Let me somewhat arbitrarily focus the question more specifically on the earliest English explorers, adventurers, and settlers in Virginia and Massachusetts in the first half of the 17th century.

Reading their published accounts gives one the impression that their lives alternated between extremes of feast and famine, between health and sickness, between sublime ease and almost unimaginable hardship, and between periods of contentment and even boredom and periods of sharp fear and terror interspersed with periods of sheer joy. Supplementing those accounts, however, with evidence from rather more mundane sources such as probate and account books, old court records, and modern excavations of kitchen middens from colonial sites, yields a larger story of people organizing and conducting their work and family lives in ways similar to ours today.

Captain John Smith published A Description of New England in 1616 in London, in which account he sought, among other things, to recruit English settlers. In it he declared:

Worthy is that person to starve that here cannot live; if he have sense, strength and health: for there is no such penury of these blessings in any place, but that a hundred men may, in one houre or two, make their provisions for a day: and he that hath experience to manage well these affaires, with fortie or thirtie honest industrious men, might well undertake (if they dwell in these parts) to subject the Salvages, and feed daily two or three hundred men, with as good corn, fish and flesh, as the earth hath of those kindes, and yet make that labor but their pleasure; provided that they have engins, that be proper for their purposes.

The first minister in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Reverend Francis Higginson, acting, like Smith, as a kind of colonial recruiter, published New-England's Plantation; or, a short and true description of the commodities and discommodities of that countrey in 1630 in London. In it, he praised the "fat black earth" around the Charles River in Massachusetts. The land, he said, was extremely fertile, and was well suited to the plow. "It is scarce to be believed how our kine and goats, horses and hogs do thrive and prosper here, and like well of this country." He bragged of the vast harvest of corn, turnips, parsnips, carrots, watercress, "pumpions," "cowcumbers," and herbs. He wrote that the colonists also planted and harvested mulberries, plums, raspberries, currants, chestnuts, filberts, walnuts, cherries, and strawberries.

He wrote about the abundance of game: deer and bear, as well as the other animals, listing wolves, foxes, beavers, otters, martins, great wild cats, and "a great beast called a molke"—most probably a moose. The abundance of fish was "almost beyond believing." Cod, mackerel, bass, and sturgeon; oysters, clams, mussels, and lobsters were easy to catch or gather. Of lobsters, Higginson wrote that "the least boy in the Plantation may both catch and eat what he will of them. For my own part, I was soon cloyed with them, they were so great, and fat, and luscious. I have seen some myself that have weighed sixteen pound; but others have had diverse times so great lobsters as have weighted twenty-five pound, as they assured me."

Higginson commended the "temper of the air" of New England as healthful. He noted that summers were hotter than in England and winters were colder, but he said that the cold was not so bad because of the ease of getting firewood. "Here is good living," he wrote, "for those that love good fires."

Higginson's improbably upbeat list of New England's "discommodities" was much shorter: First, mosquitoes; second, the snow and cold of winter; third; poisonous snakes; and fourth, the lack of more settlers. This last "discommodity" is telling, and does much to explain the hearty promotional tone of the rest of his description.

In fact, many of the first settlers, both in Massachusetts and Virginia, died of starvation, which especially afflicted them during the first winters. Several times, Indians brought them some relief with baskets of corn and game.

Diseases of one kind or another also took their toll. Some of these they brought with them, such as smallpox. Some of them, like dysentery and scurvy, were the result of malnutrition or lack of fresh drinking water. The sheer physical difficulties involved in exploration and in building a settlement in the wilderness also presented tremendous hazards to those that undertook the work.

Shipwreck was also common, especially from the hurricanes and nor'easters that were novel to them. Shipwrecks not only endangered their own lives but also imperiled the re-provisioning of the colonies from England. This was especially critical in the first years of the settlements, when their vulnerability was increased by the fact that they had to depend on ships to supply them, not just with food, but also with basic goods, such as gunpowder, firearms, tools, iron, and cloth.

Colonel Henry Norwood's pamphlet, A Voyage to Virginia, described his harrowing trip in the fall of 1649 from England, in which his ship met storms off the coast of Cape Hatteras and they were blown offshore. He and a small party of others were eventually marooned on an uninhabited island off the coast of Maryland and nearly starved until being rescued by Indians and carried by them to the colony at Jamestown:

Of the three weak women before mentioned, one had the envied happiness to die about this time; and it was my advice to the survivors, who were following her apace, to endeavour their own preservation by converting her dead carcase into food, as they did to good effect. The same counsel was embrac'd by those of our sex; the living fed upon the dead; four of our company having the happiness to end their miserable lives on Sunday night the day of January___. Their chief distemper, 'tis true, was hunger; but it pleased God to hasten their exit by an immoderate access of cold, caused by a most terrible storm of hail and snow at north-west, on the Sunday aforesaid, which did not only dispatch those four to their long homes, but did sorely threaten all that remained alive, to perish by the same fate.

The colony in Virginia was established in the midst of the Algonquian nation of Powhatan, and the Plymouth Colony on the land of the Wampanoag tribe. Relations with the Indians were sketchy and volatile, consisting of periods of friendship interspersed with periods of fighting, sometimes alongside the Indians of one tribe against its enemies from other tribes. The colonists traded metal implements and cloth for food, furs, and land. But they also carefully constructed fortifications and palisades to protect themselves against the almost certain eventuality of attack by the various tribes and nations of Indians among whom they settled. Both colonies suffered large loss of life from Indian attack.

All in all, much of the earliest settlers' time and energies were devoted to providing for their basic, physical subsistence and doing what they could to ensure their survival. Much of the colonies' early precariousness was due to not having yet cleared and planted enough land to ensure harvests that would not only provide the colonists daily fare, but would also allow a surplus to draw upon during times of scarcity.

Until about the mid-20th century, historians largely worked from the writings of the colonists and explorers to understand what colonial life was like. But those writings offered only a very selective picture. For the past several decades, detailed research by archeologists and archivists into the material culture of the colonists has dramatically broadened and sometimes corrected the historical picture.

The tea was on three privately owned merchant ships. One hundred and fourteen chests were on board the Dartmouth, the first ship to arrive in port. The other two ships, the Eleanor and the brig Beaver carried 228 chests between them, along with other cargo. As the ships sailed into Boston Harbor, they each passed by Castle William to the south, which was under the command of a British officer and had upwards of a hundred cannon. When the ships came into the harbor, but before they docked, port officials boarded them. That meant that they had officially reached port and that their movements were now under the command of port officials instead of their captains.

Behind the tea-laden ships, British Admiral John Montagu brought a squadron of warships to prevent the colonists from forcing the ships back out to sea before they were unloaded. This put the captains (and the ships' owners) in a bind. If the tea wasn't unloaded, customs weren't paid. And if the ships tried to sail back out of port, Montagu would stop them and charge them with failing to pay customs on their cargo that was due, according to him, because they had already entered port.

After a few days, the colonists had the ships come in close to Griffin's Wharf. The Sons of Liberty organized a continuous watch of the vessels. Twenty-five men on each shift ensured that the ships were not unloaded under the cover of darkness, or at least to sound an alarm if there was an attempt. The ships' captains came ashore and left the mates on board. The situation remained the same for more than two weeks.

Thomas Hutchinson, the royal governor of colonial Massachusetts, clearly understood that the colonists were angry, but he did not anticipate that they would damage the cargo. He was counting on the fact that after 20 days without having paid customs, the customs authorities—with the assistance of British sailors and soldiers—could legally impound the tea from the ships, and then, from Castle William, disburse it in small amounts to a few merchants who could resell it. This would circumvent the colonists' effort to make sure that the tea did not enter Massachusetts. Hutchinson and the apprehensive merchants who were willing to receive the tea had holed up with the troops in Castle William.

Boston was not under martial law, so soldiers were not policing the city, although Hutchinson could have brought a detachment of soldiers in, had he known beforehand the particulars of a threat. He did not post a military guard at the wharf, however, perhaps to avoid provoking a confrontation with the crowds keeping watch there.

On December 14th, when the 20 days of waiting were almost up, Hutchinson wrote his brother Elisha about the excited Bostonians, "I hardly think they will attempt sending the tea back, but am more sure it will not go many leagues: it seems probable they will wait to hear from the southward, and much may depend on what is done there." (Hutchinson, 96) Yet Hutchinson also believed the colonists might take some form of direct action if an attempt was made to land the tea onto the wharf.

Just after six o'clock on the night of December 16, 1773, a group of about 60 men daubed their faces with burnt cork, coal dust, or donned other makeshift disguises, armed themselves with hatchets, and formed a raiding party. Some of them styled themselves "Indians."

They made their way to the wharf. The Sons of Liberty's watch was already there, and still others joined them, either to assist or simply to see what was happening. The raiding party formed three groups of 50 each, and boarded all of the nearly deserted ships at about the same time. They met no resistance.

Lendall Pitts, the commander of the group that boarded the brig Beaver, "sent a man to the mate, who was on board, in his cabin, with a message, politely requesting the use of a few lights, and the brig's keys—so that as little damage as possible might be done to the vessel;—and such was the case. The mate acted the part of a gentleman altogether. He handed over the keys without hesitation, and without saying a single word, and sent his cabin-boy for a bunch of candles, to be immediately put in use." (Thatcher, 181–2).

The moon shone brightly too, so their work was well lit. The night was very quiet and neither the crowd on the wharf nor the raiding party spoke much. Onlookers at the wharf, as well as the men on some of the closer British ships, however, quite distinctly heard the sounds of the chests being staved in.

The party quickly brought the 342 chests of tea (a total of 90,000 lbs.) onto the deck. They split them open and threw the tea and the chests overboard into the harbor. The party took care that no other property on board the ships was harmed, and that none of the raiders took away any of the tea. They even swept the decks clean of loose tea when they were done. They worked quickly, apprehensive of a possible attack from Admiral Montagu's squadron, part of which was only a quarter of a mile away.

Montagu watched the affair from the fleet, but he took no action because of the cargo ships' position next to the wharf. "I could easily have prevented the Execution of this Plan," he wrote the following day in a report, "but must have endangered the Lives of many innocent People by firing upon the Town." (Labardee, 145) Instead, he rowed ashore and watched from a building nearby, even briefly exchanging taunts with the Indians.

The tea party lasted three hours, finishing around nine o'clock. The raiding party then formed in rank and file by the wharf, and, shouldering their hatchets, marched, accompanied by a fifer, back into town, dispersed, and went home.

The next morning a large, winding mound of loose tea still floated in the harbor, and a party of colonists rowed out in boats and sank it down into the waters with their oars. The British fleet witnessed this, too, but did not interfere.

The disguised men's identities were kept secret by their fellow Bostonians, and Governor Hutchinson was unable to charge the members of the raiding party, but Parliament responded five months later (news traveled back and forth across the ocean very slowly then) with a series of measures meant to force Boston to heel.

After British victory in the Seven Years War (1756-1763), Parliament attempted to better organize the British Empire. Among other things, Parliament, led by the ministry of George Grenville, enacted the Sugar Act of 1764 and the Stamp Act of 1765, and so for the first time taxed the British North American colonies. The Sugar Act amended the Molasses Act of 1733 by lowering the duty on French West Indian molasses from 6d per gallon to 3d. Reducing the duty made purchase affordable and so encouraged what the higher duty had discouraged.

The colonists denounced the Sugar Act. They reasoned that British subjects had a sacrosanct right to have their property protected. The power to tax threatened property unless the taxing body was chosen by the tax payers and also had to pay the same taxes it required others to pay. The British House of Commons met neither requirement when it taxed the colonies, and so the colonists concluded that taxation without representation violated property rights.

The colonists made the same argument in response to the Stamp Act. But the Sugar Act was enforced primarily on the oceans and by the navy, meaning that the colonists could not physically prevent the tax from being assessed. The stamp tax required that to be legal most paper products—newspapers, court documents, marriage licenses, wills, even playing cards and dice—carry an official stamp. To work the tax depended on colonists within colonial communities selling the stamps, making suspected stamp distributors vulnerable to the pressure of their neighbors. The Grenville ministry announced the stamp tax in February 1765 to go into effect in November. In the intervening months the colonists protested, rioted, and intimidated anyone suspected of taking the office of stamp distributor. Led by the Sons of Liberty, the colonists made the Stamp Act unenforceable before it even began. In 1766 the new Rockingham ministry repealed the Stamp Act but only amended the Sugar Act lowering the duty to 1d per gallon. The experience showed that the colonists opposed all parliamentary taxation but that they could much more easily prevent internal taxes than external ones.

The Chatham ministry came to power in 1767 and enacted new taxes, the Townshend Acts, that year. These external taxes taxed lead, glass, paint, and especially tea. The Townshend Acts provoked the same ideological criticism and led colonists to have grave concerns that British liberty was not safe within the empire. Because the taxes were external they were much harder to prevent but by 1769 the colonists had organized a boycott movement. Growing tensions caused troops stationed on the western frontier to be reassigned to Boston, which led to the famous Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770. The new first minister, Lord North, had already decided to repeal most of the Townshend Acts, which were threatening to tear apart the empire.

In 1770 North repealed all of the acts except for the tax on tea, the most lucrative of the taxes. The remaining tax kept relations tense and suspicious. Finally in 1773 North sought to resolve the impasse. He replaced the last Townshend Act with the Tea Act of 1773. The act was meant to bail out the East India Company, make clear Parliament’s authority to tax the colonies, and make the price of tea cheaper for colonists than it had been before. North reasoned that no colonists could fear an act that made them drink cheaper tea. He was wrong and the Boston Sons of Liberty threw 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773. The Boston Tea Party destroyed tea worth £11,000 or about $1.5 million today. That was the last tax Parliament ever imposed in the colonies. The Tea Party caused the passage of the Coercive Acts of 1774, which were punitive laws meant to punish Massachusetts, but were not taxes. The Coercive Acts led to the first and second Continental Congresses and, ultimately, to the declaration of independence. So taxes did not cause the American Revolution, but taxation without representation did create a climate of suspicion and fear that provoked the events which did.