A naval adventurer who saw service from New Orleans to the Yalu River and back over the last half of the 19th Century.

Henry Walton Grinnell was born November 19, 1843 in New York. The son of a semi-famous explorer who searched for the doomed Franklin Expedition, Grinnell joined the US Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1861. However he did not complete his formal education due to the start of the American Civil War and joined the navy proper. Attached to the modern steam sloop USS Monongahela, on patrol near New Orleans for Blockade runners in the Gulf of Mexico, .H. Walton Grinnell was listed as a Mate on the naval list 23 June, 1862 and then made an Acting Ensign, 11 November, 1862. He was given his own command of a small gunboat the USS Nyack as Acting Master, 6 January, 1864 and joined his new ship off the eastern coast. In March 1865, only a month before the war Grinnell had a brush with history.

Responding to a request for volunteers for a hazardous mission he and three of his men were given coded messages to carry through the Confederate lines to Union General William Sherman's headquarters to deliver to him personally. The eight day long secret mission was carried out by use of a dugout canoe until the river system turned into impassible swamp and the party pressed forward on foot. At one point they were nearly captured by two confederate soldiers who they managed to disarm and take with them as hostages. The little team managed to reach Sherman's lines and deliver the dispatches shortly before the war ended. Shortly after this Grinnell and his sailors returned to the more mundane duties aboard their vessel. With the end of the war Grinnell was kept in the peacetime navy as a volunteer lieutenant and offered a regular commission as an Ensign which he did not accept. He was honorably discharged 25 July, 1868, the peacetime navy being something of a disappointment to him.

He soon found himself finding the adventure he so hungrily desired. In newly modernizing Japan he found work as a o-yatoi gaikokujin (Japanese for hired foreigners or mercenaries), specifically a naval specialist to assist in the modernization of Japan. He became an instructor in all things naval and rose to the ranks of the Inspector General of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Grinnell helped train and develop the Japanese officer corps and molded them into a western model. Within a dozen years the Imperial Japanese Navy went from a small wooden fleet with iron cannons to one of the most modern all-steel steam-powered navies in the world. He became a rear admiral and served at the battle of the Yalu River in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 as an advisor with no command authority. It was during this battle that Grinnell fought against the American advisor Philo McGiffin in the Chinese Navy. He was discharged as a full admiral at the end of the war, with his services no longer needed. Japan had ended the practise of the oyatoi gaikokujin, seeing them as replaceable by the new Japanese officer class. Grinnell is credited with developing the Japanese Navy that was to defeat China in 1895 and Imperial Russia ten years later.

Unemployed, Grinnell returned to the United States in 1896 and worked in the shipping industry. When the Spanish American war erupted in 1898 Grinnell sought adventure once more and offered his services again to the navy he left nearly thirty years earlier. He was accepted and at age 55 had to be one of the oldest Lieutenants in the United States Navy. He did not see active service and was honorably discharged 10 January, 1899. He died peacefully on September 2, 1920, in his sleep. When he was born both the American and the Japanese navies were almost non-existent. At his death the US Navy was the second strongest in the world and the Japanese was the fourth.

Source Encyclopedia of Military Biography. Dupuy, Trevor N. I B Tauris & Co Ltd (1992). ISBN 1-85043-569-3