Somewhere I heard that the corporate descendant of the shipping company whose ship it was that the tea was tossed overboard during the Boston Tea Party sends the US Governement a bill each year, for the cost of the tea and compounded interest on the deliquent account. Of course, the US Government ignores the bill every year, as a matter of principle.
Any truth to this?
I don’t know but:
1 The US wan’t around back then (they should send the bill to England).
2 It was a bunch of indians that did it anyway (they sure looked like indians)
3 the statute of limitations was up a loooooong time ago.
The three ships that were raided belonged to the British East India Company. It seems unlikely that they would send a bill to the U.S., which was not in existence at the time of the incident, and I see no mention of a bill to anybody in The East India Company by Brian Gardner. You might be interested in Boston Harbour Tea, however, produced by Davison, Newman & Company, LTD. On each tin is reproduced their petition to King George III, claiming compensation for the tea that was destroyed by “persons disguised as Indians”. It’s a bit of a stretch, really—the text on the tin explains about how there was a second, little known tea-dumping about three months after the famous one, and that’s when their tea was lost. I haven’t been able to find anything else about that alleged second incident.
The second dumping is mentioned on [ulr=http://www.pennyparker2.com/revolution.html]this not-so-academic page. (Beware the bad midi!) It’s also mentioned here on a timeline page, where it seems to coincide with the closing of the harbor. There was also a dumping at New York, as refernced very briefly here.