Neptune's Needle

...the son of a blacksmith in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, rose to command of a whaleship before settling ashore as a whale oil merchant in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Like many ambitious southern New England merchants in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Fish moved to New York, entering a partnership with his cousin Joseph Grinnell of New Bedford in 1815. Their business expanded from commission sales of whale oil to encompass a wide variety of ocean trade. In 1822 Fish & Grinnell established the Swallowtail Line of Liverpool and London packets. Fish retired in 1829 and thereafter served as president of a New York bank. His firm, which became Grinnell, Minturn & Company, remained among the most prestigious operators of packets and clipper ships through the middle of nineteenth century.

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Peter Richards