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Gaspee Days in Warwick
Gaspee Days is an annual celebration held in Warwick, Rhode Island, commemorating the burning of the British customs schooner HMS Gaspee by Rhode Island colonists in June 1772, an early act of colonial defiance that predates the Boston Tea Party. The multi-week commemoration, organized by the Gaspee Days Committee, includes a reenactment burning, parade, and community events.
In June 1772, the British customs schooner Gaspee ran aground in shallow water in Narragansett Bay near Warwick, Rhode Island, while pursuing a colonial packet boat suspected of evading British trade duties, and that night a group of Providence-area colonists rowed out, boarded the stranded vessel, removed its crew, and burned it, an act of direct colonial defiance against British maritime authority carried out more than a year before the Boston Tea Party's more famous protest against British taxation.