Preserved Fish was born in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, the son of Preserved Fish. There is no foundation for the often-repeated story that his unusual name was bestowed by a New Bedford fisherman who found him as an infant, adrift at sea in an open boat. The name had come down through several generations of descendants of Thomas Fish who was settled at Portsmouth in 1643.
As a boy, he worked at first in his father’s blacksmith shop and then tried farming.
Finally he shipped on a whaler for the Pacific and by twenty-one had risen to captain. Endowed with an unusual amount of Yankee shrewdness and sharpness, Fish realized that more money could be made in selling whale oil than in gathering it.
He became a merchant at New Bedford for a few years and then, after a political quarrel, impulsively sold his property for half its value. Like many other New Englanders of that day, he moved to New York with its wider range of business possibilities.
In 1817 he was one of the twenty-eight brokers of the New York Exchange Board, the nucleus of the New York Stock Exchange, but he is principally remembered as the founder of an organization which eventually rose to first place in New York mercantile and shipping circles.
The firm started in 1815 as Fish & Grinnell, and soon included three New Bedford brothers, Joseph, Henry, and Moses Hicks Grinnell. Originally the partners confined themselves to marketing part of New Bedford’s whale- oil output. It was remarked that they “sold two kinds of oil, good and bad. ”
By 1823 they were operating a line of four packets to Liverpool, competing with the Black Ball Line, and were also running a line of packets to New Orleans. Shortly after that, Fish left the firm. His eccentric disposition may account for the several sharp breaks in his business career.
By 1832 Robert B. Minturn was a partner in the old firm which now became Grinnell, Minturn & Company. Under that name it secured an unquestioned primacy in New York foreign commerce. Fish, in the meantime, had gone to Liverpool where he formed a partnership with Edward Carnes and Walter Willis. The firm was not successful financially, and broke up in two years. Returning to New York, Fish entered another partnership which lasted barely six months, and then retired from active business for seven years.
He returned to it again about 1836, becoming president of the Tradesman’s Bank and holding that position until his death.
Fish was a Quaker until late in life when he turned Episcopalian.
Though he was an active Jacksonian Democrat, he joined the Whigs in 1837 in opposition to Van Buren.
He was married three times.
