For three hundred years, generations of Tilghman Islanders have lived by harvesting the waters of Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay. They are watermen, an old English term for commercial fishermen, and their lives today retain much of the spirit and simplicity that characterized their land’s first Anglo-Saxon settlers. Watermen is the story of their lives told by Randy Peffer, a young writer who came to Tilghman Island to search for his ancestral roots and left a year later with the makings of this book. Watermen is a singular work, a book that will touch anyone who has ever glimpsed the peope of the Chesapeake, whether in literature or in life.