What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago today?

“We neither jointly nor separately had any share, interest or property, directly or indirectly in any part of the Tea that came from London in said vessel.”

Thomas Walley, Peter Boyer, and William Thompson needed to do some damage control and salvage their reputations in the wake the second Boston Tea Party.  That trio owned the Fortune, a brig that recently arrived from London. Among its cargo, the ship carried twenty-eight chests of tea “destined for some independent merchants,” according to the Massachusetts Historical Society’s overview of events.  The brig arrived in port on March 6, 1774.  J.L. Bell explains that Walley, Boyer, and Thompson worked with those merchants to request that the tea be returned, but customs officers refused.  Bostonians did not spend weeks debating what to do like they had a few months earlier.

A news item in the March 10, 1774, edition of the Massachusetts Spy reported that “His Majesty Oknookortunkogog King of the Narragansett tribe of Indians, on receiving information of the arrival of another cargo of the cursed weed Tea, immediately summoned his Council.”  Colonizers once again played Indian in their acts of resistance against imperial authority.  The imaginary leader of the Narragansetts “did advise and consent to the immediate destruction” of the tea, “after resolving that the IMPORTATION of this Herb, by ANY persons whatever, was attended with pernicious and dangerous consequences to the lives and properties of all his subjects throughout America.”  The king and council dispatched “the seizor and destroyer-general, and their deputies … to the place where this noxious herb was.”  They made their way to the Fortune on the evening of March 7, where they “emptied every chest … and effectually destroyed the whole” before they “returned to Narrangasett to make report of their doings to his Majesty.”  The Sons of Liberty and their allies maintained the ruse deployed the previous December.

Walley, Boyer, and Thompson’s advertisement appeared immediately below that description of the destruction of another cargo of tea.  They opened by rehearsing the story of “a certain WILLAIM BOWES, Brazier, on Dock-square” who “industriously propagated … a false and scandalous report, that the owners of the brig … have imported a quantity of Tea in that vessel upon their own account.”  Walley, Boyer, and Thompson suspected that Bowes might have even “invented” the story himself rather than repeating gossip he heard elsewhere.  The merchants did not trust his motives at all, claiming that Bowes “impudently asserted” that he knew all about the tea they supposedly imported from London and told the story “with a malignant design … to injure their reputation, and expose them to public resentment.”  As a result, they found it necessary to run an advertisement “in vindication of themselves from the vile and groundless aspersion of that impertinent medler in other men’s matters.”  Although they had tried to defuse the situation by assisting merchants who shipped cargo on their vessel in receiving permission to return the tea to London, they had not been aware in advance that the Fortune carried tea.  They wished to make that clear.

To that end they published a “deposition” which explicitly stated, “WE the subscribers, owners of the brig Fortune, do solemnly declare that we neither jointly nor separately had any share, interest or property, directly or indirectly in any part of the Tea that came from London in said vessel.”  Just as Jeremiah Cronin had done when facing allegations that he acted against the interests of the patriots, Walley, Boyer, and Thompson enlisted the aid of a justice of the peace to lend credibility to their explanation of what occurred.  Edmund Quincy asserted that the merchants “personally appeared and made oath to the truth of the above declaration.”  As was often the case in early American newspapers, the section devoted to news did not contain all the information about current events.  Instead, readers garnered valuable information from an advertisement as well.