After news of the Boston Tea Party reached Charleston, various shipments of tea that arrived by ship were turned away. (One tea-bearing ship, the London, was not paid for the duty on its tea and the tea was secretly loaded off the ship before the ship departed.) But when a tea-bearing ship called the Britannia arrived in Charleston's harbor in November 1774, the ship's captain insisted that he hadn't been aware that tea was on board until after the ship left England. The colonists believed his story and took their anger out on the city merchants who had ordered the tea. Under what must have been considerable pressure, the three merchants made an "Oblation to Neptune" and emptied the tea into the water themselves.
