Interview with George Robert Twelves Hewes — At Griffin’s Wharf, Near 470 Atlantic Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts
Boston, Massachusetts — Griffin’s Wharf, Near 470 Atlantic Avenue
Stand here long enough, and it starts to bother you — the absence of water.
On the night of December 16, 1773, Griffin’s Wharf was exactly what the name promised: a working wharf, jutting into Boston Harbor, with three British merchant ships tied alongside it — the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver. The harbor was cold and black and deep. The ships were loaded with 342 chests of tea, roughly 92,000 pounds, owned by the East India Company, an organization that at its peak controlled nearly half of the world’s trade and accounted for about ten percent of England’s entire economic output.
Today, that water is gone. Land reclamation projects over the centuries pushed the shoreline outward, and what was once the harbor bottom is now pavement. The Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum sits nearby, moored where water still exists, giving visitors a sense of what the original scene might have looked like. But the exact spot where those three ships sat on that December night is now dry ground — a plaque and a memory where the harbor used to be.
What happened here that night was not an accident, and it was not a riot. It was a carefully planned, precisely executed act of political protest carried out by men who understood that how you do something sends as much of a message as what you do. The Sons of Liberty had been standing guard at the docks for twenty days, preventing the tea from being unloaded. Day twenty-one was the legal deadline — after that, the British Navy, anchored just offshore, would almost certainly move in and force the issue. Time had run out.
So they acted. About 116 men, organized into three groups, boarded the three ships in disguise, broke open the chests with axes, and spent three hours dumping ten thousand pounds’ worth of tea into the harbor. When they were done, they swept the decks clean, replaced a broken padlock they had accidentally damaged, and marched away in formation. They left the ships in better condition than they found them.
England called it treason. The colonists called it patriotism.
George Robert Twelves Hewes was a Boston shoemaker who was there that night — one of the 116 men who boarded those ships. He lived to be nearly ninety-eight years old, long enough to become the last surviving participant of the Boston Tea Party. In his final years, he gave interviews describing what he remembered of that night in vivid, specific detail. He is our closest living witness to one of the most consequential nights in American history.
Note: The following interview is fictionalized but drawn closely from Hewes’s documented recollections and historical accounts of the Boston Tea Party.
The Interview
Dan: Hello, everyone! I am standing at Griffin’s Wharf in Boston — near 470 Atlantic Avenue, right along the Harborwalk — at the site where the Boston Tea Party took place on the night of December 16, 1773. Today I have the remarkable privilege of sitting down with the last surviving participant of that night. Welcome, George Robert Twelves Hewes.
George Robert Twelves Hewes: Thank you, Dan. I have told this story more times than I can count in my old age, and it never gets shorter. There is always more to it than people expect.
Dan: Let’s start from the beginning. Who were you in 1773? What was your life like before that night?
George Robert Twelves Hewes: A shoemaker. That is what I was. A cordwainer, to use the proper term. I made shoes in Boston, I had a family, I paid my taxes, I went about my business. I was not a man of wealth or standing. I was not a lawyer or a merchant or a man of letters. I was a tradesman — the kind of man whose name does not appear in the history books unless something extraordinary happens.
Dan: And something extraordinary happened.
George Robert Twelves Hewes: It did. Though I would say it did not come out of nowhere. By December of 1773, the anger in Boston had been building for years. The stamp taxes. The Townshend duties. Soldiers quartered in our homes. The Massacre on King Street. Every time it seemed like things might settle, England would do something else — pass another act, impose another tax, send more troops. And all of it without a single colonist having any voice in Parliament about any of it. No taxation without representation was not just a slogan, Dan. It was a genuine and mounting fury.
Dan: Tell me about the Tea Act of 1773 specifically. What made that the breaking point?
George Robert Twelves Hewes: The Tea Act was cunning, and that is what made it so infuriating. The East India Company was drowning in unsold tea — they had warehouses full of it in England. Parliament gave them a monopoly to sell it directly to the colonies, which cut out the colonial merchants entirely. And here is the clever part: the tax-included price was actually cheaper than the smuggled Dutch tea that many colonists had been buying to avoid the duties. They were trying to trick us into paying the tax by making the taxed tea the better bargain.
Dan: But it did not work.
George Robert Twelves Hewes: No. Because we understood what was really happening. If we accepted the cheaper tea, we accepted the tax. And if we accepted that tax, we accepted Parliament’s right to tax us without our consent. The price of the tea was not the point. The principle was the point. You cannot trick a free people into surrendering their rights by offering them a bargain.
Dan: Walk me through the night itself. What do you remember about December 16th?
George Robert Twelves Hewes: The meeting at the Old South Meeting House first — five thousand people, as you know from the previous chapter. The air in that building was something I will never forget. Thousands of people pressed together, the candles burning, the arguments going back and forth. And then Samuel Adams spoke those words, and something shifted in the room. People knew. The time for talking was over.
Dan: And you went to the wharf.
George Robert Twelves Hewes: We went to the wharf. About 116 of us in total, organized into three groups — one for each ship. We had disguised ourselves, most of us as Mohawk Indians. Painted faces, blankets, feathers. Whether the disguise fooled anyone is another matter. But it served a purpose beyond concealment: it said that we were acting not as individual men with individual grievances, but as Americans. As something new. As people who belonged to this land.
Dan: What was it like boarding those ships?
George Robert Twelves Hewes: Quiet, mostly. That surprised me, looking back. You might expect chaos — shouting, struggle, confusion. But it was organized. We had our assignments. Each group knew which ship, which hold, which chests. The captains offered no real resistance — I think they understood that resistance would have gone very badly for them, and perhaps they had some sympathy for our cause as well. We broke open the chests with axes and hauled the tea up and dumped it over the sides. Three hours. Three ships. 342 chests.
Dan: And the British Navy was right there in the harbor, watching.
George Robert Twelves Hewes: They were there. Close enough that we could see their lights. And we were not exactly quiet about what we were doing — there was some hollering, some of the men making whooping sounds to keep up the Mohawk pretense. I have often wondered, in the years since, why they did not intervene. Perhaps they had orders to hold. Perhaps they calculated that moving in would make things worse. Perhaps they simply could not believe that colonists would actually do it. Whatever the reason, they watched, and we worked.
Dan: Then you swept the decks.
George Robert Twelves Hewes: We swept the decks. Every one of them. We gathered up every last bit of loose tea and threw it into the harbor. We replaced a padlock on one of the ships that had been broken during the boarding. We left those ships in good order — cleaner, in some respects, than when we found them. And then we marched away.
Dan: Why? Why go to that trouble? You had just committed what England considered an act of treason. Why sweep the decks?
George Robert Twelves Hewes: Because we needed England — and the world — to understand what we were and what we were not. We were not criminals. We were not a mob. We were not rioters looking for an excuse to steal or destroy. We were citizens making a political statement with the only tools available to us. If we had left those decks a mess, if we had taken anything, if we had damaged the ships or roughed up the crew, England could have dismissed us as lawless rabble. By leaving everything in order, by taking nothing, by conducting ourselves with discipline from first to last — we forced them to take us seriously. We were making a point, not throwing a tantrum.
Dan: That is a remarkable level of self-control for men who were risking their lives. Boarding those ships was technically treason, punishable by hanging.
George Robert Twelves Hewes: Every man on those docks knew that. Every one of us. We knew what England called what we were doing. We called it something else. But the rope was real either way. And yet — and this is the thing I want people to understand, Dan — not one man broke. Not one man stole anything. Not one man lost his head. One hundred and sixteen men, under that kind of pressure, held together. That does not happen without trust. Without preparation. Without a shared belief in something larger than any one of us.
Dan: What happened after? England came back hard with the Coercive Acts — shutting down Boston Harbor, isolating the city.
George Robert Twelves Hewes: They did. And it hurt. Closing the harbor was no small thing — Boston lived by the sea. The economy, the trade, the livelihoods of thousands of people depended on that water. They thought that pain would break us, would force Boston to capitulate and pay for the tea. What they did not anticipate was that the other colonies would come to our aid. Wagon loads of food and supplies came into Boston overland. The colonies that had been hesitant or resistant started to see that what England had done to Boston could be done to any of them. The Intolerable Acts united the colonies more effectively than anything we could have done ourselves.
Dan: England tried to punish one city and ended up uniting a continent.
George Robert Twelves Hewes: That is exactly right. Power, when it overreaches, often does its opponents’ work for them.
Dan: George, what is the leadership lesson you would want people to take from that night at Griffin’s Wharf?
George Robert Twelves Hewes: That passion alone is not enough. Every man on those docks was passionate. Every one of us was angry. Anger is easy, Dan. Anger is cheap. What is hard — what is rare — is the discipline to channel that anger into something precise, something purposeful, something that cannot be dismissed or misread. We planned carefully. We organized deliberately. We executed without breaking formation. And then we swept the decks. That last part — the sweeping — that was leadership. That was saying: we know exactly what we are doing and why, and we are not going to let anything compromise the message.
Dan: And for someone who feels powerless today — someone who feels like they are being taxed without representation in some form, like their voice is not being heard — what would you tell them?
George Robert Twelves Hewes: I was a shoemaker, Dan. I had no wealth, no title, no political power of any kind. I was exactly the kind of man that history tends to forget. And I was on those docks. I was one of the 116. What I would tell them is this: the size of your role in history is not determined by the size of your title. It is determined by whether you show up when it matters, whether you hold the line when others are watching, and whether you do your work with enough discipline that it cannot be ignored. Sweep the deck. Do your part cleanly. And trust that it matters.
Dan: George Robert Twelves Hewes — the last man standing from the night that changed everything. Thank you.
George Robert Twelves Hewes: It was a cold night, Dan. But it was worth every shiver.
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