Historic Boston Harbor Cruise

Boston Harbor was the stage for some of the most consequential events of the American Revolution. On December 16, 1773, the Sons of Liberty boarded three tea ships moored at Griffin’s Wharf — the Dartmouth, Eleanor, and Beaver — and dumped 342 chests of East India Company tea into the harbor. The Boston Tea Party was a direct provocation that led to the Coercive Acts, the convening of the First Continental Congress, and ultimately the outbreak of armed conflict at Lexington and Concord in April 1775.

The harbor itself is a complex of islands, inlets, and channels that stretches roughly sixteen miles from the Neponset River mouth to the Gurnet in Duxbury. The Boston Harbor Islands State and National Recreation Area encompasses thirty-four islands and peninsulas, several of which contain Civil War-era fortifications and colonial-period ruins. Boston Light on Little Brewster Island, established in 1716, is the oldest lighthouse site in the United States and the only remaining staffed lighthouse operated by the US Coast Guard.

Cruises departing from Long Wharf at the foot of State Street pass the MBTA Aquarium, USS Constitution moored at the Charlestown Navy Yard, and the World War II-era destroyer USS Cassin Young. The narrated route covers the harbor’s layered history from the Puritan settlement of the 1630s through the Tea Party, the Civil War defenses, and the harbor’s dramatic environmental recovery in the 1990s following one of the largest EPA cleanup efforts in American history.