This is the story of an Aegean island and its people that prospered from sponge fishing. Meticulously researched, the book reveals Kalymnos’s prevalence in the business, profession and culture of sponge fishing, and its global commercial network. It analyses the fishing practices, the shipowners, the seamen, the women “tough as men”, the divers that risked paralysis or death from decompression disease, something acceptable in the community, like the acceptance of danger in warrior societies.