70 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
as 1772 he received, however, a striking mark of confidence from the 
General Court, namely, the appointment to adjust the long standing 
boundary dispute between the Massachusetts and New York. “ After 
all the illiberal treatment,” he writes, “I have received for so many 
years together, this is a greater mark of real confidence than I have 
known any Assembly to place in a Governor. I have made no conces- 
sions to occasion it.” 
The famous Boston Tea Party brought to a crisis the estranged 
relations of Hutchinson and the colony. The story has been often told, 
and need not be here repeated in detail. The ministry of Lord North 
had withdrawn the export duty paid in England of 12d. per pound on 
tea, but retained an import duty of 3d. per pound in America. But 
that differentiation in favour of the colonies did not mollify the anti- 
pathy to a violation of their cherished principle, “ No taxation without 
representation.” 
In November, 1773, the ship Dartmouth sailed into Boston Har- 
bour with a hundred and fourteen chests of tea. She was soon followed 
by two other tea ships. Among the consignees were the two sons of 
Governor Hutchinson; Richard Clarke, the grandfather of Lord Lynd- 
hurst, Lord Chancellor of England ; and Benjamin Faneuil, the 
Huguenot who bore one of the most honoured names in Boston. The 
Boston patriots demanded that the tea should be returned to England. 
The consignees declared this to be beyond their power, but offered to 
store it till they had received further instructions from their 
constituents. 
The patriotic colonial women pledged themselves to use instead of 
tea steeped cat-nip and raspberry leaves. “While,” says Hosmer, “in the 
main, the posterity of those men and women must admire, the incidents 
of the transaction are not by any means always pleasant. There was 
a mob in revolutionary Boston scarcely less foul-mouthed, pitiless, 
unscrupulous, than that which roared for the blood of the Bourbons in 
revolutionary Paris, or was on the verge of destroying London in the 
Gordon riots.” 
On December 15th a body of forty or fifty men, disguised as Indians, 
with war whoops and shouting proceeded to the wharf where the ships 
lay, and broke open and flung into the harbour the entire consignment 
of tea chests, numbering three hundred and forty. 
On December 23rd Hutchinson writes thus to a correspondent at 
Hatfield : “There never was greater tyranny in Constantinople than 
has been lately in Boston. Because a number of gentlemen who with- 
out their knowledge, the East India Company made the consignees of 
400 chests of tea, would not send it back again, which was absolutely 
out of their power, they have forced them to fly to the castle for refuge 
