The Boston Tea Party and the Wreck of the William: A Link to Cape Cod

The Boston Tea Party and the Wreck of the William

A Link to Cape Cod

Ron Petersen

Orleans Massachusetts

December 16, 2023 was the 250^th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, that seismic event in 1773 that changed the course of American History in a substantial and irreversible way. That night, an indeterminant number of Patriots, may disguised as Native Americans, boarded three ships carrying British East India Company tea, and proceeded to dump 340 chests of the “detestable stuff” into the waters of Boston Harbor. The identity of the three tea ships docked at Griffin’s Wharf are well known, the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver. What is not as well known is that there was a fourth tea ship, the William, that had left London in the Fall of 1773 with the other three, and was also headed for Boston with a consignment of British East India Company tea. This ship met the same fate as thousands of others throughout history in the treacherous waters off of Cape Cod and wrecked on a sandbar off of Race Point. The events that followed this shipwreck were to reverberate from Provincetown to Boston for the next six months, and in many ways illustrate the divisions among the Massachusetts colonists of the time. It also involved and impacted the lives of many Cape-Codders of the day.

With the passage of the Tea Act in the Fall of 1773, the William was one of seven ships that departed from London headed for the American colonies with consignments of East India Company tea. One ship was headed for Charleston, one for Philadelphia, one for New York, and four for Boston. The William carried 58 chests of tea and three-hundred street lamps, destined to provide Boston with its first street illumination. The Captain of the William was Joseph Loring, about 22 years old and son of Captain Joshua Loring, a well-known Loyalist.

The tea on the William was destined for Richard Clarke and Sons, one of the East India Company’s designated consignees in Boston. Richard Clarke was a prominent Boston merchant and one of the city’s leading importers. He was a staunch Loyalist, and related by marriage to Governor Thomas Hutchinson. Of the six individuals designated as tea consignees, two were Hutchinson’s sons, two were relatives, and two were close friends. Clarke’s son, Jonathan, was responsible for arranging the relationship with the East India Company, and was to play a prominent role in the events to follow on Cape Cod.

Richard Clarke

On the night of December 10, 1773, the William encountered a violent storm while approaching the Massachusetts coast. On the morning of December 11, she ran aground on a sandbar off Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod. The storm did not abate, and the William finally washed ashore about two miles east of Race Point at what is now called Peaked Hill Bars. At this point, Captain Loring directed the crew to begin moving the cargo ashore.

The first official to arrive at the wreck scene was John Greenough from nearby Wellfleet. Greenough was a Justice of the Peace, a schoolteacher and a business owner. In his business capacity, he had regular dealings with Richard Clarke and Sons, and was a friend of Jonathan Clarke. His endeavors often involved the salvage of shipwrecks, a fairly common occurrence in the dangerous waters off Cape Cod. Greenough was from a prominent Patriot family, and his father Thomas was a member of the Boston Committee of Correspondence.

When Greenough first arrived at the wreck, he took the recorded statement of Captain Loring, and then took charge of the scene in the owner’s absence. Of the 58 chests of tea, 54 were found to be intact, and four damaged. The contents of one of the damaged chests were successfully transferred to barrels, leaving three damaged chests to spark controversy on Cape Cod for months to come.   Greenough first hired local laborers to complete the transfer of the cargo to the shore, then to transport the cargo to Provincetown where transit to Boston would be sought. This was completed on December 18, and significantly, the local laborers were paid with tea from one of the damaged chests.

Getting the Cargo Ashore

News of the fate of the William first reached Boston on December 13 in a letter from the Sandwich Committee of Correspondence to the Boston Committee of Correspondence. It was reported in a Boston newspaper on December 16, the same day as the Tea Party, at which point Jonathan Clarke immediately set out for Provincetown where he joined Greenough in the effort to salvage the William’s cargo. Greenough and Clarke began soliciting Provincetown captains to transport the cargo to Boston. They promptly found two captains that agreed to carry the streetlamps, but none would agree to carry the “cursed tea”. They finally found Captain John Cook of Salem, master of the fishing schooner Eunice. Cook had put into Provincetown Harbor to avoid a storm, and agreed to carry the tea to Boston. Upon its arrival, Governor Hutchinson had the tea secured in the army barracks on Castle Island. As a postscript, when Cook returned to Salem, word of his action had preceded him, and a group of citizens disguised as Native Americans harassed him and Eunice owner George Bickford. They were brought before the Salem Town Meeting, which absolved them from blame, finding that the tea was transported out of “ignorance and inadvertence”.

When the news of the wreck first reached Boston, the Patriots there had high expectations that the Cape Codders would take the appropriate action with respect to the tea. A newspaper editor wrote “Tis expected that the Cape’s Indians will give us a good account of the tea”. [i] John Adams weighed in as well, writing that he expected “Vinyard, Mashpee, and Mattapoisett Indians to take charge of the tea and protect it from violence, I mean from the hands of Tyrants and oppressors who want to do violence with it, to the Laws and Constitution.” Upon learning that the William’s tea had arrived safely in Boston, Samuel Adams was outraged that Jonathan Clarke was able to travel more than one-hundred miles to Provincetown and “did not meet with a single Instance of Contempt.”[ii] Adams also wrote “Had the Indians of Boston known that the Mashpee tribe would have been so sick at the knees, they would have marched in snowshoes to destroy the Cape Cod tea themselves.” The Patriots of Boston had been advised to keep an eye on Castle Island to ensure that none of the tea from the William was sold. A group of citizens disguised as Native Americans boarded and searched one of the ships that had transported the street lamps, but found no tea.

Meanwhile, back on the Cape, about a thousand pounds of tea remained with John Greenough. His intention was to sell it, believing it was appropriate since no tax had been paid on the tea. He saw it as no different from the salvage of any other shipwreck, and he was, after all, in the salvage business. However, not all of his fellow citizens saw it that way. Some agreed with him, and would buy or sell untaxed East India Company tea, seeing no harm. Many disagreed strongly, and believed that buying or selling any tea was contrary to the boycott and to the Patriot cause. What does Greenough do? He proceeds to sell the tea.

He had already used most of one of the three chests to pay the laborers who had hauled the cargo to Provincetown. He then sold a second chest to Provincetown merchant Stephen Atwood. Finally, he sold about one-half chest to Colonel Willard Knowles, a leading citizen and militia commander of neighboring Eastham. The differences of opinion among the population soon emerged.

The first disputes involved the laborers who had been paid in tea to transport the tea from the wreck to Provincetown. Those who were found to have even a small amount of tea were forced to acknowledge their error at town meeting. The accused used the same explanation that Captain Cook used in Salem- “ignorance and inadvertence”. An elderly man from Wellfleet had purchased two or three pounds of tea from one of the laborers. On his way home, he was accosted by three men in disguise who searched his saddlebags, found the tea, and scattered it in the road. Subsequently, a group of disguised men searched every house in Provincetown and confiscated all the tea they found.

Stephen Atwood, who had purchased a case of tea from Greenough, was confronted by a group of what Greenough later called “incendiaries”. They found a large quantity of tea in his house and burned it publicly. Apparently, they didn’t get it all, since a quantity of tea believed to be from Atwood’s chest made its way to Lyme, Connecticut.

Colonel Knowles did not face mobs or “incendiaries”, but when he started to market the tea in Eastham, it set off a series of confrontations at town meeting. At a meeting on January 21, 1774, it was voted to allow Knowles to sell the tea, and expressed no concern. At a second town meeting in February, those present excoriated Knowles and ordered the Selectmen to remove the store of militia weapons that were entrusted to his custody. When they refused, one was threatened with tar and feathers. At a third town meeting in late March, the voters formally reversed the February meeting and declared its criticisms of Knowles to be “false, scandalous, and defaming”. They also resolved that the buying or selling of untaxed East India Company tea should not be interpreted as endorsing the Tea Act or the right of Parliament to tax America.

Town Meeting Prevails

Back in Wellfleet, John Greenough did not face mobs or raiders either, but did encounter stiff opposition from his family and his fellow citizens. Upon hearing of the situation in Provincetown, his brother David, who also lived in Wellfleet, had a letter dispatched to John while he was still in Provincetown. “Earnestly I beseech you as a friend and brother, as you value your own interest, credit, and credit of our family not to concern yourself with the tea.” He further advised his brother “to sink the tea in the sea rather than to bring any here.”[iii] In addition, David wrote that he did not want it said “that a brother of mine and the son of our honorable father ever bought or sold any of the detestable stuff, or even considered it.”

The Wellfleet town meeting first impounded what remained of Greenough’s tea while they sought the advice of the Boston Committee of Correspondence. He then appeared before the town and made a statement that he “supported all lawful and prudent steps to prevent the importation and sale of tea taxed by a law to which Americans had not consented.” He also told the town “If the ruffians that raided houses and accosted individuals gained power, the people of Massachusetts would be worse off than under the current regime.” The town meeting then voted to return the tea to Greenough and allow him to sell it. By May 1774 it was gone, and the great controversy faded away on the Outer Cape.

A postscript to this story serves as evidence of the healing that took place in the aftermath of the wreck of the William and the subsequent tea controversy on the Outer Cape. It also provides an ironic bookend to this tale. After the Revolutionary War began, the citizens of Wellfleet elected John Greenough to the Massachusetts legislature in 1777. He then gained a seat on the Council, which was the upper chamber in the legislature, and which essentially served as the executive branch of government during the war.

Then, on November 2, 1778, a second major shipwreck occurred in nearly the same place as the wreck of the William. On that date, the fearsome British warship HMS Somerset, which had figured prominently in the war, was wrecked in a storm off of Race Point. The Massachusetts Council appointed none other than John Greenough as superintendent of the wreck, charged with overseeing the removal and dispersal of the Somerset’s contents and wreckage. Greenough’s business experience with the salvage of shipwrecks was undoubtably a factor in this appointment. Thus, two major shipwrecks related to the Revolutionary Ware in nearly the same spot of off Cape Cod, and John Greenough is a major player in both.

The events that followed the wreck of the William exemplify and amplify the various sentiments of Americans throughout the colonies. As events occurred, sentiments formed and shifted as the basic ideology of American democracy took shape, and the goal shifted from seeking the rights of Englishmen under the British Constitution to seeking a new, independent nation.

REFERENCES

Carp, Benjamin L., Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America. (Yale University Press, 2011)

Deyo, Simeon L. History of Barnstable County. (Memphis, General Books, 1890)

Drummy, Peter. “The Greenough Family and the Boston Tea Party”, (Lecture, Jamaica Plains Historical Society)

Freeman, Frederick. The History of Cape Cod. (Sandwich, MA 1862)

Jensen, Merrill. The Founding of a Nation. (Oxford University Press, 1968)

Kittredge, Henry C. Cape Cod, Its People and Its History. (Hyannis, Massachusetts, Parnassus Imprints, 1930)

Labaree, Benjamin Woods. The Boston Tea Party (Boston, Northeastern University Press 1964)

Maier, Pauline. From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britian 1765-1776. (New York, Alfred A Knopf, 1972)

Morgan, Edmund S. The Birth of the Republic 1763-1789. (Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 2013)

Norton, Mary Beth. 1774: The Long Year of the Revolution. (New York, Alfred A. Knoph, 2000)

Norton, Mary Beth. “The Seventh Tea Ship” The William and Mary Quarterly, October 2016.

Pratt, Enoch. A Comprehensive History, Ecclesiastical and Civil, of Eastham, Wellfleet, and Orleans, County of Barnstable, Mass 1644-1884 (Yarmouth, Massachusetts, W.S Fischer and Co. 1844)

Raphael, Raymond and Marie. The Spirit of 1774, How the American Revolution Began. (New York, The New York Press 2015)

Swift, Charles Francis. Cape Cod, the Right Arm of Massachusetts: A Historical Narrative. (Yarmouth, Massachusetts, Register Publishing Company, 1897)