Although it was not an affair of the sea, strictly speaking, it is worth recalling here that within six months after this Commission of Inquiry had failed to learn the names of the men, disguised as Indians, who had burned the Gaspé, another party of men in another colony disguised themselves as Indians, and helped amazingly in making the history of the times. It was on the night of Friday, the 17th of December, 1773, as the reader will remember. The ship Dartmouth, laden with tea, was lying at her wharf in Boston. She had been lying there since the 28th of the preceding month, and during all those days the people of Boston had labored unceasingly to get her away to sea without discharging her cargo. It is even recorded that “the urgency of the business in hand overcame the sabbatarian scruples of the people,” and that in Boston! Meetings too great for “the Cradle of Liberty” (Faneuil Hall) were adjourned to the Old South Meeting-House. The people were “determined not to act (in offense) until the last legal method of relief should have been tried and found wanting.” But at last, on the night of this 17th day of December, as the great throng of more than seven thousand people waited in and about “the church that was dimly lighted with candles,” a messenger arrived from the British Governor to say that the last legal resource had failed. The Governor had refused to allow the ship to go. And “then, amid profound stillness, Samuel Adams arose and said, quietly but distinctly, ‘this meeting can do nothing more to save the country.’”
A war-whoop was heard a moment later without the church, and fifty men, disguised as Indians, just as Captain Whipple’s men were when they fired the Gaspé—disguised as Indians because Captain Whipple’s men had successfully eluded the British detectives—these fifty citizens of Boston ran away to the wharf where the Dartmouth lay.
One John Rowe had asked during the meeting earlier in the evening, “Who knows how tea will mingle with salt water?” He had now his opportunity to learn, for when the Indians reached the ship they quickly brought her cargo on deck, and smashing open the chests with hatchets, tumbled the tea over the rail, while a vast host stood by in the moonlight and silently watched the work.
There was a significance in the silence of the work that might have been, but was not, heeded by those in authority, for it portrayed the feelings and the character of the men engaged in it, and foreshadowed the grim determination of the people during the conflict that was fast coming on.
The “Boston Tea-Party.”
From an old engraving.
Then followed, as the reader will remember very well, the Boston Port Bill closing that port. Then followed the bill by which any magistrate, soldier, or revenue officer, accused of murder in Massachusetts, was to be taken to England for trial—a bill justly stigmatized as an act to encourage the soldiery in shooting down peaceful citizens. Then followed other acts equally or still more unjust and tyrannous that need not be mentioned here, the indignation of the colonists growing deeper as their distress under the oppression increased, until war was inevitable. And on the 19th of April, 1775, when the profane Pitcairn discharged his “elegant pistol” at the minute-men of the veteran Capt. John Parker on the village green in Lexington, war came.
Now, it was because of the stir caused by the story of this battle at Lexington that the second sea-fight of the Revolution occurred.
The reader must keep steadily in mind that not only were churches lighted by candles in those days, but mails were carried up and down the country by stage coaches and on horseback and by the oft-times slower water route—in sloops and schooners. The fight at Lexington occurred on April 19th, but the news of it did not reach Machias, Maine, until Saturday, the 9th of the following month. On that day word was brought by sea to Machias, telling how the British troops had fired on the minute-men, whose present offense was that they had refused to obey when Pitcairn had shouted, “Disperse, ye villains! Damn you, why don’t you disperse?” How some had been killed and others wounded by this first onslaught; how the minute-men had at first retreated and then gathered anew for the attack; how the British were first brought to a stand and then started in a retreat so swift that when at last they were rescued by fresh troops from Boston they fell to the ground with “their tongues hanging out of their mouths like those of dogs after a chase”—when all this was related in Machias, Maine, it stirred the men of the town to do a stroke against the oppressive ministry on their own account.