ABSTRACT
Daly's professional credentialing as judge, lawyer, and geographer allowed him to present himself as authoritative 'jurist-geographer' when maneuvering through public and scientific communities in order to secure Arctic exploration as a valuable civic and commercial enterprise. Arctic and polar exploration during the period of Charles Daly's American Geographical and Statistical Society (AGS) presidency fused along a number of coordinates and goals. The searches for Franklin's lost expedition were linked either implicitly or explicitly to hopes of discovering new commercial fisheries the search for trade route across the Arctic Circle. Infused with the commercial logic of finding a practical shipping route between Europe/America and Asia through waters of the Arctic circle, this was an aspiration more or less dependent upon finding a short-cut from the Atlantic to the Pacific via open water at the North Pole itself. This survey of a type of 'commercial empire' in the Arctic is one to which Henry Grinnell's patronage of AGS expeditions is obviously linked.
