How much tea was dumped into Boston Harbor during the Boston Tea Party?
Benjamin Labaree’s The Boston Tea Party (N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1964) states that 342 chests holding over 90,000 pounds of tea worth 9,000 British pounds were thrown off the ships Dartmouth, Eleanor, and Beaver on December 16, 1773. The Salada Tea Company estimated that the figure was more like 20,000 pounds of tea. They base this on the fact that the type of chest would have been a “half chest” holding about 65 pounds of tea each.
