In 1825, Henry joined his older brother Joseph and Preserved Fish in Fish, Grinnell & Company. A few years later, with the addition of Henry's brother-in-law, Robert Bowne Minturn, the firm became Grinnell, Minturn & Company, whose operations were greatly expanded by its entry into the general shipping business. The company became one of the strongest and best known mercantile houses in New York City.
Arctic exploration
Henry Grinnell retired in 1850, around the time that he became very interested in the fate of the lost Franklin Polar Expedition. For the remainder of his life he corresponded regularly with Lady Jane Franklin and others interested in solving the mystery, as well as promoting and funding several expeditions. The first of these expeditions was in 1850, when he purchased and loaned to the United States Navy the brigs Rescue and Advance to search the Arctic under the overall command of Lieutenant Edwin De Haven. After these vessels returned unsuccessful, he funded a second expedition with the Advance under Elisha Kent Kane which explored the region named Grinnell Land off the north-western coast of Greenland between 1853 and 1855, when the vessel, hopelessly beset in the ice, was abandoned. In 1856, Grinnell was instrumental in having the recently salvaged HMS Resolute restored at the expense of the United States government, and returned to Great Britain as a good-will gesture. This was partly in the hope that the vessel would be used for a further search for the Franklin expedition. On later occasions, Grinnell manifested his unabated interest in polar exploration by contributing to the voyage of Isaac Israel Hayes in 1860, and the three expeditions of Charles Francis Hall between 1860 and 1870. He was also a regular correspondent with the writer and unsuccessful explorer William Parker Snow. Henry Grinnell was also one of the founders, and the first president, of the American Geographical and Statistical Society.
Grinnell died on June 30, 1874 and was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. In 1880, the British Government presented his widow with a lady's desk made from timbers from the recently demolished HMS Resolute. This was not the Resolute desk, but a companion desk made from other timbers from the same vessel.
Descendants
Through his daughter Sarah, he was the grandfather of Frances Sherborne Ridley "Fanny" Watts. Fanny was a childhood friend of the artist John Singer Sargent, who painted her in 1877. The painting was the first that Sargent submitted to the Paris Salon. Through his son Robert, he was the grandfather of Josephine Lucy Grinnell, who married Fredrick Harold Van Rensselaer, a grandson of U.S. Representative Henry Bell Van Rensselaer, in 1898. After his death of cerebro meningitis, she married the actor Harold Rogers Woolf, nephew of Benjamin Edward Woolf, in 1905. They divorced and in 1913, she married Robert Stewart Smith. Through his daughter Sylvia, he was the grandfather of Sylvia Leith-Ross, who was an anthropologist and writer who worked in Nigeria.
