Lost at sea, year by year

Lost and never forgottenIn remembrance of the fishermen and mariners of Cape Ann lost at sea, and of the families who waited for them to come home.

How many Gloucester names went into the city's Lost at Sea register each year, and how many vessels.

The City of Gloucester's register lists more than 6,600 people lost from the port since 1633. We counted its entries by year and decade so you can see when the sea took the most: the busiest years fall in the 1860s to 1890s, when Gloucester's schooner fleet worked the offshore banks in all seasons.

Source: Cape Ann Current. Sources and reuse rules.

Read these numbers with care

• Each count is names in one register, not a confirmed death toll. The city says the register is incomplete.
• Vessel counts are approximate, and a vessel lost with no one named in the register is missing from them.
• Other records give other totals. The 1882 Fishermen's Own Book, for example, counts 27 Gloucester vessels and 212 men lost in 1876; the register has 213 entries for that year.
• The register was last compiled in 2010, so recent decades are incomplete.

Download the yearly and decade counts on the dataset page, or explore individual records in the archive.