For nearly four centuries, Gloucester's history has been the story of America's greatest fishing port, beginning with settlers from England in 1623 who harvested the ocean's bounty on the rich fishing banks between Gloucester and Newfoundland and later throughout the Atlantic. During the 1800s, immigrants from the Canadian Maritimes, Scandinavia, Ireland, Italy, and Portugal joined this perilous work, establishing an industry that yielded countless millions of pounds of fish. That legacy came at a tremendous cost, with over 5300 men lost at sea to catastrophic northeasters, small dories gone astray from schooners, collisions in storms, and steamers in the shipping lanes. These men were remembered not only as fishermen but as fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons whose lives and losses profoundly shaped the community. Men known to be lost at sea numbered 5368, and of nearly 1,000 ships lost, 265 were lost with all hands. Thousands of widows struggled to survive and raise their children, and many fatherless children entered the trade of their lost fathers. Between 1860 and 1906, 660 ships sank and 3880 men were lost, including 120 men in a single storm in 1862 and 159 men in another devastating storm in 1879. Gloucester honors both those known to have been lost and those men and ships lost without record.