William F. Sturgis
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William F. Sturgis (February 25, 1782 - October 21, 1863) was a Boston merchant in the China trade.
Sturgis was born in Barnstable, Massachusetts, to Hannah Mills and William E. Sturgis, a ship master and lineal descendant from Edward Sturgis of Yarmouth, Massachusetts, the first Sturgis in America (arrived 1630). In 1796, he joined the counting house of his uncle Russell Sturgis (1750–1826), and less than two years later became connected with James and Thomas Handasyd Perkins's fur trade between the Pacific Northwest coast and China. Upon his father's death in 1797, he went to sea to support the family as assistant trader on the Eliza, then chief mate of the Ulysses. He then served under Captain Charles Derby in the Caroline until Derby died and Sturgis took command. In 1804 the Caroline sailed from the Columbia River to Kaigahnee, just south of Prince of Wales Island, Alaska, acquiring some 2,500 sea otter skins that netted $73,034.
He did not return to Boston until 1810, when he married Elizabeth M. Davis (with whom he had one son and five daughters) and formed a trading copartnership with John Bryant as Bryant & Sturgis. From 1810-1850 more than half of the trade carried on between the Pacific Northwest coast and China was under their direction.
Sturgis was a longtime member of the Massachusetts House and Senate, a member and sometime president of the Boston Marine Society, and a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society. He donated his house to be the Barnstable public library, and his papers are collected there in the Sturgis Library Archives. One of his descendants donated the Tanglewood estate to the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
[edit] References
[edit] Further reading
- Sturgis, William, Memoir of the Hon. William Sturgis, Charles Greely Loring, ed., John Wilson & Sons, Boston, 1864.
- Sturgis, William, The Journal of William Sturgis: The Eighteenth-Century Memoirs of a Sailor, S.W. Jackman, ed., ISBN 0-919462-54-5.
