“Another Vessel took the Tea on board”

Four ships carrying British East India Company tea set out for Boston in 1773, but only three made it.

The fourth was the William, captained by Joseph Loring, son of the man who built the Loring-Greenough House in Jamaica Plain.

As with the other three ships, tea was just part of the William’s cargo. It also carried hundreds of glass globes that Boston had ordered for its first street lamps.

On 2 December, Loring ran aground off the northern tip of Cape Cod near Provincetown. The next day, bad weather damaged the William, ensuring it wouldn’t complete its voyage. Most of the cargo, however, was still intact. Over the next couple of weeks, people took off as much as they could.

Jonathan Clarke salvaged most of the tea on behalf of his family firm, one of the original tea consignees. In his Journal of the American Revolution article, James R. Fichter calculated that Clarke managed to secure 54 of 59 chests of tea on the William.

Three or four containers wound up in other people’s hands. That situation set up a new tempest as Massachusetts Patriots tried to keep anyone from selling any surviving tea, even if it had bypassed the tea tax. Mary Beth Norton described those efforts in her book 1774. Peter Drummey covered a local angle in this talk for the Jamaica Plain Historical Society.

It took a while for Clarke to find a ship with a crew willing to carry his rescued tea chests into Boston harbor. We glimpse that situation in this 3 Jan 1774 report in the Boston Evening-Post:

Last Saturday [i.e., 1 January] a Vessel arrived here from Cape-Cod with Part of the Cargo of Capt. Loring’s Brig lately stranded there, among which are the Lamps for the Use of the Town.—Another Vessel took the Tea on board, which, we hear, is intended to be landed at the Castle.

Citing a document preserved in Britain’s India Records papers, Fichter explained what ultimately happened to those chests in his article “The Tea That Survived the Boston Tea Party.”

The 6 January Massachusetts Spy included a detail about the first ship’s arrival from the Cape that the Evening-Post left out:

Last Saturday arrived a vessel with the goods saved out of the Brig William, Capt. Loring, lately cast away at Cape-Cod; and the same evening was visited by a number of Indians, who made thorough search, but found no tea.

Again, this is evidence of Bostonians using “Indians” as a way to refer to locals enforcing the loyal tea boycott by force without acknowledging those men were locals enforcing the loyal tea boycott by force. I doubt these inspectors were disguised with paint and costumes. Instead, everyone knew they’d be better off keeping those men’s identities secret.