Memorial of the East India Company to the Earl of Dartmouth

Let's start off with a look at one of the most important documents related to the Boston Tea Party.

After receiving news of the destruction of their cargo of tea in Boston Harbor, the directors of the East India Company asked the Earl of Dartmouth, Secretary of State for American Affairs, to petition King George III to pursue measures for securing compensation for the lost cargos.

The memorial they submitted was dated February 16, 1774—two months after the destruction of the tea—and contained a detailed invoice of the lost cargos. This invoice provides crucial data for understanding what took place.

A handwritten contemporary copy of the memorial survives and is held by the Parliamentary Archives in London. The reference is:

"Parliamentary Archives, London, HL/PO/JO/10/7/408. Memorial of the East India Company to the Earl of Dartmouth, 16 February 1774."

I wish I could share the image of the memorial, but I do not have permission to do so. A very grainy version of it can be found here. It comes from the booklet "Catalyst for Revolution: the Boston Tea Party, 1773" by Benjamin Woods Labaree, which was published by the Bicentennial Commission in December of 1973. Professor Labaree had previously published one of the definitive works on the event, "The Boston Tea Party" (1964, reprinted in 1979).

I can, however, transcribe the memorial, which I will do in a following post. Then we'll look at some of the key data we can pull from it.

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