♂Fortunatus Sherman

Fortunatus Sherman (died 19 February 1803) was the son of a Dartmouth, Massachusetts shipwright. In the Revolution he sat on his town’s Committee of Safety, and he later settled at Cambridge, in Washington County, New York, where his will left his seat in the church gallery for the use of the poor. Histories of the whale fishery name him as the master of Dartmouth whaling vessels in the late 1760s. He was the fourth great-grand-uncle of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), the brother of Henry Shearman (1730–1805), Roger’s fourth great-grandfather.

Dartmouth

Fortunatus was born at Dartmouth, in Bristol County, then part of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay, the first of the eleven children of Jabez Sherman (1700–1774) and Jedidah Hawes (1709–1764). A family-history website and a Delano family genealogy of 1899 give his birth as 24 September 1728 and his marriage to Sarah Delano at Dartmouth as 30 August 1753.

At sea

The family-history website calls Fortunatus “a sea rover”, and the printed histories of the port bear it out. In the summer of 1758 the Philadelphia custom house entered a vessel from Rhode Island under a master named Fortunatus Shearman, and cleared him back to Rhode Island; the newspaper does not name his town, but the name is rare and Dartmouth lies on the Rhode Island border. A history of New Bedford published in 1892, drawing on Starbuck’s history of the American whale fishery, lists him among the masters of Dartmouth whaling vessels in 1768, 1769 and 1770. An earlier history of 1858, describing the licence issued at Newport in 1770 to the sloop Wren, built that year at Dartmouth, records him among the men who afterwards commanded her. The Delano genealogy calls him Captain Fortunatus Sherman.

When his father made his will in June 1774, Fortunatus received the dwelling house and about nine and a half acres, on condition that he pay his brother Jabez twenty pounds, and he was named sole executor.

The Revolution

On 3 February 1777 Fortunatus headed the signatures on a letter from Dartmouth’s Committee of Safety^W and selectmen. It asked that the leave given to certain prisoners be withdrawn and that they be sent from Providence to New York or Halifax, because they knew the destinations and sailing times of the port’s vessels and could expose them to the enemy’s cruisers. Later that month he chaired the committee that fixed the town’s prices for food, labor and goods, from pork and coffee to a tailor’s day and the shoeing of a horse. A local historical sketch of 1903 names him as a selectman in June 1778, signing with Thomas Kempton a petition to the General Court. It warned that Dartmouth’s harbor was the only one between Cape Cod and North Carolina still in American hands, crowded with fifty vessels and full stores, and that families were already leaving Bedford for want of protection.

Three months later the British landed and burned the waterfront at Bedford in Grey’s raid^W. A county history of 1931, written from a descendant’s family account, says that Fortunatus’s house was the first the British burned. The same history prints a letter by his son Lemuel, who served in the alarm when New Bedford was burned and came to Cambridge in 1779.

Cambridge, New York

A descendant’s chapter on the family says that Fortunatus moved to Cambridge, probably in 1778, when he sold the land he had inherited. On 1 March 1782 he was one of the three-man committee of the district convention who signed the district’s petition to be restored to New York. Vermont had taken the district into its jurisdiction, then dissolved the union, and the petitioners asked to return to their former allegiance. In 1785 he leased the east part of a lot there, saying that he lived on the western part. The 1790 census lists a Fortunatus Sherman at Cambridge. A history of the Presbytery of Argyle records that he was ordained a ruling elder of the Cambridge church on 31 August 1791, and the descendant’s chapter names him a trustee of the Protestant Presbyterian Congregation of Cambridge from 1786 to 1797.

Will and death

Sarah died in 1802, according to the same chapter. Fortunatus made his will at Cambridge on 17 February 1803, in poor health, and died two days later, on 19 February. He asked to be buried in the Cambridge graveyard beside his wife, and divided the rest of his estate into twelve shares. He left the congregation of the Reverend John Dunlop three dollars and fifty cents a year, to be paid by his son Lemuel, and gave his gallery seat to the poor of the church. Lemuel received a share and the seat below, and his son Amasa, his daughters Rhoda Wells and Eunice Bishop, and several grandchildren shared the rest. The executors were Lemuel, Nathaniel Wells and a Bachelor Sherman, most likely his nephew Batchelder, a son of Henry. The will was proved at Salem in April 1803.

Notes

Name, birth and wife

An index of family trees gives his name as Fortunatus Henry Sherman. Their father’s will names Fortunatus and Henry as two separate sons with separate legacies, so he is called Fortunatus here.

His death date comes from an index of family trees; the will, dated two days earlier and proved that April, agrees with it.

The sea career and the burned house

The whaling commands rest on printed histories of the port, not on the vessels’ own papers, and the 1758 Philadelphia entry does not name the master’s town. The burning of his house is a family account printed in 1931, more than 150 years after the raid; the same sketch wrongly places his new home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It fits the records around it: he was still a Dartmouth selectman in June 1778, and the family was at Cambridge by 1779. Two family histories of 1928 and 1931 also make his father a lieutenant in the English Royal Navy. No record supports that, and his father’s own papers describe a Dartmouth shipwright.