Gloucester

The moments

The sourced timeline.

1. 01

   Before English arrival · Colonial · pre-1763

   Cape Ann was Agawam and Pawtucket fishing ground first

   Indigenous HistoryMaritime

   Long before any English vessel anchored in the harbor, the rocky cape that Europeans would rename Cape Ann was the seasonal fishing and shellfishing ground of the Pawtucket and Agawam peoples, both part of the wider Pennacook and Massachusett-speaking networks of the region.

   Coastal weirs, shell middens, and shaped-stone tools recovered around Annisquam and the Essex marshes document a maritime economy that ran for thousands of years before contact. The cape's name in the local language has been recorded by historians as Wingaersheek, though scholars continue to debate its precise origin and translation.

   Figures · Pawtucket people, Agawam people

   SourceMassachusetts Historical CommissionSourceCape Ann Museum
2. 02

   1623 · Colonial · pre-1763

   An English fishing camp at Stage Fort, one of the earliest in Massachusetts

   MaritimeCivic Firsts

   In 1623 a small party of Dorchester Company fishermen pitched their stages and flakes at what is now Stage Fort Park on Gloucester Harbor. The venture was a commercial fishing station, not a religious colony, predating the founding of Salem by three years and Boston by seven.

   The Dorchester effort failed financially within a few seasons and most of the men either returned to England or moved on to Naumkeag, the settlement that became Salem. Permanent English resettlement of Cape Ann came later in the 1630s and 1640s, but the 1623 fishing camp anchors Gloucester's claim as one of the first English footholds in New England and the oldest continuous fishery in what is now the United States.

   SourceNational Park Service, Essex National Heritage AreaSourceCape Ann Museum
3. 03

   Eighteenth century · Colonial · pre-1763

   Gloucester schooners push out to the Grand Banks

   MaritimeLabor

   By the eighteenth century Gloucester vessels were sailing to the Grand Banks off Newfoundland and to Georges Bank closer to home, hunting cod in volume that fed not only New England but the West Indies sugar plantations through the salt-fish trade.

   The work was relentless and the crews were young. Cod salted on deck and dried on shoreline flakes built the merchant fortunes of Cape Ann and tied Gloucester's economy permanently to deep-water risk.

   SourceNOAA Northeast Fisheries Science CenterSourceLibrary of Congress, American Memory
4. 04

   1713 · Colonial · pre-1763

   The fishing schooner takes shape on Gloucester Harbor

   MaritimeInnovation

   Tradition, recorded in nineteenth-century maritime histories, holds that the first true schooner was launched at Andrew Robinson's yard in Gloucester in 1713. Modern historians treat the date as approximate, but Cape Ann is widely credited as one of the cradles of the two-masted, fore-and-aft rig that came to dominate the North Atlantic fishery.

   Over the next two centuries Gloucester builders refined the type into the fast, sharp-bowed clipper schooners and later the iconic Fredonia and Indian Header designs. Speed back to market mattered: the first schooner home with fresh fish set the price for the rest of the fleet.

   Figures · Andrew Robinson

   SourceMystic Seaport MuseumSourceCape Ann Museum
5. 05

   January 1883 · Industrial · 1815–1880

   Howard Blackburn rows five days with frozen hands

   MaritimeLabor

   In January 1883 a Gloucester schooner-man named Howard Blackburn was working a dory off the schooner Grace L. Fears on the Burgeo Bank when a blizzard cut him and his dorymate Thomas Welch off from the vessel.

   Welch died in the boat the first night. Blackburn, realizing his hands were freezing, deliberately curled them around the oar handles before they stiffened, then rowed for roughly five days and ninety miles to the south coast of Newfoundland.

   He survived. He lost every finger and most of both thumbs to frostbite. He came home to Gloucester, opened a saloon on Main Street, and later sailed the Atlantic alone twice in small sloops he handled without fingers.

   “He froze his hands to the oars and rowed for Newfoundland.”

   Figures · Howard Blackburn, Thomas Welch

   SourceCape Ann MuseumSourceNew England Historical Society
6. 06

   1897 · Progressive Era · 1880–1920

   Rudyard Kipling sets a novel on a Gloucester schooner

   MaritimeInnovation

   Rudyard Kipling spent stretches of the 1890s in New England and grew fascinated by the Gloucester fishing fleet. He published Captains Courageous in 1897, a coming-of-age novel set aboard the fictional Gloucester schooner We're Here on the Grand Banks.

   The book introduced national readers to the rhythms of the dory fishery, the immigrant crews, and the cost in lives. It put Gloucester on the literary map and helped fix the schooner-man as an American archetype.

   Figures · Rudyard Kipling

   SourceLibrary of CongressSourceThe Kipling Society
7. 07

   1925 · Modern · 1920–1965

   The Man at the Wheel rises on the harbor for the lost

   MaritimeLabor

   In 1925, for Gloucester's tercentenary, the city dedicated the Gloucester Fishermen's Memorial on Stacy Boulevard, the bronze figure of a sou'westered helmsman at the wheel sculpted by Leonard Craske.

   The base reads, They That Go Down to the Sea in Ships, from Psalm 107. Bronze plaques along the boulevard carry the names of more than five thousand three hundred Gloucester fishermen lost at sea since 1623. New names are still being added.

   Figures · Leonard Craske

   SourceNational Park Service, Essex National Heritage AreaSourceCape Ann Museum
8. 08

   Late 19th to early 20th century · Progressive Era · 1880–1920

   Portuguese and Italian fishermen remake the waterfront

   ImmigrationMaritimeLabor

   From the 1870s onward Gloucester's crews and shore work were increasingly Portuguese, drawn first from the Azores and later from mainland Portugal, and Italian, drawn heavily from the Sicilian villages of Terrasini and Sciacca.

   The Portuguese community organized around Our Lady of Good Voyage Church and the Fiesta of St. Peter, first celebrated in Gloucester in 1927, with its blessing of the fleet and the greasy pole walk in the inner harbor. The Sicilian community established the St. Joseph's Day altars and the procession of the Madonna del Soccorso. Both traditions remain active on the waterfront a century later.

   SourceLibrary of Congress, American Folklife CenterSourceCape Ann Museum
9. 09

   1969 · Contemporary · 1965–today

   The Gloucester Fishermen's Wives Association is founded

   Women's RightsLaborMaritime

   In 1969 a group of Gloucester women, many of them married to active fishermen and many of them daughters of the Sicilian and Portuguese communities, organized the Gloucester Fishermen's Wives Association.

   The Association became one of the most effective advocacy voices in the American fishing industry, lobbying on fuel prices, foreign factory trawlers, fishery management, marine sanctuary policy, and survivor benefits. Its founders argued, in public testimony, that the women who buried husbands and sons at the Man at the Wheel had earned a seat at the regulatory table.

   Figures · Angela Sanfilippo

   SourceGloucester Fishermen's Wives AssociationSourceNOAA Fisheries
10. 10

    October 1991 · Contemporary · 1965–today

    The Andrea Gail is lost in the Perfect Storm

    MaritimeLaborEnvironment

    On October 28, 1991, the Gloucester swordboat Andrea Gail, owned by Bob Brown and skippered by Billy Tyne, was working east of the Grand Banks when an extratropical cyclone absorbed Hurricane Grace and built into one of the most severe storms ever recorded in the North Atlantic.

    The Andrea Gail's last position report came in on October 28. The vessel and her six crew were never recovered. The National Weather Service later christened the system the Perfect Storm because of the rare convergence of meteorological factors that produced it.

    Figures · Billy Tyne, Bob Brown, the crew of the Andrea Gail

    SourceNOAA National Weather ServiceSourceNational Transportation Safety Board
11. 11

    1997 · Contemporary · 1965–today

    Sebastian Junger publishes The Perfect Storm

    MaritimeLabor

    In 1997 Sebastian Junger, who had worked in Gloucester and drunk at the Crow's Nest, published The Perfect Storm, a nonfiction reconstruction of the 1991 storm and the lives of the Andrea Gail crew.

    The book became a number one bestseller, was adapted into a 2000 Warner Brothers film, and forced a national conversation about commercial fishing safety, federal fishery management, and the economic squeeze on small-boat ports. The Crow's Nest, the Main Street bar central to the book, is still open.

    Figures · Sebastian Junger

    SourceThe New York TimesSourceLibrary of Congress
12. 12

    Twenty-first century · Contemporary · 1965–today

    The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than ninety-nine percent of the world's oceans

    EnvironmentMaritimeLabor

    Peer-reviewed work led by the Gulf of Maine Research Institute and corroborated by NOAA satellite records has found that surface waters in the Gulf of Maine warmed faster than ninety-nine percent of the global ocean between 2004 and 2013, with continued acceleration since.

    Atlantic cod, the species that built Gloucester, has been in a sustained collapse off Cape Ann for more than two decades. Federal regulators have closed entire grounds and slashed quotas. The fleet that survived the Perfect Storm now competes for what is left while planning, in real time, for what the Gulf will look like at four degrees of warming.

    SourceNOAA Northeast Fisheries Science CenterSourceGulf of Maine Research InstituteSourcePershing et al., Science (2015)
13. 13

    Mid-nineteenth century onward · Industrial · 1815–1880

    Rocky Neck becomes one of America's oldest working art colonies

    InnovationMaritime

    Gloucester's clean north light and working harbor drew painters from the 1840s onward. Fitz Henry Lane, born in Gloucester in 1804, painted the harbor's luminous schooners and granite headlands and helped define the American Luminist movement before his death in 1865.

    Winslow Homer worked at Ten Pound Island in 1880, producing a celebrated body of watercolors. Edward Hopper painted the working houses of East Gloucester in the 1920s. The Rocky Neck Art Colony, organized around the peninsula in East Gloucester, is among the oldest continuously active art colonies in the United States.

    Figures · Fitz Henry Lane, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper

    SourceCape Ann MuseumSourceSmithsonian American Art MuseumSourceRocky Neck Art Colony

The people

Figures from Gloucester.

• Howard Blackburn

  Industrial · 1815–1880

  Gloucester schooner-man who rowed five days through a Grand Banks blizzard with frozen hands in 1883, then sailed the Atlantic alone twice after losing his fingers.

• Fitz Henry Lane

  Industrial · 1815–1880

  Gloucester-born painter, born 1804, whose luminous harbor views helped define the American Luminist movement before his death in 1865.

• Rudyard Kipling

  Progressive Era · 1880–1920

  Author of Captains Courageous (1897), the novel set on a Gloucester Grand Banks schooner that fixed the city in American literature.

• Winslow Homer

  Industrial · 1815–1880

  American painter who produced his celebrated 1880 watercolor series from Ten Pound Island in Gloucester Harbor.

• Angela Sanfilippo

  Contemporary · 1965–today

  Sicilian-born president of the Gloucester Fishermen's Wives Association and one of the most prominent voices in U.S. fishery policy.

• Sebastian Junger

  Contemporary · 1965–today

  Author of The Perfect Storm (1997), the book on the loss of the Gloucester swordboat Andrea Gail that became a defining account of the modern American fishery.