Boston Harbor Islands, Whale Watching & the Harbor's Rebirth

Boston Harbor (the estuary of the Charles, Mystic, and Neponset Rivers at the western end of Massachusetts Bay — the harbor that launched the American Revolution (the Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773, when colonists dumped 342 chests of British East India Company tea into the harbor) and that was once the most polluted major harbor in the United States (the subject of a famous 1988 presidential campaign advertisement attacking Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis), before a massive clean-up effort in the 1990s-2000s transformed it into one of the cleanest urban harbors in the eastern United States).