Delete comment from: Boston 1775
The quoted description from George R. T. Hewes about Conner (“Captain O’Conner”) at the Tea Party appeared in A Retrospect of the Tea-Party, published in 1834. It’s important to read that chapter fully to analyze it well. It’s also important to read the corresponding passage in Traits of the Tea-Party, also based on interviews with Hewes and published the next year.
In Retrospect, Hewes described “several attempts” by different people to make off with tea. He didn’t just single out Conner. Both books mention an older man caught with tea the same way.
Hewes started his description of the tea destruction by saying three men in the crowd assumed command of three groups, one for each ship, and he recalled his commander first as “Leonard Pitt.” This was Lendell Pitts, documented at other events of the time. Retrospect described Hewes telling “the captain” about Conner; Traits said, “He informed Pitts.” There were multiple former and current sea and militia captains on the waterfront that night, but the one that mattered was the man commanding Hewes’s group. No mystery or contradiction there.
In Traits, Hewes’s story about “a man named Charles O’Connor” is a little more detailed and dramatic, and seems less reliable. It claims that the two men had been apprentices together under the cordwainer Downing, which doesn’t fit Conner’s history. Nonetheless, the fact that Hewes recalled the man’s first name is significant.
Jul 13, 2021, 4:38:51 PM
Posted to Capt. Charles Conner: mariner, trader, letter of horses