“The taste of their fish being altered”

Just because the British Empire was sliding toward internal warfare in 1774, that was no reason to stop laughing about the news.

Here are a couple of items that appeared in New England newspapers 250 years ago.

The first must have originated in a London newspaper. The earliest North American reprinting I’ve found is in John Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet on 18 Apr 1774. Four days later it appeared in both Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy and Timothy Green’s Connecticut Gazette of New London, followed by other papers.

Jan. 28. Letters from Boston complain much of the taste of their fish being altered: Four or five hundred chests of tea may have so contaminated the water in the harbour, that the fish may have contracted a disorder not unlike the nervous complaints of the human body. Should this complaint extend itself as far as the banks of Newfoundland, our Spanish and Portugal fish trade may be much affected by it.

Needless to say, even 340 chests of tea dumped off Griffin’s Wharf weren’t really enough to affect the New England fisheries.

Earlier this month artist Cortney Skinner shared this clip from the 9 May 1774 Boston Gazette. It appeared on page 3 right after a political essay and right before the many mercantile ads it resembled.

This notice reads:

WANTED immediately,
A long, strong BOOM,
that will reach from Cape-Cod to Cape-Ann.———
Any Person having such an One to dispose of, will meet with a good Price, by applying to

N***H.

N. B. The Distance is only 18 Leagues.

This was a poke at Lord North’s plan to close Boston harbor to shipping. Unofficial hints of the Boston Port Bill had started to arrive, and Edes and Gill wanted readers to laugh at the folly of that policy.

The same satirical ad appeared the next day in Samuel and Ebenezer Hall’s Essex Gazette of Salem.

Then the text was reprinted (though no longer looking like an advertisement) in the 16 May New-York Gazette, the 18 May New-Haven Post-Boy and Pennsylvania Journal, and the 23 May Newport Mercury. For readers without so much maritime experience, the capper became “The Distance only 54 miles.”

When the Royal Navy and Customs service really did shut down the port of Boston in June, though, suddenly the situation didn’t seem so laughable.