Britain's thirst for tea in the eighteenth century was growing steadily. Fortunes could be made from shipping in tea - and many lives lost in the process. The East India Company rewarded its crews according to results. If no tea was landed, no one got paid.
But rising taxation led to smuggling. No one knows how much tea was imported illegally from mainland Europe. A single trip across the North Sea could net a fortune that was big enough to share - indeed it had to be, to buy the silence of everyone involved.
Canny tea merchants were even tempted to exploit customers' ignorance about tea by diluting the product - sometimes with inferior teas, sometimes with something altogether less palatable. The process of thinning out could occur several times over as corrupt retailers and middlemen increased profits at each stage by bulking up with twigs and dried leaves.
History of Tea
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Such practices outraged honest tea importers and traders. During the 1780s, Richard Twining published a book on the subject. There was a certain village near London, he said, almost entirely devoted to the production of material for adulterating tea. The industrious villagers apparently churned out 20 tonnes of the stuff each year, and their nauseating list of ingredients included sheep's dung.