THe SAME BRITISH FLAG OVER BOMBAY AND BOSTON CITY AMERICA 1700

BRITISH FLAG OVER BOMBAY HARBOUR 1670

                      FLAGS OVER AMERICA
BRITISH UNION FLAG
1603 - 1775

King James of Scotland succeeded Elizabeth the First of England in 1603. To signify the union of the two lands, he designed this flag, combining the red cross symbolic of Englands' Patron Saint George (he of the dragon legend) with the white cross of Saint David of Wales and the white saltire (that's heraldry talk for a cross that's X-shaped) symbolic of Saint Andrew, Patron Saint of Scotland. This flag flew over all the English new world colonies. Note the difference from the modern Union Jack, which has added to it the red saltire of Saint Patrick for Northern Ireland.

DUTCH EAST INDIA COMPANY
1609
When Henry Hudson sailed up the river that bears his name and when Manhattan was purchased for a handful of beads, this was the flag that flew overhead. The colors are the same as the Dutch national flag, and the "A" stands for the home city of Amsterdam. The other letters stand for: "Oost Indise Compagnie" or East India Company.

English East India Company c1600-1707
British East India Company 1707-1800

English East India Company 1678
Using mercenaries to control conquered lands by private companies is not a new practice, and government hiring corporations to control colonies isn't new either. Parliament used the British East India Company to conquer and manage India, and later gave the company trade monopolies in parts of the New World to help pay them. The East India Company was expected to provide the necessary "soldiers for hire" to rule India, and profits made from exporting their Indian tea to the American Colonies helped pay for those soldiers.Boston Tea Party

Boston Tea Party

BRITISH FLAG OVER BOSTON 1700'S

Destruction of the tea

1789 engraving of the destruction of the tea

While Samuel Adams tried to reassert control of the meeting, people poured out of the Old South Meeting House and headed to Boston Harbor. That evening, a group of 30 to 130 men, some of them thinly disguised as Mohawk Indians, boarded the three vessels and, over the course of three hours, dumped all 342 chests of tea into the water. The precise location of the Griffin's Wharf site of the Tea Party has been subject to prolonged uncertainty; a comprehensive study places it near the foot of Hutchinson Street (today's Pearl Street).

When Mohandas K. Gandhi led a mass burning of Indian registration cards in South Africa in 1908, a British newspaper compared the event to the Boston Tea Party. When Gandhi met with the British viceroy in 1930 after the Indian salt protest campaign, Gandhi took some duty-free salt from his shawl and said, with a smile, that the salt was "to remind us of the famous Boston Tea Party."