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Bare to the waist, feathers in their hair, the raiders swing the chests up over the rail. Nobody in Boston was fooled by the Mohawk costume, and it was not meant to fool anyone.

Three ships sat at Griffin’s Wharf in Boston through the first weeks of December, 1773, loaded with tea nobody would unload. The Dartmouth had docked on the twenty-eighth of November, the Eleanor and the Beaver behind her, all carrying chests of the East India Company’s tea, and all caught in a trap made of paper. The law gave a ship 20 days to pay the duty on its cargo or have that cargo seized by the customs house. For the Dartmouth the clock ran out at midnight on the sixteenth. The town would not let the tea be landed, because landing it meant paying the tax; the governor, Thomas Hutchinson, whose own sons were tea consignees, would not let the ships leave without paying. Something had to give before morning. On the afternoon of the sixteenth, thousands packed the Old South Meeting House, more people than lived in most colonial towns. They were waiting on a last message sent to Hutchinson at his country house, asking him to let the ships sail. The answer came back no. Samuel Adams rose and said that this meeting could do nothing more to save the country. It may have been a plain statement of fact. It may have been a signal. Either way, war whoops went up outside in the dark. A column of men already half in disguise moved down toward the water, faces smeared with soot and red paint, blankets over their shoulders, a few with hatchets. They called themselves Mohawks. Nobody was fooled about who they were, and that was rather the point: the costume said this was America’s quarrel, not a mob’s. What followed was oddly orderly for a riot. Nobody afterward agreed on how many went aboard: the counts run from 30 men to well over 100. They split into parties and worked by lantern light for close to three hours. They hauled up 342 chests of tea, split them open with axes, and tipped the leaves into the harbor. The tide was low; the tea piled up in the shallows and had to be beaten down with oars and paddles so it would sink and not drift back. A shoemaker named George Hewes, who was there and told the story 60 years later, remembered the strangest rule of the night: they took nothing. One man who tried to stuff tea into the lining of his coat was stripped of it and roughed up. A padlock broken to reach a hold was found, replaced, and returned the next day. The decks were swept clean. Close to £10,000 of tea went into the sea, and not a teaspoon went home in a pocket. The print here is not a witness. Napoleon Sarony and Henry Major drew it in New York in 1846, 73 years after the fact. Their harbor is a stage set: bare-chested Mohawks flinging chests off a high stern, a warehouse crowded with faces at every window, a cheering crowd at the water’s edge under a bright afternoon sky. The real work was done after dark, by lantern light, by men in a hurry to be home before dawn. The phrase Boston Tea Party did not exist yet either; nobody called it that until the 1830s. What London called it was a crime, and the answer came the next spring in a set of laws that shut the port of Boston until the tea was paid for. It never was. In the picture a small British flag still flies from the rigging out in the harbor, over water already full of floating chests.