The businessman who made his fortune transporting opium and migrants

On May 19, 1845, an expedition departed from Greenhithe, United Kingdom, with the aim of reaching the Arctic and navigating, for the first time, the route known as the Northwest Passage, which linked Canada to the North Pole and would allow for the discovery of a navigable connection to the Atlantic. For centuries, and for commercial reasons, there had been an aspiration to find a northern route connecting Europe with Asia. The main ships of the 1845 expedition were the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, which had a crew of about 130 people led by Captain John Franklin.

At the end of July of that year, the expedition was last sighted, this time by two whalers who crossed their path. After that, nothing; no news of the adventurers. Captain Franklin's wife made numerous pleas for an investigation into what had happened, and after five years she received the support of Henry Grinnell, a maritime trade entrepreneur who had just retired with a considerable fortune. Our protagonist set out to unravel the mystery of Captain Franklin's lost expedition, a task he would dedicate the rest of his life to.

Born in New England, the son of a whaling vessel owner, his first job after finishing his studies was in New York, at a firm of trading of commoditiesThe experience served him well when he started his own company seven years later, in 1825. He joined his brother, an already successful businessman with the curious name Preserved Fish, to establish a shipping company. Later, his brother-in-law also became a partner. The business was a great success, and the company soon became one of the largest in the country in its sector.

The company's years of operation coincided with the rise of the opium trade, which, since 1839, had sparked the First Opium War, with the British as the main instigators. Transporting this merchandise provided enormous profits for Grinnell and his partners. They also profited from the mass exodus of Irish people to the United States during the famine of 1845-1852, known as Gorta Mór in Irish. In this case, the transport was not of raw materials, but of people seeking a better life in the New World. All the company's partners became part of the most powerful elite in New York at the time. But there were still more reasons to become rich, because the California Gold Rush that began in the mid-19th century also brought them enormous income.

When Grinnell retired from maritime business in 1849, he maintained some professional activity through his relationships with several insurance companies, such as the Globe Insurance Company, the Arctic Insurance Company, and the United States Insurance Company, and also with banking institutions, such as Seamen's Bank. Meanwhile, the company that Grinnell had helped to found continued operating after the deaths of the founding partners and did not close its doors until 1880, when it was already in the hands of the second generation.

In the realm of philanthropy, Grinnell was one of the founders, in 1851, of the American Geographical and Statistical Society, a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing geographical knowledge. One of the driving forces among the founding group was their interest in the North Pole, as was the case with Grinnell, who financed expeditions related to the Franklin mystery. Grinnell himself was the institution's third president, serving from 1861 to 1864. In gratitude for his work, a territory in northern Canada was named after him: the Grinnell Peninsula.

We mentioned earlier that the search for the Franklin mystery would occupy the rest of his life, meaning that Grinnell died without being able to unravel the entanglement. In his obituary in the New York Times He was remembered as a man whose integrity and honesty had helped him succeed in the business world. And as for the mystery surrounding him, it wasn't until 2014 that enough clues began to emerge to establish a plausible hypothesis about the expedition's fate. That year, the MHS Erebus at the bottom of the Canadian coast, while in 2016 another expedition located the HSM Terrornot far from the other discovery.