Delete comment from: Boston 1775
That’s a lot of speculation—Coffin owning another property that’s not in any real-estate records, Montagu having a “female companion,” Hewes’s story sixty years after the fact being accurate in details while Montagu’s report the day afterward being completely unreliable.
We know one of Hewes’s stories about the Tea Party, in which he found himself working alongside John Hancock to break open crates of tea, is bunk. A contemporaneous witness puts Hancock in Old South during the operation on Griffin’s Wharf. Hewes’s story is detailed and dramatic, but that doesn’t make it true.
Given the totality of the evidence, I think that Hewes’s anecdote about yelling back at the admiral immediately after destroying the tea was similarly dramatized for his post-Revolutionary audiences. Hewes’s recollections seem most reliable, and often have the most documentary support, when he was describing events that his listeners didn’t have preconceived notions about. In this case, it’s interesting that we can see a seed for the Montagu exchange in the words Hutchinson quoted.
Dec 24, 2023, 10:04:05 PM
Posted to “Who was to pay the fidler”?