ABoston Globe Best Non-Fiction Book of 2007 Amazon.com Editors pick as one of the 10 best history books of 200 Winner of the 2007 John Lyman Award for U. S. Maritime History, given by the North American Society for Oceanic Histor "The best history of American whaling to come along in a generation." --Nathaniel Philbrick

Boston Harbor served as a colonial gateway to the world, witnessed the Boston Tea Party, and helped the community transform itself from an outpost of a few hardy settlers into a bustling metropolis and self-proclaimed hub of the universe. Yet for hundreds of years Boston Harbor was also a cesspool. Long before Bostonians dumped tea into the harbor to protest English taxes, they dumped sewage there.As the Boston area grew and prospered, its sewage problems worsened, as did the harbor's health, to the point where in the 1980s it was considered the most polluted harbor in the country and...