Participants in the Boston Tea Party dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor.
The protest took place on December 16, 1773, when colonists opposed the Tea Act and Parliament's authority to tax them without colonial representation. Protesters boarded three ships—Dartmouth, Eleanor, and Beaver—and threw the tea cargo into the water.
The tea belonged to the British East India Company. The Tea Act allowed the company to sell tea directly to the colonies, but many colonists viewed the arrangement as an attempt to make an unpopular tax politically acceptable. The protesters did not generally destroy other goods aboard the ships.
The action led to the Coercive Acts, called the Intolerable Acts by many colonists. Those measures tightened British control over Massachusetts and helped unite opposition across the colonies. The Boston Tea Party was therefore both a local protest and a major escalation before the Revolutionary War.