[WITHROW] THOMAS HUTCHINSON 71 
and then have destroyed the property committed to their care. Such 
barbarity none of the Aborigines were ever guilty of. he Admiral 
asked some of them next morning who was to pay the fiddler. 
The value of what is lost is 12 or £14,000 sterling.” 
“I have taken a solemn oath,” he writes to Samuel Swift, on the 
4th of January, 1774, “as Governor, to do everything in my power 
that the Acts of Trade may be carried into execution. Now to have 
granted a pass (for return to England) to a vessel which I knew had 
not cleared at the custom-house, would have been such a direct coun- 
tenancing and encouraging the violation of the Acts of Trade, that I 
believe you would have altered your opinion of me, and seen me ever 
after in an unfavourable light. JI am sure if I could have preserved 
the property that is destroyed, or could have complied with the general 
desire of the people, consistent with the duty which my station requires, 
T would most readily have done it.” 
The answer to the Tea Party was the bill closing the port of Boston, 
thus threatening ruin to its trade. Thus the mother country and the 
colonies drifted more and more widely asunder and soon came the armed 
collision which precipitated the Anglo-Saxon schism. With hs super- 
session by General Gage as military commandant the Governor’s work 
was done. He had for some months contemplated, and indeed announced 
to the legislature, his intention of proceeding to Great Britain. On 
the first day of June, 1774, one of the first and the most conspicuous 
of the United Empire Loyalists, sailed away forever from his native 
land, to which his best services had for nearly forty years been rendered. 
His faithful services were not unappreciated by the better class of 
the citizens. “One hundred and twenty merchants and gentlemen of 
Boston,” says Hosmer, “the members of the Bar, the Episcopal clergy, 
the magistrates of Middlesex, a number of citizens of Salem and Mar- 
blehead, sent him respectful addresses.” The following is the account 
given by his biographer of his departure from Boston: “There must 
have been gloom in the Governor’s soul as his eyes turned for what was 
destined to be his last glance toward the spot of his birth and his life- 
long striving. In the foreground lay the stubborn town that had so 
thwarted and contemned him, and yet which he so much loved,—Copp’s 
Hill to the right where lay the dust of his fathers and his much-cher- 
ished wife; the Beacon on the height in the centre ready to flame its 
invitation to sedition inland. In the background rose the high lands 
of the beautiful Province in which the old man had lived from the days 
of his youth. He had written its history, tracing every detail. That its 
boundaries swept wide and were well ascertained was due to his watch- 
fulness. No less was it due to him that its laws everywhere were well 
administered, chief among its judges as he had been through many 
