{"id":4615,"date":"2017-06-03T15:18:53","date_gmt":"2017-06-03T22:18:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/?p=4615"},"modified":"2017-06-03T15:18:53","modified_gmt":"2017-06-03T22:18:53","slug":"give-me-liberty-boston-usa-06022017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/?p=4615","title":{"rendered":"Give me Liberty \u2013 Boston, USA \u2013 [06\/02\/2017]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Yes, sir, I think I do. As the ship lay in Boston Harbor, a party of the colonists dressed as red Indians boarded the vessel, behaved very rudely, and threw all the tea overboard, making the tea unsuitable for drinking. Even for Americans. ~ Mary Poppins<\/em><\/p>\n

I expected the Boston Tea Party museum to be basically like any other museum. What I didn\u2019t expect was what it actually was. This is not a standard gallery style museum with glass cases and hushed voices, this\u2026is a show. A fully theatrical costumed experience complete with interactive guides and in-character docents. It is, in short, the kind of job that if I found myself living in Boston, I would audition for in a heartbeat.<\/p>\n

Upon entering the museum I was assigned the name of a historical figure, and handed a feather (which would later prove necessary as a means of \u201cdisguise\u201d) and introduced to Sam Adams, who gave such a rousing speech that it was not long before the room rang with thumps and huzzahs of agreement. And upon Mr Adams\u2019 utterance of the now well-known words \u201cThis meeting can do nothing further to protect this country\u201d we were escorted out of the meeting hall and onto one of the museum\u2019s two full scale replicas of the ships involved in the original event. In the case of my visit today, it was the Beaver.<\/em><\/p>\n

She\u2019s a beautiful ship, fully rigged, and \u2013 though trapped in the harbor by the height of the bridge (she was constructed and then brought to the harbor with the masts\u2019 separated to be reconstructed later) \u2013 fully seaworthy. They have raised the ceilings a foot to make room for visitors but all else is to scale. It was highly entertaining watching the children in the group heave replicas of tea chests over the side. Where they could \u2013 of course \u2013 be conveniently pulled back up for the next rebel to have a go.<\/p>\n

But the experience of the day also gave me a lot of insight. I am a history buff only in regard to certain things, and general American history is not one of them. I learned about the Tea Party of course, all of us did, Canadian history classes seemed to focus more on our neighbour\u2019s than on ourselves. But it had been a long long time since high school, and all I really knew was there was tea, there was a tax, and there was a revolt that ended up with the tea in the harbour. The pure historical significance of that event was somewhat lost on little Canadian me. The fact that this was the event that basically started<\/em> the Revolutionary war is something that I never really put together. It took seeing a specific thing in the depths of that museum to really bring that home to me..<\/p>\n

The Robinson Half chest.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s one of only two that are left. It\u2019s matching companions, all bearing the scarred burned symbols of the East India Trading company, were burned or drowned with their contents. Just for good measure.\u00a0 All that\u2019s left is this one tiny, hatchet marked \u00a0and brightly painted wooden chest, hidden under a families\u2019 stairs for years, then used to house a child\u2019s doll collection, until it finally found its way to the museum, where it is suspended in a rotating glass case. A mute witness to the violence that lit the match to a revolution.<\/p>\n

Nothing else could compare to that. Not the replica ships, the perfectly reconstructed paintings, the excellent scripting or the humor. It was all about that box.<\/p>\n

History can be changed by the smallest, seemingly most insignificant things\u2026<\/p>\n

And on a totally unrelated note: How does one manage to get a job at an interactive museum? Because yeah, that would be brilliant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yes, sir, I think I do. As the ship lay in Boston Harbor, a party of the colonists dressed as red Indians boarded the vessel, behaved very rudely, and threw all the tea overboard, making the tea unsuitable for drinking. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[12,16,93],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-historical-sites","category-ports-of-call","category-south-of-the-border-2017"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3GtNE-1cr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4615"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4615\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4617,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4615\/revisions\/4617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}