For centuries people saw the Chesapeake Bay as a bottomless sink for waste products -- a natural decomposer with the ability to freshen itself with ocean inflows. Not until human health and livelihood seemed threatened did people begin to think seriously about management by such methods as treating sewage and limiting seafood harvests. Chesapeake Waters chronicles four centuries of public attitudes about the Bay -- and legislative responses to them -- from 1607, the date of the first English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, to the close of the twentieth century. In the last few decades, wide-reaching measures by federal and local governments have influenced how people use the Bay. The authors make sense of these programs and relate how human attitudes and ideas have shaped four hundred years of decisions about the Bay.