claims he had gone only for his health:

To add to this unpleasant state of affairs, we had the misfortune to
lose our manager, Mr Henry Noble, at Hong Kong, a gentleman highly esteemed by
us, who was drowned in a voyage to Foochow undertaken for benefit of his
health. The Bankers’ magazine, Vol 26

The trip from Hong Kong to Foochow is about 700 km [434
miles] by sea. Even today, it takes at least a couple of days to sail there. Foochow
was a focal point for trade, so Henry would have done business there in the
past. After the treaty following the Opium War of 1842, it had become a
significant export port, and was central to the exchange banking business
conducted at the time by the Agra and other such banks.

The Great Tea Raceof 1866, an event that began a few months
after Henry’s death, started from Foochow and included five tea clippers fully loaded
up with freshly harvested tea, racing towards Britain – a race of
some three months duration. Like Hong Kong, Foochow was a place where the cutting
edge technologies of the time linked up with the cutting edge ways of doing
business within the British Empire. Not all of them were benign or beneficial, especially
to those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder, but money was there to be
made hand over fist for those who had the zeal and the connections as well as the additional resources of
character and coin for the game.

Henry Noble’s ship may have foundered and sunk somewhere
between Hong Kong and Foochow, but as yet I can find