Delete comment from: Boston 1775
It's my theory that "half chest" functioned as a generic term for a smaller chest, while also being a more technical term for a chest one half the weight of a whole chest. Much like how "barrel" is both a generic term for a cask and a type of cask with a specific volume. Drake's Tea Leaves has the Polly's freight invoice for the tea, and it refers to the same 130 chests as both "half" and "quarter" in different places. The Dartmouth's logbook also calls the chests "half chests", but as you pointed out the average weights are more consistent with the quarter chests.
I suspect the other chest you're referring to is the formerly-named Robinson Half Chest at the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum. My research on this for them while I was there led me to conclude that the term "half chest" was applied to that chest by the family during the 19th century, a time when tea chest sizes and naming conventions had changed since the late-18thC. I believe they now simply refer to it as the "Robinson Tea Chest". I believe it to be an example of a 1/16 chest. It would have held roughly 20 lbs of tea.
Dec 15, 2022, 1:17:15 AM
Posted to “Ebenezer Withington hath declared that he hath sold a Part of the Tea”