea as their British cousins,

AMBUSKE: But the tea they did drink was an important part of tea culture.

CARP: Tea had become an amazingly popular commodity among English speaking peoples, both in Britain and in colonial America. It's not just about the beverage itself, but all the ecopage or equipment that goes along with it, the cups you drink out of the tea pot that you pour out of the Sugar Bowl, the sugar tongs, beautiful silver or ceramic sets. And then, in terms of wooden furniture, the tea tables that you would drink on the chairs that you would use to sit around it.

AMBUSKE: One Boston merchant listed for sale:

BOSTON MERCHANT: “A fine assortment of Tea-pots, Coffee-pots, Sugar-pots, Cups, and saucers[,] several compleat Tea-table Sets of Childrens cream-coloured Toys[,] English Loaf Sugar…Spices of all sorts, fine Hyson and Souchong Tea."

FICHTER: Tea came in all sorts of grades, from low end Bohea, which was a black tea, to high end Hyson, which was a fine green tea.

CARP: And I want to stress that tea was not the kind of commodity by the 18th century that was only available to the very elite. It was inexpensive enough that it was accessible to middle class and working class people. They might not have all of the same fancy things to go with it that wealthy people would have, but it was still a way to aspire towards being a member of a more upper class than the one that you actually inhabited.

FICHTER: Hyson was extremely pricey, for example, and would be something that'd be difficult for average consumers to get. Pricing indicates that you could get tea for 345, shillings a pound, and there's a lot of range there as well, because you can get different qualities of tea. You can even just get older tea that might be cheaper. I was surprised. Is to learn that in the poor houses in New York and Philadelphia, where people were given lodging in exchange for work by the town inmates, as they were referred to, were served tea as part of their board and lodging in the poor house.

CARP: Men and women both drank tea, but the tea table was classically thought to be ladies domain. This was a source of criticism and satire sometimes, but it was also a chance for people to be sociable in ways that they really appreciated. And so all of this material culture and all of these rituals have come to surround the tea table in a way that becomes really important.

AMBUSKE: One colonist advised his sister that when she married, serving tea would allow her to keep up with the latest news.

COLONIST: “If you have tea you will have visitors enough, you will see every old wife in the neighbourhood each week, you will hear all the news that is stirring.”

CARP: Tea becomes this really exciting and aspirational beverage for people in America and in Britain itself.

AMBUSKE: Aspirational as tea might be, Parliament missed its guess. British Americans did object to the new Tea Act. Colonists learned of it beginning September 1773 when the statute was published in newspapers, though their initial reactions were muted. The act’s befuddling language wasn’t the easiest to parse, but as its meaning became clearer, would-be protestors faced a rhetorical problem.

CARP: If you were going to object to the Tea Act, you had to do so on the basis of principle, because people could see that the cost of tea might well go down. But it was the principle of thing that really seemed to matter.

FICHTER: There were fears. Many patriots expressed their fears that this was going to encourage the East India Company to have a monopoly on tea in North America. And of course, they talked a lot about taxation without representation. These are serious, and this is something that had been brewing for some time, implying they would establish the precedent of raising a revenue in North America without any representation or any mechanism for colonists to consent to it. This isn't really true. In reality, that precedent had been established in 1770 when the tea boycott collapsed and colonists continued to pay for tea without protest throughout 1771 and 1772 and into 1773 in 1772 North American colonists imported and consumed over a quarter million pounds of taxed tea into North America. That's a quarter million pounds of precedent that's already been set.

AMBUSKE:  Nevertheless, in October 1773, when British Americans learned that ships with cargos of Company tea would be sent to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, some began drawing up strategies of protest and resistance. To them, Parliament’s latest reform fit into a growing pattern of ministerial conspiracy and corruption. First the Sugar Act, then the Stamp Act, followed by Quartering Act, the Townshend Acts, and now the Tea Act.

AMBUSKE: In Philadelphia, the Quaker merchant Thomas Mifflin drew inspiration from the Stamp Act crisis. In a published broadside, he advised tea consignees to refuse their appointments, or perhaps face the wrath of angry mobs, much as stamp distributors once had. The Scottish-emigrant Alexander McDougall, a member of the New York Sons of Liberty and a fierce opponent of quartering soldiers in the city, raged in a series of broadsides:

ALEXANDER MCDOUGALL: “That the East-India Company obtained their exclusive Privilege of Trade to that Country, by Bribery and Corruption: Wonder not then, that Power thus obtained, at the Expence of the national Commerce, should be used to the most tyrannical and cruel Purposes.”

AMBUSKE: The Edinburgh-trained, Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush believed that landing the tea would openly admit Parliament’s right to tax the colonists. If that happened, he wrote, “We are undone forever.” It would mark the end of British American liberty. 

AMBUSKE:  Philadelphians took the initial lead in organizing public resistance to the Tea Act and to the inbound tea ships. On October 16th, members of the city’s elite gathered at the State House to debate Parliament’s actions. They passed a series of resolutions, later published in newspapers, that condemned the act:

PHILADELPHIANS: “That the duty imposed by Parliament upon tea landed in America is a tax on the Americans, or levying contributions on them without their consent.”

PHILADELPHIANS: “That a virtuous and steady opposition to this ministerial plan of governing America is absolutely necessary to preserve even the shadow of liberty and is a duty which every freeman in America owes to his country, to himself, and to his posterity.”

AMBUSKE: The Philadelphians’ deeds galvanized Boston’s Sons of Liberty into action.

CARP: They smell a rat. Samuel Adams is like this is going to seduce us into paying a duty on a commodity that's being sold by this monopoly company that if we accept this, then what's going to follow is even more taxes and even more monopoly. Arrangements this is going to squeeze American traders. This is going to extract pound sterling after pound sterling out of the pockets of colonial Americans. So the Americans see it as a measure that is directed at them, that violates the principle of no taxation without representation, that offends colonial Americans in a couple of other ways. And so the Americans react badly to it, even though, really what parliament was intending to do was use the measure as a way of bailing out the East India Company,

AMBUSKE: As British Americans concocted a variety of arguments and strategies to resist the Tea Act, the tea ships were approaching.

CARP: When Parliament passes the Tea Act, the East India Company decides to take advantage of this new arrangement by sending four groups of ships to the colonies. Four are intended for Boston and then one each are intended for New York City, Philadelphia, and Charleston.

AMBUSKE: The seven ships sailed from England in late September and early October 1773. With the New York bound ship Nancy lost somewhere in the Atlantic, the remaining ships headed west toward their intended destinations. Colonial newspapers reported their passage, but no one knew when or where the first ship would arrive, nor what would happen once it got there.

AMBUSKE: In Boston, Anne Hulton, the sister of customs commissioner Henry Hulton, waited with bated breath for the first ship’s arrival. On November 25th, Hulton wrote of a standoff between Richard Clarke, one of the East India Company’s consignees, and angry Bostonians. 

ANNE HULTON:  “The Ships Laden with Tea from the East India House are hourly expected, the People will not suffer it to be landed at Boston, they demand the Consignes to promise to send it back. Mr. Clark resolutely refuses to comply, will submit to no other terms, than to put it into warehouse till they can hear from England. They threaten to tear him to pieces if its Landed. He says he will be tore to pieces before he will desert the Trust reposed in him by the Consignees.”

AMBUSKE: The Dartmouth captained by James Hall arrived in Boston Harbor three days later on November 28th. Once in port, the clock began ticking.

FICHTER: In Boston, four ships are sent with the company's tea. These ships arrive in a staggered formation. The first vessel arrives in late November. If after 20 days the vessel's cargo has not been unloaded, the customs officer can impound the tea and potentially later sell it. The complicating factor is, while the first vessel, the Dartmouth, has arrived with this tea five days later. The second vessel, the Eleanor, arrives with the next piece of the Boston Tea shipment. And so everyone knows that whatever happens with the Dartmouth will set the precedent for what happens with the Eleanor, and then whatever happens with the Dartmouth and the Eleanor will lock in what you can do with the beaver and the William, which will be the last two ships.

AMBUSKE: Unbeknownst to Bostonians:

MARY BETH NORTON: The tea ship was in Charleston at exactly the same time that tea ships were in Boston. I'm Mary Beth Norton. I'm the Mary Donlon Alger, Professor Emerita at Cornell University. The customs laws at the time said that if the duty wasn't paid in twenty days, the product would be confiscated by the customs officers

AMBUSKE: The London arrived in Charleston on December 2nd. The distance between Boston and Charleston was too great for colonists in one to know how colonists in the other were dealing with the tea. In Boston:

FICHTER: The patriots concede and allow customs officers to impound the tea, they'll probably have to allow that. With all of the vessels, they have all the more reason to hold the line on the first one customs officers, likewise, the tea has been brought into the customs area in Boston, and they say, Look, we're going to force this tea to be landed and the tax paid. Even if you do want to re ship it back to England, we don't care, you're still going to pay the darn tax. Going to pay the darn tax, and we're going to hold the line here, because we know there's another ship coming. In fact, after five days, the two vessels are sitting next to each other on the wharf. Each side has a reason not to concede.

AMBUSKE: Meanwhile, in Charleston:

FICHTER: The London arrives on December 2, 1773 and the Sons of Liberty immediately organized against it. The Sons of Liberty organized for a meeting, what they call a general meeting to happen the next day, Charleston has this big new building, the exchange which has been built on the Charleston waterfront just a couple years earlier, at the beginning of the 1770s and on the ground floor were the customs facilities the customs officers operated there. You would land your cargoes there, pay duties there, and the ground floor and underground basement also provided warehousing space. As a customs warehouse, they called a general meeting. A bunch of people showed up. They came to the exchange. They debated what to do. About the tea, and eventually started to pass some resolves against importing our consuming duty tea. And then the meeting summoned the consignees that had been tasked with landing the company's tea. The consignees faced what they referred to as a great majority of people opposed to the teas landing there. However, they stood fast. They did not resign their role in dealing with East India Company's tea. And they also noted that while South Carolinians seem to be against the East India Company's tea, seemed to also be in favor of continuing the importation of smuggle tea in large amounts. And they did not take kindly to this. And the South Carolina merchants community as a whole seemed to have been quite divided about how to respond to it.

AMBUSKE: The other tea on board the London contributed to the divide. The ship carried tea from other London wholesalers, giving some Charleston merchants an incentive to keep tea prices high by keeping Company tea off the market. So while the Sons of Liberty declaimed against the Tea Act upstairs in the Exchange.

FICHTER: Downstairs, people were actually doing things while politicians talked downstairs. Merchants landed tea from the London landed it, paid the duties at the exchange and carried it right past the meeting to the individual merchant shops, because all the people that would watch out for that sort of thing. Were busy in the meeting room upstairs, not looking out the windows, and so they missed what was going on.

NORTON: The big difference between Charleston and Boston was that Boston put up a watch on the wharfs so that nobody could unload the tea. Charleston didn't do that. They just had this meeting, and they said, well, we don't want the tea to be landed. The local government in Charleston tried to stay out of it. The Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina tried to stay out of the whole thing, and he let the merchants and the planters try to figure out what to do. In the end, they did a negotiated settlement.

FICHTER: They have to call a new meeting on December 17. This meeting eventually decides that East India Company's tea will not be landed. The consignees do agree to no longer have anything to do with it. However, the ship captain, Captain curling, he has Devin bond in England to land the T in North America and return to England with a certificate of its proper landing. And if he doesn't, he's out a substantial amount of money, and so he's not willing to return to England with this cargo. As a result, even though the consignees had promised not to do anything with it, it's a little bit of a question. What's going to happen then on December 22 ultimately, the customs collectors decide to impound the tea from the London and store it in the customs warehouse under the exchange.

AMBUSKE: Officials spent hours unloading more than 250 chests of tea. Landing the tea meant it could be sold, but Charleston merchants, now with other stocks of tea and wanting to keep prices high, had no incentive to buy it.

NORTON: The customs officers wrote to England to say, what should we do with all this tea? And of course, it took months and months and months to get an answer from the East India Company. And by then, events had moved on, and it was irrelevant.

AMBUSKE: Boston’s Sons of Liberty did not know how Charlestonians had dealt with their tea, but by then, it didn’t matter. They had already made a profoundly different choice, with profoundly unforeseen consequences.

AMBUSKE: The Dartmouth put into Boston Harbor and docked at Griffin’s Wharf on November 28th. The next day, the Sons of Liberty called for a meeting at Faneuil Hall to discuss its arrival. So many people came, they had to reconvene at the Old South Meeting House.

AMBUSKE: When the Dartmouth entered the customs zone on the 28th, the captain and crew had 20 days to land the tea and pay the duty before customs officials could impound and sell it. 

FICHTER: Boston is the city that had imported more duty tea than any other city in North America. 40% of all the duty tea imported into North America in the five years for the Boston Tea Party went into Massachusetts, there's a very real, plausible belief that if you can land this tea, there'll be a market for it. This was both why Boston patriots needed to push harder, because they needed to stop this previous sale of duty tea, and why the consignees and the customs officers felt that they could continue to try to land this cargo, because they had landed these other ones for the previous several years.

AMBUSKE: Twenty days to make choices.

FICHTER: The Dartmouth, the only vessel for which the countdown is expiring, they have to land the tea for the Eleanor and the beaver, there are many days left on their countdown. It's possible that you could just destroy the tea on the Dartmouth, if you really do respect property, leave the tea on the Eleanor alone and hope that encourages the importing merchants to think twice and send the tea back to England

AMBUSKE: Twenty days to fear different fates.

FICHTER: The wharf where those ships are docked is guarded by a paramilitary group under control of the Sons of Liberty. Prevent the tea being landed. What's going to happen is the soldiers that are in Boston, the naval vessels and men that are in Boston, are going to secure the tea on the remaining ships. So that will inevitably create a confrontation between these two armed groups, which would likely result in bloodshed that would make the Boston Massacre pale by comparison, and is to be avoided. It also might end in victory of Parliament's cause by getting the tea impounded and landed, knowing that this is a repeated game, that whatever happens with the first vessel will have to be re enacted with the next one. Patriots think, well, we want to shortcut the repeated game. Just get all the vessels at once

AMBUSKE: Twenty days to avoid confrontation.

CARP: In Boston, they feel that if the tea is landed, that it will somehow be sold. They are under immense pressure from the Sons of Liberty in New York and Philadelphia. They don't feel that they can land the tea. They don't want to pay the duties on it. But the governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, is stubborn and will not allow the tea ships that were headed to Boston to just turn around and bring the tea back to London, because that was illegal, and Hutchinson felt that he had to do his duty. Bostonians are pretty much between a rock and a hard place, with officialdom on one hand and peer pressure from their fellow Sons of Liberty on the other.

AMBUSKE: On December 16th, a Thursday, more than 5,000 Bostonians – more than a quarter of the town’s population – gathered at the Old South Meeting House under “very heavy Dull weather” to discuss the crisis. Samuel Adams and John Hancock led the meeting. The clock for the Dartmouth expired that night.

CARP: This is a last resort on December 16, the body of the people in Boston tries one more time to avoid the problem of the tea landing. They send Francis Roach, part owner of one of the tea ships. They send him to walk seven miles to Milton, Massachusetts, to meet with Governor Thomas Hutchinson at his country house and say, Governor Hutchinson, can I please have special permission to leave the harbor with the tea on board. If I don't, then, in a day or two, customs officers will have the right to seize my ship for non payment of a duty on tea, because the ships had been in the harbor for twenty days at that point. If you don't let me go, I'm going to lose my shirt because the ship and all of the goods aboard, I will be held liable for that. I'd really like to avoid that problem. Governor Hutchinson says, No, I'm sorry, I can't help you. So Roche walks back to the Old South Meeting House where the body of the people were meeting. Roach walks up and says, Here's my report. And this is when, supposedly, Samuel Adams says, well, there's nothing more that we can do to save our country.

AMBUSKE: And in the opinion of some of the people in attendance that night:

CARP: We can't land the tea and we can't send the tea back, so the only proper destination for it is to dump it into Boston Harbor.

AMBUSKE: Shortly after Adams finished speaking, about 100 men, some dressed as Mohawk warriors, with their faces darkened to conceal their identities, let out fake Indigenous war cries, and then:

CARP: And a group of men marches down from the Old South Meeting House to griffins wharf to hoist the tea off of these three ships that had docked at griffins Wharf, throw the tea over the side and destroy it.

AMBUSKE: The tea destroyers dragged wooden chests lined with lead weighing as much as 400 pounds out of the cargo hold, carried them on to the decks of each of the three ships, broke  them open, and dumped their contents into the water. 46 tons in all. It took hours. The tide was out that night. As the men dumped chest after chest into the harbor, the mountains of tea began to rise above the waves.

CARP: Who was involved in the Boston Tea Party? Our ability to know the names of the men for certain is a little bit difficult. Nobody really came forward and said they were part of the Boston Tea Party for almost 50 years. It was a closely held secret. But of the 100 names that I find most reliable, I tried to put together a social and political profile of these men, and they ranged from a couple of guys who were Harvard educated, a couple of guys who were pretty wealthy, all the way to teenaged apprentices who were just starting out in life. There were a lot of artisans and retailers, a lot of people who had been politically involved in previous acts, four guys that the bullets had just missed at the Boston Massacre in 1770 it's this really interesting mix of what seems to have been politically involved Bostonians, although there were also rumors that they used men from out of town so that they wouldn't be recognized. That's a little bit unclear, but it seems clear that they were politically connected, not necessarily the most powerful people in town, and in fact, the most powerful people in town, like Samuel Adams and John Hancock ostentatiously stayed behind at the Old South Meeting House while the destroying was happening on Griffin's Wharf, so that the most powerful Boston leaders wouldn't necessarily be blamed. But Thomas Melville is there. Paul Revere is there. William Molineaux is there. There was a guy named James Swan who had authored an anti slavery pamphlet as well. People. So it's an interesting mix of people who are said to have participated in the Boston Tea Party, but I see them as a relatively representative cross section of the kinds of people that were objecting to the Acts of Parliament in the years leading up to 1773

AMBUSKE: Historians have long puzzled over why some of the tea destroyers dressed as Mohawk warriors, though we do have several theories.

CARP: Boston is a town of 16,000 people. You knew how your cousin walked or how his neighbor carried himself, even if everybody had smudged faces and it was a little bit dark, I think everybody knew who all of these people were, but the disguise was meant to send a message. You'd better not tell that is the message that's being put out. But still, that doesn't quite answer the question, why Native Americans? We know that there was a history of people in Boston dressing up as priests or women or black people or Native Americans in order to protest that might be one reason. Another reason is that there was a sort of fascination with Native American iconography. There was a Native American that was part of the colony of Massachusetts. Seal America was often represented as a Native American man or woman in political cartoons. And Bostonians had actual respect for real Mohawks as being fierce and independent and brave. And so in a weird way, adopting a mohawk identity or a Native American identity, had all these really interesting meanings of we are showing our independence, we are showing our Americanness, and therefore our separation from Europe. But at the same time, it's also a way of saying, hey, but you know that these aren't real Native Americans. You understand that these are white people underneath a white American was supposed to be the best of both worlds, more civilized in their minds than Native Americans, but also not as corrupt as Europeans, a sort of happy medium in between that could draw upon the civilizing influences of Europe, but also retain the independence from Europe that colonists half admired in the indigenous people of America

AMBUSKE: With the tea destroyed, the men vanished into the night, some of them into history, and the leaves washed out into the sea.

FICHTER: But they don't get the tea on the fourth vessel, and we've completely missed this fourth vessel that William is wrecked in a storm off Cape Cod in early December, and the consignees send out a son to go and rescue this cargo. So he rides out on horseback from Boston out to Wellfleet, assesses the situation, hires some men to rescue the cargo, which is extremely dangerous work to get cargo from rocks in stormy weather and to bring it on shore.

AMBUSKE: Here’s Mary Beth Norton:

NORTON: There were lots of things bound for Boston on that ship, including street lamps that they've been waiting for. There were 50 some odd chests of tea on it. Most of them were undamaged, but three of them were sufficiently damaged that they kept them on the cape. They just couldn't send those up to Boston easily. There was this big debate then on the Cape, what to do about this tea? Some people want to buy it and drink it because, hey, after all, it hasn't paid any duty, because it's a shipwreck on our shores. Other people said no. Now it's from the East India Company, so we can't buy it at all. We can't pay any attention to it. Two local grandees took over two of the cases. One of the chests was used to pay the guys who unloaded the ship, they then got attacked by other people for having earned this tea, and indeed, we have stories of them being forced to apologize in the Truro town meeting for having done this, and others having the tea that was in their houses taken away by people who came and raided the houses looking for this tea.

AMBUSKE: The consignee sent the remaining rescued chests to Boston for safe keeping. They were stored in Castle William in the harbor, then home to the 64th Regiment of Foot, and the Royal Navy vessels anchored around it. 

AMBUSKE: The Sons of Liberty dispatched Paul Revere to carry the news of what Bostonians had done to New York. He left on December 17th, and reached New York city five days later. The New York ship, the Nancy, was still nowhere to be found. He carried the news further south to Philadelphia, where the Polly was expected at any moment.

AMBUSKE: Revere’s mission was as much about constructing a narrative as it was delivering information.

FICHTER: The Boston Tea Party was both excessive and inadequate. It was seen by many patriots as an overreach and created much division, even amongst patriots, as well as between other colonists. But also it didn't get all the tea, and Boston patriots uniquely had to destroy all the tea because Boston cargos were the most likely ones to be used, to have that last cargo of tea surviving, and to have it threatening a future landing could threaten to undermine the Boston patriot movement. This means that if the tea gets landed and sold, it would make it look like everything Boston Patriots are saying is. Completely false that they don't speak for the public, because the public buys duty these India Company tea. So this tea has to be kept out as a result lost. And patriots both downplay talk of this fourth cargo and obscure it in the letter that Paul Revere takes to Philadelphia, they let Philadelphians get the impression that the tea was destroyed even when it wasn't, and other newspapers will report news that it was destroyed even though it survived, because news that it survived could be very corrosive to any commonality, any common cause between the colonies.

AMBUSKE: The Polly arrived on Christmas Day. Over a month earlier, a group of Philadelphians calling themselves “The Committee for Tarring and Featuring” published a broadside warning all Delaware River pilots that if one of their number chose to help the Polly navigate up river to the city’s docks, then “Tar and Feathers will be his Portion.” To the Polly’s captain, they menanced:

COMMITTEE: “You are sent out on a diabolical Service; and if you are so foolish and obstinate as to compleat your Voyage; by bringing your Ship to Anchor in this Port; you may run such a Gauntlet, as will induce you, in your last Moments, most heartily to curse those who have made you the Dupe of their Avarice and Ambition. What think you Captain, of a Halter around your Neck—ten Gallons of liquid Tar decanted on your Pate—with the Feathers of a dozen wild Geese laid over that to enliven your Appearance? Only think seriously of this—and fly to the Place from whence you came—fly without Hesitation—without the Formality of a Protest—and above all, Captain Ayres let us advise you to fly without the wild Geese Feathers.”

AMBUSKE: Whether the Committee would have gone through with their threats, we cannot know. Knowledge of the violence in Boston inspired Philadelphians to make a different choice. 

NORTON: In Philadelphia, they knew what had happened, and so they said, Ah, the best thing to do is not let the tea ship get here at all. So they intercepted the tea ship as it came up the river, and persuaded, shall we say the captain that it would be wise to turn around and leave

FICHTER: That ship arrived at the mouth of the Delaware River. The ship, Captain, exited, his vessel, went up to the city of Philadelphia. There, he was greeted with an 8000 person crowd opposing the tea was convinced by the consignees in Philadelphia that it wasn't going to land the tea and therefore they said to him, Look, we'll help you resupply your ship. You keep it out of the customs area, which is easy to do in Philadelphia because there's a very long river separating the city from the ocean, and then you go back to England. No one will hurt you. You'll be left alone, and everyone will be happy with his ship

AMBUSKE: With his ship resupplied, Captain Ayers and the Polly sailed back down the Delaware River and headed back across the sea. Ayers may have escaped his tar and feathering, but British America would not escape the consequences of the Destruction of the Tea in Boston.

FICHTER: The Boston Tea Party was widely disliked by many after it happened because of its violence. It was extremely divisive. Many people felt the Tea Party was an excessive act. It was an overreach. Many other colonists supported the Boston Tea Party and thought it was wonderful. The result of the Boston Tea Party was colonial division, not just among colonists, but within the patriot movement itself and within the Patriot leadership about what had happened, it seemed to many like it was an overreach, and they didn't need to be so destructive and violent. Even John Adams is often quoted for talking about it was this sublime event and such a wonderful epoch in history. But after that, he goes on to say, I really hope this doesn't happen again, though, because when you have a crowd this big and it gathers to do something like this, it's really easy next time for somebody to get killed, and we're just lucky that no one got killed this time. That is the real fear, that even though the kind of crowd you need to gather to get this done, things can go south really fast, and things do that's kind of how revolutions happened.

AMBUSKE: The Nancy limped into New York on April 19, 1774. Captain Benjamin Lockyer’s vessel was a broken ship, an apt metaphor for all that was soon to come. 

AMBUSKE: The tea ship left Antigua in late February, heading for New York, months after it was already supposed to be there. It had been a rough crossing, and now they sailed into another storm.

AMBUSKE: As the winds and the currents carried the Nancy north along the mainland, another gale sprung up, thrashing the ship. She lost an anchor, her mizzen mast snapped and fell overboard, her topmast sprung loose, and the ship “was thrown on her beam ends.”

AMBUSKE: Still, Captain Lockyer was determined to see his cargo of 698 chests of tea safely to New York, hoping that temperatures had cooled, and the tea could be landed.  

AMBUSKE: But the choice had already been made for him. When The Nancy dropped its remaining anchor off Sandy Hook, outside the customs area, Lockyer received a letter from the tea’s consignees, dated December 27th, apprising him of the fate of the tea ships in Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston. They believed the tea should not be landed, and that he should sail for home.

AMBUSKE: That advice was now months old. Lockyer requested a river pilot to bring him into the city to lodge a protest and inquire about landing the tea, a request the pilot initially refused until he gained permission from the Vigilance Committee.  

AMBUSKE: Once on shore, Lockyer learned he would not be landing his tea. Before Boston, the city’s Sons of Liberty, merchants, consignees, members of the provincial council, and the colony’s new governor, William Tryon, all disagreed on what to do when the Nancy arrived. But after Boston, a strange unity. Most all agreed it was in the interest of everyone to send the tea back to England. 

AMBUSKE: As they had promised to do, New Yorkers repaired and resupplied the Nancy for her voyage home. The ship gained a passenger in the process. Captain Chambers and his vessel, also called the London, arrived in New York on April 21st. Despite Chamber’s early denials, he finally admitted to the Vigilance Committee that he had on board 18 chests of tea. The next night, a mob appeared, boarded the ship, broke open the chests, and dumped the tea into the river. 

AMBUSKE: When the Nancy sailed for England soon thereafter Chambers was aboard.

AMBUSKE: As the Nancy headed east to bring its rough crossing to an end, other ships were heading west from London. They bore news of Parliament’s reaction to Boston’s crimes. New acts of Parliament meant to be coercive. New acts of Parliament British Americans would find intolerable.

AMBUSKE: Thanks for listening to Worlds Turned Upside Down. Worlds is a production of R2 Studios, part of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

AMBUSKE: Our lead audio editor for this episode is Curt Dahl of CD Squared.

AMBUSKE: Annabelle Spencer is our graduate assistant. Special thanks to Bridget Bukovich and Hannah Knox Tucker.

AMBUSKE: Our thanks to Benjamin Carp, James Fitcher, Deepthi Murali, and Mary Beth Norton for sharing their expertise with us in this episode.

AMBUSKE: Thanks also to our voice actors Craig Gallagher, Margaret Hughes, Grace Mallon, Norman Rodger, Annabelle Spencer, and John Turner.

AMBUSKE: Subscribe to Worlds on your favorite podcast app. Thanks, and we’ll see you next time.