Three ships were involved in the Boston Tea Party of December 1773: Dartmouth, Eleanor, and Beaver.
The vessels carried tea belonging to the British East India Company. On December 16, after a large protest meeting at the Old South Meeting House, a group boarded the ships at Griffin's Wharf and dumped the tea into Boston Harbor. The action opposed Parliament's taxation authority and the Tea Act's special treatment of the East India Company.
The protest destroyed approximately 340 chests of tea, weighing about 92,616 pounds. Contemporary accounts and later summaries sometimes give slightly different totals for the chests, but the number of vessels is consistently three. The participants generally disguised themselves, with some wearing clothing intended to evoke Mohawk identity.
The British government responded with the Coercive Acts in 1774. Those measures intensified colonial resistance and helped lead to the First Continental Congress later that year.