Massachussetts: Boston – Boston Tea Party Museum

🍵 The Boston Tea Party: A Right Royal Tantrum Over a Cuppa

The Boston Tea Party was one of the defining moments that led to the Revolutionary War and, eventually, the founding of the United States of America. It’s the sort of event that gets a single line in a school textbook, but there’s a proper story behind it, and we got to walk through the whole thing ourselves.

The incident took place on the night of 16th December 1773, when American patriots, disguised as Mohawk Indians so nobody could identify them, boarded ships moored in Boston Harbour and threw 342 chests of tea belonging to the British East India Company straight into the water. We’re talking the best part of 92,000 pounds of tea, chucked overboard in the dark, worth well over a million dollars by today’s reckoning. The ships involved, the Dartmouth, the Eleanor and the Beaver, had all sailed across from London laden down with the stuff.

The Americans were protesting two things: a tax on tea imposed without them having any say in Parliament, the old “taxation without representation” chestnut, and what they saw as the East India Company’s monopoly over the tea trade, which was putting local merchants out of business. Brewing a cup of tea had become a political act, which, as any Englishman will tell you, is taking things a bit far.

🏛️⛵ The Tour: Meeting House, Mutiny, and a Multimedia Finale

Our tour fell into three distinct parts, and it kicked off in a meeting room with hard, bench-like seating, a bit like sitting through a long sermon. Doing this during Covid times felt a touch awkward, packed in shoulder to shoulder, but we made it through. As we sat there, folk in period costume took to the pulpit and gave us a good talking-to about the injustices suffered at the hands of the British, the East India Company in particular. We were role-playing, so we had to jeer and applaud at the right moments, which felt a bit silly at first but turned out to be good fun. Everyone in the audience was handed a card with the name of the person we were meant to be playing. A lucky few even landed proper speaking and action roles. It was thoroughly interactive, and we picked up some genuine history about those late 1773 proceedings along the way, which made a nice change from the usual museum trudge of looking at glass cases.

From the meeting room we moved outside to storm one of the sailing ships moored in the harbour. There are two reconstructed vessels you can board, the Brig Beaver and the Eleanor, both decent replicas of the originals. Once we, the Sons of Liberty, were onboard, which was fairly cramped, we got more cheering and incitement, plus a few more history lessons, before being invited to throw packs of tea overboard into the water. These obviously weren’t real bundles of tea, my wife would never have forgiven that sort of waste. Once these shenanigans were over, we returned triumphantly to shore for the final part of our tour.

We headed back inside for an excellent multimedia experience, very well done indeed. There were portraits on the wall of figures from the time of the Tea Party that would come to life and tell their story, Hogwarts fashion, which gave a fair few of us a proper jolt. Other parts of the show used more traditional light and sound to round the afternoon off nicely. All told, a thoroughly good day out, and not a drop of real tea wasted in the process.