Three ships full of East India Company tea sat in Boston harbour. Under the new Tea Act, the colonists would pay a tax they had never voted for. After a packed meeting at the Old South Meeting House, a crowd marched to Griffin's Wharf. Men with soot-blackened faces and blankets boarded the ships and dumped 342 chests of tea into the harbour. They broke nothing else, and swept the decks clean afterwards. The words are imagined.