Many Bostonians resented the presence and abuses of a large military force in their midst, and hostility grew rapidly into frequent brawls between workers and soldiers. On the night of March 5, 1770, Captain Thomas Preston and a small detachment came to the aid of a harassed sentry on duty at the Customs House, and in circumstances that are still unclear, the desperate soldiers fired into the hostile crowd. Five men fell and several more were wounded. Crispus Attucks, a merchant seaman of Native American and African descent, was shot twice in his chest and was the first Bostonian killed in the incident. He later came to be regarded as a hero to the anti-slavery movement as the first to die in the American Revolution. Paul Revere quickly published his engraving, "The Bloody Massacre in King Street," which became a powerful influence in forming outspoken anti-British public opinion. Ironically, on the same day, Parliament repealed most of the Townshend Duties but retained the tax on tea to maintain its claimed right to tax the colonies. In May 1773, Parliament authorized the East India Company, which was facing bankruptcy due to corruption and mismanagement, to export over half a million pounds of surplus tea to the American colonies without the usual tariffs and to appoint its own consignees to receive and sell the tea to the exclusion of other colonial dealers. These privileges let the company sell tea so cheaply that it could undersell American merchants and dominate the colonial tea trade. From the colonists' perspective, the Tea Act was an unfair and dangerous measure that granted exclusive rights to a few, encouraged corruption in government, created more unfair competition for colonial merchants, and revived American passions over taxation without representation.