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The Old Man and the Sea
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For other uses, see The Old Man and the Sea (disambiguation).
The Old Man and the Sea
Original book cover
Author
Ernest Hemingway
Country
United States
Language
English
Genre
Literary Fiction
Published
1952 (Charles Scribner's Sons)
Media type
Print (hardback & paperback)
Pages
127
Awards
Pulitzer Prize for fiction (1953)
ISBN
0-684-80122-1
OCLC
19793
Dewey Decimal
813.52
LC Class
PS3515.E37
The Old Man and the Sea is a short novel written by the American author Ernest Hemingway in 1951 in Bimini, Bahamas, and published in 1952.[1] It was the last major work of fiction by Hemingway that was published during his lifetime. One of his most famous works, it tells the story of Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Florida.[2]
In 1953, The Old Man and the Sea was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and it was cited by the Nobel Committee as contributing to their awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Hemingway in 1954.[2]
Contents
[hide]
1 Plot summary
2 Background and publication
3 Literary significance and criticism
4 Legacy
5 Notes
6 References
6.1 Sources
7 Further reading
8 External links
Plot summary[edit]
The Old Man and the Sea tells the story of a battle between an aging, experienced fisherman, Santiago, and a large marlin. The story opens with Santiago having gone 84 days without catching a fish, and now being seen as "salao",[a] the worst form of unluckiness. He is so unlucky that his young apprentice, Manolin, has been forbidden by his parents to sail with him and has been told instead to fish with successful fishermen. The boy visits Santiago's shack each night, hauling his fishing gear, preparing food, talking about American baseball and his favorite player, Joe DiMaggio. Santiago tells Manolin that on the next day, he will venture far out into the Gulf Stream, north of Cuba in the Straits of Florida to fish, confident that his unlucky streak is near its end.
On the eighty-fifth day of his unlucky streak, Santiago takes his skiff into the Gulf Stream, sets his lines and, by noon, has his bait taken by a big fish that he is sure is a marlin. Unable to haul in the great marlin, Santiago is instead pulled by the marlin, and two days and nights pass with Santiago holding onto the line. Though wounded by the struggle and in pain, Santiago expresses a compassionate appreciation for his adversary, often referring to him as a brother. He also determines that, because of the fish's great dignity, no one shall deserve to eat the marlin.
On the third day, the fish begins to circle the skiff. Santiago, worn out and almost delirious, uses all his remaining strength to pull the fish onto its side and stab the marlin with a harpoon. Santiago straps the marlin to the side of his skiff and heads home, thinking about the high price the fish will bring him at the market and how many people he will feed.
On his way in to shore, sharks are attracted to the marlin's blood. Santiago kills a great mako shark with his harpoon, but he loses the weapon. He makes a new harpoon by strapping his knife to the end of an oar to help ward off the next line of sharks; five sharks are slain and many others are driven away. But the sharks keep coming, and by nightfall the sharks have almost devoured the marlin's entire carcass, leaving a skeleton consisting mostly of its backbone, its tail and its head. Santiago knows that he is defeated and tells the sharks of how they have killed his dreams. Upon reaching the shore before dawn on the next day, Santiago struggles to his shack, carrying the heavy mast on his shoulder, leaving the fish head and the bones on the shore. Once home, he slumps onto his bed and falls into a deep sleep.
A group of fishermen gather the next day around the boat where the fish's skeleton is still attached. One of the fishermen measures it to be 18 feet (5.5 m) from nose to tail. Pedrico is given the head of the fish, and the other fishermen tell Manolin to tell the old man how sorry they are. Tourists at the nearby café mistakenly take it for a shark. The boy, worried about the old man, cries upon finding him safe asleep and at his injured hands. Manolin brings him newspapers and coffee. When the old man wakes, they promise to fish together once again. Upon his return to sleep, Santiago dreams of his youth—of lions on an African beach.
Background and publication[edit]
No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in .... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things.
Ernest Hemingway in 1954[4]
Written in 1951, and published in 1952 , The Old Man and the Sea is Hemingway's final full-length work published during his lifetime. The book, dedicated to "Charlie Scribner" and to Hemingway's literary editor "Max Perkins",[5][6] was featured in Life magazine on September 1, 1952, and five million copies of the magazine were sold in two days.[7]
The Old Man and the Sea became a Book of the Month Club selection, and made Hemingway a celebrity.[8] Published in book form on September 1, 1952, the first edition print run was 50,000 copies.[9] The illustrated edition featured black and white pictures by Charles Tunnicliffe and Raymond Sheppard.[10]
In May 1953, the novel received the Pulitzer Prize[10] and was specifically cited when in 1954 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature which he dedicated to the Cuban people.[11][12] The success of The Old Man and the Sea made Hemingway an international celebrity.[8] The Old Man and the Sea is commonly taught and continues to earn foreign royalties.[13]
Literary significance and criticism[edit]
The Old Man and the Sea served to reinvigorate Hemingway's literary reputation and prompted a reexamination of his entire body of work. The novel was initially received with much popularity; it restored many readers' confidence in Hemingway's capability as an author. Its publisher, Scribner's, on an early dust jacket, called the novel a "new classic," and many critics favorably compared it with such works as William Faulkner's short story The Bear and Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick.
Ernest Hemingway and Henry ("Mike") Strater with the remaining 500 lbs of an estimated 1000 lb marlin that was half-eaten by sharks before it could be landed in the Bahamas in 1935. See Pilar for details of this episode.
Gregorio Fuentes, who many critics believe was an inspiration for Santiago, was a blue-eyed man born on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. After going to sea at age ten on ships that called in African ports, he migrated permanently to Cuba when he was 22. After 82 years in Cuba, Fuentes attempted to reclaim his Spanish citizenship in 2001.[14] Critics have noted that Santiago was also at least 22 when he immigrated from Spain to Cuba, and thus old enough to be considered an immigrant—and a foreigner—in Cuba.[15]
Hemingway at first planned to use Santiago's story, which became The Old Man and the Sea, as part of an intimacy between mother and son. Relationships in the book relate to the Bible, which he referred to as "The Sea Book". Some aspects of it did appear in the posthumously published Islands in the Stream. Hemingway mentions the real life experience of an old fisherman almost identical to that of Santiago and his marlin in On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter (Esquire, April 1936).[16][17]
Joseph Waldmeir's essay "Confiteor Hominem: Ernest Hemingway's Religion of Man" is a favorable critical reading of the novel—and one which has defined analytical considerations since. Perhaps the most memorable claim is Waldmeir's answer to the question—What is the book's message?
The answer assumes a third level on which The Old Man and the Sea must be read—as a sort of allegorical commentary on all his previous work, by means of which it may be established that the religious overtones of The Old Man and the Sea are not peculiar to that book among Hemingway's works, and that Hemingway has finally taken the decisive step in elevating what might be called his philosophy of Manhood to the level of a religion.[18]
Waldmeir considered the function of the novel's Christian imagery, made most evident through Hemingway's obvious reference to the crucifixion of Christ following Santiago's sighting of the sharks that reads:
"Ay," he said aloud. There is no translation for this word and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood.[19]
One of the most outspoken critics of The Old Man and the Sea is Robert P. Weeks. His 1962 piece "Fakery in The Old Man and the Sea" presents his claim that the novel is a weak and unexpected divergence from the typical, realistic Hemingway (referring to the rest of Hemingway's body of work as "earlier glories").[20] In juxtaposing this novel against Hemingway's previous works, Weeks contends:
The difference, however, in the effectiveness with which Hemingway employs this characteristic device in his best work and in The Old Man and the Sea is illuminating. The work of fiction in which Hemingway devoted the most attention to natural objects, The Old Man and the Sea, is pieced out with an extraordinary quantity of fakery, extraordinary because one would expect to find no inexactness, no romanticizing of natural objects in a writer who loathed W.H. Hudson, could not read Thoreau, deplored Melville's rhetoric in Moby Dick, and who was himself criticized by other writers, notably Faulkner, for his devotion to the facts and his unwillingness to 'invent.'[20]
Some critics suggest Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea in reaction against the overtly negative criticism he received for Across the River and into the Trees.
Legacy[edit]
In 1954 Hemingway donated his Nobel prize gold medal in Literature to the venerated Marian image of Our Lady of Charity. The Swedish medal was stolen in 1986, but was returned later upon the threat of Raul Castro.[21]
The Old Man and the Sea has been adapted for the screen three times: a 1958 film starring Spencer Tracy, a 1990 miniseries starring Anthony Quinn, and a 1999 animated short film. It is often taught in high schools as a part of the American Literature curriculum.
In 2003 the book was listed at number 173 on the BBC's The Big Read poll of the UK's 200 "best-loved novels."[22] The book is featured in a 2007 episode of American animated comedy series South Park.
The plot is recounted in the style of Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) in a text crawl at the end of the teaser trailer for Deadpool 2 that played before the movie Logan.
Notes[edit]
Jump up ^ "...he had gone sixty-five days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy's parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky...."[3]
References[edit]
Jump up ^ The Editors (25 August 1952). "From Ernest Hemingway to the Editors of Life". Life. Time Inc. 33 (8): 124. ISSN 0024-3019. Hemingway's work is a 27,000-word novel called The Old Man and the Sea. CS1 maint: Extra text: authors list (link)
^ Jump up to: a b "The Nobel Prize in Literature 1954". The Nobel Foundation. Retrieved January 31, 2005.
Jump up ^ Hemingway, Ernest (1952). The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. p. 9. hardcover: ISBN 0-684-83049-3, paperback: ISBN 0-684-80122-1
Jump up ^ "Books: An American Storyteller". TIME. December 13, 1954. Retrieved February 1, 2011.
Jump up ^ Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea. p. 5
Jump up ^ Perkins, Maxwell (2004). Bruccoli, Matthew J.; Baughman, Judith, eds. The sons of Maxwell Perkins: letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and their editor. University of South Carolina Press. p. xxvii. ISBN 1-57003-548-2.
Jump up ^ "A Hemingway timeline Any man's life, told truly, is a novel". The Kansas City Star. KansasCity.com. June 27, 1999. Archived from the original on October 12, 2008. Retrieved 2009-08-29.
^ Jump up to: a b Desnoyers, p. 13
Jump up ^ Oliver 1999, p. 247
^ Jump up to: a b Meyers 1985, p. 489
Jump up ^ "Heroes:Life with Papa". TIME. November 8, 1954. Retrieved 2009-12-12.
Jump up ^ "The Nobel Prize in Literature 1954". Nobelprize.org. Retrieved October 4, 2009.
Jump up ^ Meyers 1985, p. 485
Jump up ^ "El pescador que inspiró a Hemingway ‘El viejo y el mar’ recupera la nacionalidad española". Retrieved June 7, 2013.
Jump up ^ Herlihy, Jeffrey. "Eyes the same color as the sea: Santiago’s Expatriation from Spain and Ethnic Otherness and in Hemingway’s the Old Man and the Sea" (PDF). Hemingway Review. Retrieved 2015-04-17.
Jump up ^ Old Man and the Sea. Introduction: The Ripening of a Masterpiece. Simon and Schuster. Retrieved September 29, 2012.
Jump up ^ Hemingway, Ernest (edited by William White) (1967). By-Line: Ernest Hemingway. Selected articles and dispatches of four decades. New York: Scribner's.
Jump up ^ Joseph Waldmeir (1957). "Confiteor Hominem: Ernest Hemingway's Religion of Man". Papers of the Michigan Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. XLII: 349–356.
Jump up ^ Hemingway. The Old Man and the Sea. p. 118
^ Jump up to: a b Robert P. Weeks, Robert P. (1962). "Fakery in The Old Man and the Sea". College English. XXIV (3): 188–192. JSTOR 373283. doi:10.2307/373283.
Jump up ^ "Huffington Post". The Huffington Post. March 27, 2012. Retrieved October 7, 2014.
Jump up ^ "BBC – The Big Read". BBC. April 2003, Retrieved August 23, 2017
Sources[edit]
Desnoyers, Megan Floyd. "Ernest Hemingway: A Storyteller's Legacy". John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Online Resources. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. Retrieved December 9, 2011.
Meyers, Jeffrey (1985). Hemingway: A Biography. London: Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-42126-4.
Oliver, Charles M. (1999). Ernest Hemingway A to Z: The Essential Reference to the Life and Work. New York: Checkmark. ISBN 0-8160-3467-2.
Further reading[edit]
Baker, Carlos (1972). Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (4th ed.). Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01305-5.
Jobes, Katharine T., ed. (1968). Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Old Man and the Sea. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-633917-4.
Mellow, James R. (1992). Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences. New York: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-37777-3.
Young, Philip (1952). Ernest Hemingway. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston. ISBN 0-8166-0191-7.
External links[edit]
The Old Man and the Sea at Faded Page (Canada)
Rare, Unseen: Hemingway in Cuba—slideshow by Life magazine
"Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure: Cuba". PBS. Retrieved January 21, 2006.
Awards and achievements
Preceded by
Winston Churchill
1953 Nobel Prize in Literature
1954 Succeeded by
Halldór Laxness
1955
[show]
v
t
e
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
1918–1925
His Family by Ernest Poole (1918)
The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington (1919)
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1921)
Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington (1922)
One of Ours by Willa Cather (1923)
The Able McLaughlins by Margaret Wilson (1924)
So Big by Edna Ferber (1925)
1926–1950
Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis (declined) (1926)
Early Autumn by Louis Bromfield (1927)
The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder (1928)
Scarlet Sister Mary by Julia Peterkin (1929)
Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge (1930)
Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes (1931)
The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck (1932)
The Store by Thomas Sigismund Stribling (1933)
Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Pafford Miller (1934)
Now in November by Josephine Winslow Johnson (1935)
Honey in the Horn by Harold L. Davis (1936)
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (1937)
The Late George Apley by John Phillips Marquand (1938)
The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1939)
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1940)
In This Our Life by Ellen Glasgow (1942)
Dragon's Teeth by Upton Sinclair (1943)
Journey in the Dark by Martin Flavin (1944)
A Bell for Adano by John Hersey (1945)
All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (1947)
Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener (1948)
Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens (1949)
The Way West by A. B. Guthrie Jr. (1950)
1951–1975
The Town by Conrad Richter (1951)
The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk (1952)
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1953)
A Fable by William Faulkner (1955)
Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor (1956)
A Death in the Family by James Agee (1958)
The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters by Robert Lewis Taylor (1959)
Advise and Consent by Allen Drury (1960)
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1961)
The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O'Connor (1962)
The Reivers by William Faulkner (1963)
The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau (1965)
The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter by Katherine Anne Porter (1966)
The Fixer by Bernard Malamud (1967)
The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron (1968)
House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday (1969)
The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford by Jean Stafford (1970)
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner (1972)
The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty (1973)
The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara (1975)
1976–2000
Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow (1976)
Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson (1978)
The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever (1979)
The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer (1980)
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1981)
Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike (1982)
The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1983)
Ironweed by William Kennedy (1984)
Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie (1985)
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (1986)
A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor (1987)
Beloved by Toni Morrison (1988)
Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler (1989)
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos (1990)
Rabbit at Rest by John Updike (1991)
A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley (1992)
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler (1993)
The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx (1994)
The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields (1995)
Independence Day by Richard Ford (1996)
Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser (1997)
American Pastoral by Philip Roth (1998)
The Hours by Michael Cunningham (1999)
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (2000)
2001–present
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon (2001)
Empire Falls by Richard Russo (2002)
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (2003)
The Known World by Edward P. Jones (2004)
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (2005)
March by Geraldine Brooks (2006)
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2007)
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (2008)
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (2009)
Tinkers by Paul Harding (2010)
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2011)
No award given (2012)
The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson (2013)
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (2014)
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (2015)
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen (2016)
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (2017)
[show]
v
t
e
Ernest Hemingway
Bibliography
Novels
The Torrents of Spring (1926)
The Sun Also Rises (1926)
A Farewell to Arms (1929)
To Have and Have Not (1937)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
Across the River and into the Trees (1950)
The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
Non-fiction
Death in the Afternoon (1932)
Green Hills of Africa (1935)
Posthumous
A Moveable Feast (1964)
Islands in the Stream (1970)
The Dangerous Summer (1985)
The Garden of Eden (1986)
True at First Light (1999)
Under Kilimanjaro (2005)
Short stories
"Indian Camp" (1925)
"The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" (1925)
"The End of Something" (1925)
"The Three-Day Blow" (1925)
"The Battler" (1925)
"A Very Short Story" (1925)
"Soldier's Home" (1925)
"The Revolutionist" (1925)
"Mr. and Mrs. Elliot" (1925)
"Cat in the Rain" (1925)
"Out of Season" (1925)
"Cross Country Snow" (1925)
"My Old Man" (1925)
"Big Two-Hearted River" (1925)
"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" (1926)
"A Canary for One" (1926)
"Fifty Grand" (1927)
"Hills Like White Elephants" (1927)
"The Killers" (1927)
"The Undefeated" (1927)
"Che Ti Dice La Patria?" (1927)
"In Another Country" (1927)
"On the Quai at Smyrna" (1930)
"Fathers and Sons" (1932)
"A Day's Wait" (1933)
"The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio" (1933)
"A Way You'll Never Be" (1933)
"The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (1936)
"The Capital of the World" (1936)
"The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" (1936)
Short story
collections
Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923)
In Our Time (1925)
Men Without Women (1927)
Winner Take Nothing (1933)
The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938)
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1961)
The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War (1969)
The Nick Adams Stories (1972)
The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (1987)
Ernest Hemingway: The Collected Stories (1995)
Story fragments
"On Writing"
Poetry
88 Poems (1979)
Complete Poems
Letters and
journalism
Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981)
Dateline: Toronto (1985)
The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway (2011)
Adaptations
The Sun Also Rises
1957 film
1984 film
Opera
The Select (The Sun Also Rises)
Ballet
"The Killers"
1946 film
1956 film
1964 film
Bukowski short story
A Farewell to Arms
1932 film
1957 film
1966 TV series
To Have and Have Not
1944 film
The Breaking Point (1950)
The Gun Runners (1958)
Captain Khorshid (1987)
For Whom the Bell Tolls
1943 film
1965 TV series
Metallica song
The Old Man and the Sea
1958 film
1990 miniseries
1999 film
Other film adaptations
The Macomber Affair (1947)
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952)
Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man (1962)
Islands in the Stream (1977)
See also
Nick Adams
Michigan cottage
Idaho house
Key West home
Hotel Ambos Mundos, Havana home
Finca Vigía, Cuba home
Pilar (boat)
The Spanish Earth (1937 film)
Bacall to Arms (1946 cartoon)
Hello Hemingway (1990 film)
In Love and War (1996 film)
Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012 film)
Cooper & Hemingway: The True Gen (2013 documentary)
Papa: Hemingway in Cuba (2015 film)
Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award
Kennedy Library Hemingway collection
Family
Elizabeth Hadley Richardson (first wife)
Jack Hemingway (son)
Pauline Pfeiffer (second wife)
Patrick Hemingway (son)
Gregory Hemingway (son)
Martha Gellhorn (third wife)
Mary Welsh Hemingway (fourth wife)
Grace Hall Hemingway (mother)
Leicester Hemingway (brother)
Authority control
GND: 4099230-5
BNF: cb122159627 (data)
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Tea Act
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Tea Act of 1773
Parliament of Great Britain
Long title
An act to allow a drawback of the duties of customs on the exportation of tea or oil to any of his Majesty's colonies or plantations in America; to increase the deposit on bohea tea to be sold at the East India Company's sales; and to empower the commissioners of the treasury to grant licenses to the East India Company to export tea duty-free.
Citation
13 Geo. 3 c. 44
Introduced by
The Rt. Hon. Lord North, KG, MP
Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer & Leader of the House of Commons
Territorial extent
Great Britain
British Dominions
Dates
Royal assent
10 May 1773
Commencement
10 May 1773
Repealed
1861
Other legislation
Repealed by
Statute Law Revision Act 1861
Relates to
Sugar Act
Stamp Act 1765
Townshend Acts
Status: Repealed
Tea Act of 1773 (13 Geo 3 c 44) was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain. The principal objective was to reduce the massive amount of tea held by the financially troubled British East India Company in its London warehouses and to help the struggling company survive. A related objective was to undercut the price of illegal tea, smuggled into Britain's North American colonies. This was supposed to convince the colonists to purchase Company tea on which the Townshend duties were paid, thus implicitly agreeing to accept Parliament's right of taxation.
The Act granted the Company the right to directly ship its tea to North America and the right to the duty-free export of tea from Britain, although the tax imposed by the Townshend Acts and collected in the colonies remained in force. It received the royal assent on May 10, 1773.
Colonists in the Thirteen Colonies recognized the implications of the Act's provisions, and a coalition of merchants, smugglers, and artisans similar to that which had opposed the Stamp Act 1765 mobilized opposition to delivery and distribution of the tea. The company's authorised consignees were harassed, and in many colonies successful efforts were made to prevent the tea from being landed. In Boston, this resistance culminated in the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773, when colonists (some disguised as Native Americans) boarded tea ships anchored in the harbour and dumped their tea cargo overboard. Parliamentary reaction to this event included passage of the Coercive Acts, designed to punish Massachusetts for its resistance, and the appointment of General Thomas Gage as royal governor of Massachusetts. These actions further raised tensions that led to the eruption of the American War of Independence in April 1775.
Parliament passed the Taxation of Colonies Act 1778, which repealed a number of taxes (including the tea tax that underlaid this act) as one of a number of conciliatory proposals presented to the Second Continental Congress by the Carlisle Peace Commission. The commission's proposals were rejected. The Act effectively became a "dead letter", but was not formally removed from the books until passage of the Statute Law Revision Act 1861.
Contents
[hide]
1 Background
2 Provisions of the Act
3 Implementation
4 Response
5 Consequences
6 Notes
7 References
Background[edit]
In the 1760s and early 1770s, the East India Company had been required to sell its tea exclusively in London on which it paid a duty which averaged two shillings and six pence per pound.[1] Tea destined for the North American colonies would be purchased by merchants specializing in that trade, who transported it to North America for eventual retail sale. The markups imposed by these merchants, combined with tea tax imposed by the Townshend Acts of 1767 created a profitable opportunity for American merchants to import and distribute tea purchased from the Dutch in transactions and shipments that violated the Navigation Acts and were treated by British authorities as smuggling. Smugglers imported some 900,000 pounds (410,000 kg) of cheap foreign tea per year. The quality of the smuggled tea did not match the quality of the dutiable East India Company tea, of which the Americans bought 562,000 pounds (255,000 kg) per year.[2] Although the British tea was more appealing in taste, some Patriots like the Sons of Liberty encouraged the consumption of smuggled tea as a political protest against the Townshend taxes
In 1770 most of the Townshend taxes were repealed, but taxes on tea were retained. Resistance to this tax included pressure to avoid legally imported tea, leading to a drop in colonial demand for the Company's tea, and a burgeoning surplus of the tea in the company's English warehouses. By 1773 the Company was close to collapse due in part to contractual payments to the British government of £400,000 per year, together with war and a severe famine in Bengal which drastically reduced the Company's revenue from India, and economic weakness in European markets. Benjamin Franklin was one of several people who suggested things would be greatly improved if the Company were allowed to export its tea directly to the colonies without paying the taxes it was paying in London: "to export such tea to any of the British colonies or plantations in America, or to foreign parts, import duty of three pence a pound."[1]
The administration of Lord North saw an opportunity to achieve several goals with a single bill. If the Company were permitted to directly ship tea to the colonies, this would remove the markups of the middlemen from the cost of its tea, and reducing or eliminating the duties paid when the tea was landed in Britain (if it was shipped onward to the colonies) would further reduce the final cost of tea in the colonies, undercutting the prices charged for smuggled tea. Colonists would willingly pay for cheaper Company tea, on which the Townshend tax was still collected, thus legitimizing Parliament's ability to tax the colonies.
Provisions of the Act[edit]
The Act, which received the royal assent on May 10, 1773, contained the following provisions:
The Company was eligible to be granted licence to export tea to North America.
The Company was no longer required to sell its tea at the London Tea Auction.
Duties on tea (charged in Britain) destined for North America "and foreign parts" would either be refunded on export or not imposed.
Consignees receiving the Company's tea were required to pay a deposit upon receipt of tea.
Proposals were made that the Townshend tax also be waived, but North opposed this idea, citing the fact that those revenues were used to pay the salaries of crown officials in the colonies.
Implementation[edit]
The Company was granted license by the North administration to ship tea to major American ports, including Charleston, Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston. Consignees who were to receive the tea and arrange for its local resale were generally favorites of the local governor (who was royally appointed in South Carolina, New York, and Massachusetts, and appointed by the proprietors in Pennsylvania). In Massachusetts, Governor Thomas Hutchinson was a part-owner of the business hired by the Company to receive tea shipped to Boston.
Response[edit]
A 1789 depiction of the Boston Tea Party
Many colonists opposed the Act, not so much because it rescued the East India Company, but more because it seemed to validate the Townshend Tax on tea. Merchants who had been acting as the middlemen in legally importing tea stood to lose their business, as did those whose illegal Dutch trade would be undercut by the Company's lowered prices. These interests combined forces, citing the taxes and the Company's monopoly status as reasons to oppose the Act.
In New York and Philadelphia, opposition to the Act resulted in the return of tea delivered there back to Britain. In Charleston, the colonists left the tea on the docks to rot. Governor Hutchinson in Boston was determined to leave the ships in port, even though vigilant colonists refused to allow the tea to be landed.[3] Matters reached a crisis when the time period for landing the tea and paying the Townshend taxes was set to expire, and on December 16, 1773, colonists disguised as Indians swarmed aboard three tea-laden ships and dumped their cargo into the harbour in what is now known as the Boston Tea Party. Similar "Destruction of the Tea" (as it was called at the time) occurred in New York and other ports shortly thereafter, though Boston took the brunt of Imperial retaliation, because it was the first "culprit".
Consequences[edit]
The Boston Tea Party appalled British political opinion makers of all stripes. The action united all parties in Britain against the American radicals. Parliament enacted the Boston Port Act, which closed Boston Harbor until the dumped tea was paid for. This was the first of the so-called Coercive Acts, or Intolerable Acts as they were called by the colonists, passed by Parliament in response to the Boston Tea Party. These harsh measures united many colonists even more in their frustrations against Britain, and were one of the many causes of the American Revolutionary War.
The Taxation of Colonies Act 1778 repealed the tea tax and others that had been imposed on the colonies, but it proved insufficient to end the war. The Tea Act became a "dead letter" as far as the Thirteen Colonies were concerned, and was formally removed from the books in 1861.
Notes[edit]
^ Jump up to: a b Ketchum, pg. 240
Jump up ^ Unger, pg. 148
Jump up ^ "The Tea Act". ushistory.org. Retrieved 2017-08-11.
References[edit]
Ketchum, Richard, Divided Loyalties, How the American Revolution came to New York, 2002, ISBN 0-8050-6120-7
Unger, Harlow, John Hancock, Merchant King and American Patriot, 200, ISBN 0-7858-2026-4
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