Did the ocean taste like tea after the Boston Tea Party?

by Fireheart318s_Reddit

Did the tea from the cargo ship mix with the ocean and turn it into tea for a short time? Of course, it would be salty, but would it at least taste like tea?

Georgy_K_Zhukov

I don't think there is a record of anyone trying out a cuppa from the waters of Boston Harbor, but while rhetoric such as John Rowe's "Who knows how tea will mingle with salt water?" did allude to the harbor turning into one giant teapot, the reality doesn't quite swing that way, for both practical and historical reasons. In the first, of course, preparing tea requires boiling water, or at least reasonably hot, for a good steep. Those were definitely not the conditions on December 16th, 1773. Very poor water quality for making tea, and that isn't even accounting for the comparative volume of the tea on three ships compared to the water of an entire harbor, far beyond the ratio that you'd have of leaf to water in your kettle! Additionally though, the tide was out at the time, and much of the tea that was dumped didn't end up in the harbor immediately, but rather started to accumulate on mudflats in the shallows. Young boys were tasked with trying to move it back into the water itself, but this would also have further diluted the ratio of leaf to water.

So no, while again, I don't know of anyone drinking the harbor to find out, there isn't any particular reason to believe that the harbor would especially taste like tea, as it would be far too diluted to make much of a change.

See: B"unker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution" by Nathaniel Philbrick