Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 October 2009
Henry Grinnell (1799–1874), a retired New York shipping magnate, maintained for 20 years a correspondence with Jane Franklin, wife of the British explorer Sir John Franklin whose ships Erebus and Terror were lost in the Arctic some time after 1845. Grinnell financed two United States expeditions and two searches by Charles Francis Hall to the Arctic to collect information on the fate of the Franklin expedition. Grinnell's letters, now held in the archives of the Scott Polar Research Institute, form the basis of this article.