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The Frozen WaterTrade
How Ice from New England Lakes
Kept the World Cool
GAVIN WEIGHTMAN
COPYRIGHT
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This paperback edition 2003
First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollinsPublishers 2002
Copyright © Gavin Weightman 2002
Source ISBN: 9780007102860
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DEDICATION
In fond memory of my uncle
Morris Weightman
CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
NOTE TO READERS
DEDICATION
INTRODUCTION
MAP
Chapter 1: The Frozen Assets of New England
Chapter 2: Tropical Ice Creams
Chapter 3: From the Ice-House to the Jailhouse
Chapter 4: Exile in Havana
Chapter 5: Sad Return from Savannah
Chapter 6: The Crack-Up
Chapter 7: The Cutting Edge of the Ice Trade
Chapter 8: A Cool Cargo for Calcutta
Chapter 9: The Ice Wagon Rolls on
Chapter 10: Wenham Lake
Chapter 11: Homage to the Ice King
Chapter 12: After Tudor
EPILOGUE
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
OTHER WORKS
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
FOOTNOTES
INTRODUCTION
The inspiration for this book was one of those scraps of information that lodge in the mind and refuse to go away. I had read somewhere, while researching the history of nineteenth-century London, that Queen Victoria had for a time enjoyed a supply of ice from Massachusetts in New England. It was delivered by an American enterprise called the Wenham Lake Ice Company, which in the 1840s had an ice store and a shop in London with a window onto The Strand, in which a large cube of crystal clear ice about two feet square was displayed every day in summer. Sometimes a colourful New England fish called a pickerel would be frozen into the block of ice on show.
I wondered if the ingenious Americans, pioneers of mass production, great inventors and modernisers, had stolen a march on the rest of the world and devised a form of refrigeration which could produce ice cheaply enough to sell at a price the wealthy in London could afford. I discovered that there was in fact a huge ice industry in nineteenth-century North America, but that it was not at all what I had imagined.
Ice became essential to the American way of life from the mid-nineteenth century. Americans made ice cream at home on Sundays, had ice-boxes in which to keep butter and milk fresh, were served iced drinks in hotels, and were dependent on ice for the preservation of fresh food long before there was any artificial refrigeration at all. All the ice was natural, cut from lakes and rivers in winter, stored in huge ice-houses and delivered to customers in horse-drawn wagons. A great quantity was exported in the holds of sailing ships: that is how the ice from Wenham Lake, near Salem in Massachusetts, was carried to London. In fact the New England ice trade had begun not as a domestic business but with exports to the West Indies, and it had achieved a much more remarkable feat before any ice was sold in London: in the 1830s Boston merchants began selling ice to the British community in Calcutta. The voyage to India was about 16,000 miles, and in favourable conditions took about 130 days. Yet for fifty years the sale of New England ice to Calcutta was a profitable business. In fact its success saved the man who had first dreamed up the ice trade from financial catastrophe.
He was Frederic Tudor, surely one of most remarkable businessmen of the nineteenth century. Tudor was a diminutive, pig-headed Bostonian who dedicated most of his working life to supplying ice to the tropics. He suffered the humiliation of bankruptcy, was jailed for debt, endured a mental breakdown, but came through it all to father six children after the age of fifty and to die in 1864, aged eighty, a wealthy man with a country estate. At no time did Tudor, or any of those who became his competitors in the ice business, make use of artificial refrigeration. With one or two trivial exceptions, all the ice marketed in Tudor’s lifetime was ‘harvested’ from lakes and rivers which froze in the winter. In the holds of ships the ice was preserved through many days, and even weeks, sailing through tropical heat by the insulation of sawdust supplied by timber mills in Maine.
The ice trade was carried on in a century of great inventions – the electric telegraph, railways, steam-driven machines of all kinds, and gas and electric light. It continued long after Tudor’s death, into the age of petrol engines and electric trams. As late as 1907 New York, by then the quintessential modern city of skyscrapers and motor cars, was absolutely reliant on natural ice harvested from lakes and rivers, including the Hudson, and on imports of Kennebec River ice sent by ship from Maine. When winter weather was mild, the New York Times would warn of an ice ‘famine’ the following summer, and every year newspaper articles would appear promising an end to the reliance on harvested ice.
Frederic Tudor had not anticipated that the trade he began would lead to such ice-addiction among his fellow Americans. From the time he first shipped lake ice to the West Indies in 1806 to the beginnings of the Calcutta trade in the 1830s, he clung to one conviction: people living in tropical climates would pay a good price for ice if they could get it. The inhabitants of Havana in Cuba, and the British sweltering in Calcutta, could make ice cream, cool their drinks and relieve their suffering from fevers with ice harvested from the clear waters of New England’s many spring-fed ponds. They could even enjoy crisp Baldwin apples from the orchards of Massachusetts, and fresh churned butter, which Tudor packed in barrels and stowed alongside the ice.
The techniques Tudor and his employees developed for cutting, storing and shipping ice were in time adopted across all the areas of North America where winters were hard enough to produce a saleable crop. Ice was shipped down the eastern seaboard and carried across the continent in insulated railroad cars to satisfy the ever-growing demands of the first nation in history to enjoy refrigeration not as a luxury for the rich but as an everyday necessity for a very wide section of its population.
There had been earlier ice trades. In the sixteenth century, the mountain ranges which surround the Mediterranean and are high enough to remain snow-capped in summer provided refrigeration for those living on the torrid coasts. Snow and ice gathered on the upper slopes of the mountains was packed in straw baskets and brought down the winding Alpine tracks on donkeys. A similar trade had existed in South America for centuries, and continues in some places to this day. Wherever there were accessible mountains which carried summer snow, and towns close enough to provide a market for it, there was likely to be an ice trade. But the American industry was on a much larger scale, and was far more sophisticated than anything before it.
The harvest, which lasted for a few weeks, usually between January and March, took place across that huge region of North America where the winters are hard enough to freeze lakes and rivers solid. Whether it was on the Hudson River, one of the New England ponds, the Kennebec River in Maine or in the mid-west, it presented the same extraordinary winter tableau, and in many places drew crowds of spectators.
After a week or so of sub-zero temperatures, soundings would be taken to check the thickness of the ice. If it had frozen to a depth of eighteen inches or more it was ready – strong enough to support the weight of hundreds of men and horses, and thick enough to yield good-sized cubes of ice.
Migrant workers who lodged close to the frozen lakes and rivers joined local farmworkers to make up teams of ice harvesters. Blacksmiths shod the heavy horses with spiked shoes. The men wore boots with cork soles so they could get a grip on the ice, and wrapped their legs in layers of cloth to protect them from the cold. All the while they watched the weather: a warm spell could quickly ruin the ice, while a fall of snow might delay the cutting, for the ice would have to be cleared with horse-drawn scrapers before its surface could be marked out. Often they worked at night by torchlight. Ice was valuable, and competing ice companies working on the same lake or river had to observe boundaries: ownership was established by buying sections of shoreline, on which huge timber ice stores were built.
Once a favourable area of ice was established and the snow cleared to reveal the crystal surface of the ice, it could be marked out. This was generally the work of men who steered iron cutters drawn by teams of two horses across the surface, creating parallel lines in one direction and then, working at right angles to the first cuts, another set of parallel lines, so that the whole area to be cut was divided up into regular squares. The favoured size of the cubes varied according to the market for which the ice was destined. Blocks for India or the West Indies were the largest, those destined for American cities often smaller – a ‘New York’ ice cube was twenty-two inches square.
When the surface was marked out, horse-drawn ploughs with metal teeth cut far enough down into the first grooves to enable men with long-handled chisels to prise the blocks free. The giant ice cubes were then coaxed along channels of free water to a mechanism which hoisted them into the timber ice-house. Loading was from the top, the blocks sliding down a chute from which they were hauled into regular stacks, like huge building blocks. Sawdust was put between and around the blocks as insulation. Stacked like that awaiting shipment, the ice cubes were able to survive for several years, shrinking slowly through each summer and refreezing in winter.
Before the building of railroads to transport it, ice was carried from the stores to a port or nearby town in wagons drawn by teams of horses or oxen. From there most of it was moved by ship, and could not be carried until the spring thaw: on the Hudson, specially designed barges carried the ice down to New York. In city centres huge ice warehouses provided depots from which ice was distributed to customers. In the home Americans kept blocks of ice cut to a standard size in what were called refrigerators or ice-boxes – there are people living in rural areas who still remember these very well. It took a number of years to perfect the design of these containers for storing ice, for this proved to be technically difficult. Refrigerators were chiefly built of wood and lined with metal inside, with different compartments for keeping food fresh. Those who could afford it had a fresh block of ice delivered daily, for which they paid a weekly or monthly subscription.
American ice was crystal clear, and considered clean enough to put directly into drinks, a custom which was novel to Europeans in the nineteenth century. Before the Civil War of the 1860s the mint juleps of New Orleans and other southern cocktails were made with ice shipped down from Boston, and the abundance of natural ice which could be delivered daily made it possible for Americans to enjoy home-made ice cream right through the summer. This required an additional piece of equipment, for it is impossible to freeze liquids simply by immersing them in ice; a bit of alchemy is required. It had been discovered centuries earlier, possibly in China, that a mixture of salt and ice will draw heat from a metal container immersed in it and reduce the temperature inside it to below zero. If a liquid is put into the container it will freeze solid. To make ice cream with a pleasing, light texture it is important to stir the cream as it freezes. Nineteenth-century ice-cream-making machines therefore included a paddle mechanism to stir the mixture as it solidified.
Frederic Tudor, promoting his pioneer shipment of ice to the West Indies in 1806, can be credited with being the first person to sell ice cream in that part of the world. The use of salt and ice to make a ‘freezing mixture’ was really the only bit of science or chemistry Tudor ever employed in the ice business. All the other innovations to do with the cutting and storing of natural ice – and there were a great many of them – were arrived at by trial and error and close observation of the keeping properties of frozen water. Whereas heat could easily be produced by the burning of fuels such as coal, the reverse process of generating low temperatures was much more complex. Even today, when half the population of the world enjoys the benefits of domestic refrigeration, very few people understand how the cooler or the ice-making machine works. It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that the physics of heat was properly understood, and even then there were technical problems with making machines which could produce artificial ice cheaply enough to compete with the abundant natural supplies from frozen lakes and rivers. The modern domestic refrigerator is powered by electricity, which was not widely available in homes until the 1920s. The first successful artificial refrigerators were large industrial plants which required enormous power. The ice they produced was delivered to customers who made use of it in exactly the same way as they did supplies of natural ice – by placing it in their ice-boxes.
It was in places where the supply of natural ice presented special problems that artificially manufactured ice was first used on any scale. As early as the 1860s the southern states of America began to depend on artificial ice when shipments of lake and river ice from the North ceased during the Civil War. Calcutta got its first artificial ice plants around 1880, putting an end to the Boston trade. But in most of North America natural ice harvesting gained ground continuously in the nineteenth century, and did not become established in many regions until after the 1880s. The boom in Maine came in the last decades of the century when New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Washington were desperate for supplies.
When the first comprehensive report on the ice industry of the United States was commissioned in 1879 as part of a national census it was estimated that about eight million tons were harvested annually, though the business was so extensive and production so poorly documented that this was at best a well-informed guess. The figures were put together by one Henry Hall, who signed himself ‘special agent’ and gave an account of the great growth of the industry in the preceding ten years. Of the eight million tons of ice harvested, about five million reached the consumer – the rest melted during shipment and storage. By far the biggest market was New York, and none of its ice was manufactured artificially: it was all cut in winter and stored in hundreds of timber warehouses which lined the lakes and rivers and had a capacity of up to 50,000 tons each. Between New York and Albany, 150 miles up the Hudson River, there were 135 ice-houses, but even this was not enough to supply the metropolis, which relied heavily on imports. In fact, in the year of the great ice census New York and Philadelphia suffered one of their recurrent ice ‘famines’ when unseasonably warm weather destroyed the harvest on the Hudson and local lakes, and the price of ice rose from $4 to $5 a ton. That year the ice was fifteen to twenty inches thick in Maine, a top-quality crop, and it could be shipped down to New York at an estimated cost of $1.50 a ton. This produced a frenzy of harvesting on the Kennebec, Penobscot and Sheepscot rivers, and two thousand cargoes of ice packed in hay and sawdust were shipped south to New York, Philadelphia and other southern cities, where they were sold for a total of around $1.5 million.
Though the demand for ice rose annually, the New York suppliers did not explore the use of artificial refrigeration. Instead they began to buy up sections of the Kennebec River shoreline and to erect great wooden warehouses there, transforming the landscape of the river for many miles. It was the same further inland, where ice companies bought up shoreline along the lakes and put up storehouses to supply the meat industry of Chicago and the brewers of Milwaukee, as well as millions of domestic consumers.
The first real crisis in the natural ice trade was not caused by competition from artificial manufacture, but by pollution. As the cities grew they encroached on the rivers and lakes from which the ice was cut, and soon there were health scares. The authorities reported that the Hudson River was becoming an open sewer, yet ice cut from it ended up in drinks served in New York hotels and put into domestic refrigerators. This produced a search for cleaner supplies away from towns, and stimulated the search for a means of manufacturing ice with pure water. The realisation that diseases such as typhoid were not killed off in frozen water added to the urgency of finding safer forms of refrigeration.
The natural ice trade began to decline from the early decades of the twentieth century, though in more remote areas of North America where electric power was not available but lake ice was abundant in winter it survived as late as the 1950s. As ice harvesting died out, the evidence of its former vast scale rapidly disappeared. There was no alternative use for the great ice-houses, many of which simply burned down, often set alight by a spark from a steam train – they were surprisingly inflammable, as most were made of wood and kept as dry as possible to better preserve the blocks of ice they had housed. But the majority were demolished or simply rotted away.
Over a wide area of the northern states, young diving enthusiasts with no knowledge of the former ice trade still emerge from lakes and rivers clutching an impressive variety of odd implements – ploughs and chisels and scrapers which fell through the ice during the harvesting. One or two museums keep small displays of these tools, and collectors have preserved manufacturers’ catalogues which proudly present their versions of the ice-plough, the ice saw, the grapple, the Jack-grapple, the breaking-off bar, the caulk-bar, the packing chisel, the House bar, the fork-bar, the float-hook, the line-marker and many other specialist implements the use of which has long been forgotten.
The inner-city ice-houses have also gone, and the ice wagon and the iceman are rapidly fading memories (although the latter survived for a time in countless bawdy jokes and in the title of Eugene O’Neill’s play The Iceman Cometh). All that is left in America of this once-great industry is the water itself which provided a continuously renewable supply of ice each winter. There are few memorials on the banks of the rivers and lakes which once produced such a vital crop, although a small museum close to Wenham Lake, near Salem, Massachusetts, has some souvenirs and a colourful account of the area’s part in the ice trade.
Most of the few histories of the ice trade are local publications, for despite the industry’s extent it was, like farming or the mining of coal, of greatest interest to those communities which earned their living from it and whose families retain some memories passed down from earlier generations. The shipping of ice over hundreds and even thousands of miles became so routine that few records remain in the memoirs of sea-captains or sailors, who generally treated the blocks as just another cargo, like sugar or wheat. Even the epic voyages from Boston to Calcutta appear to have left little impression on the elite crews who carried ice, and who sometimes called the business, in their matter-of-fact seafaring fashion, the ‘frozen water trade’.
I have borrowed the seaman’s term for the business as the title of this book. It struck me when I first came across it as evocative of an industry which grew so impressively in the nineteenth century without any recourse to modern inventions. Its success was grounded in human qualities and skills which have been neglected as driving forces in an age now characterised in history books by the novelties and excitements of electricity and steam. Timber, sailcloth, horsepower, manpower and the traditional skills of blacksmiths, farmers and sailors made America the first ever refrigerated nation. This is the story of how that was achieved.
MAP
CHAPTER ONE
The Frozen Assets of New England
When the brothers William and Frederic Tudor agreed to put together what money they had in the summer of 1805 and invest it in a scheme to sell ice to the West Indies, they kept the plan close to their chests. They had dreamed up the idea after spending some pleasant weeks on the family farm, Rockwood, in New England. It was just a few miles inland from Boston, the great port which seethed with shipping and merchants, many of whom had made fortunes trading around the world in all kinds of luxury goods. New England itself had little of value to export: there was no iron or coal or cotton, and the farmland was picturesque but poor. Most of Boston’s trade was second-hand: the Yankee merchants had a sharp eye for other nations’ goods which they bought and sold as their ships scoured the world for bargains.
Just to the north, the port of Salem had more or less cornered the market in peppercorns, re-exporting in 1805 7.5 million tons of the spice which was greatly valued as a food preservative in the days before refrigeration. And in 1783, the year the younger Tudor brother Frederic was born, a syndicate of Boston merchants had made a fortune from a shipload of ginseng which they sold in Canton. The herbal root, rare in China, where it was greatly prized as an aphrodisiac and a tonic, had been found growing in abundance in North America, and the first Boston cargo was said to equal ten times the annual Chinese consumption. But even the shrewd merchants of Massachusetts had failed to realise that each winter a local product of dazzlingly high quality was left to dissolve away each spring, while in the tropical islands of the West Indies and the plantation states of southern America it would be worth its weight in gold. That, at any rate, was how the Tudor brothers saw it, and why they wanted to keep their scheme for selling ice in tropical climates a secret. Once Boston merchants got wind of their brilliant plan they would face stiff competition.
The elder brother, William, who was twenty-six years old, a Harvard graduate with some worldly experience after travelling in Europe, was just a little sceptical once he had considered the practical problems of the venture. But Frederic, not quite twenty-two and the maverick of the distinguished Boston family, was convinced it would make them a fortune, and that within a few years they would be, as he put it, ‘inevitably and unavoidably rich’. As it turned out, Frederic did make his fortune selling ice, but there was nothing inevitable or unavoidable about his eventual success. The fact that he prospered at all, after suffering years of ridicule and hardship, was more of a miracle than something pre-ordained. Then, as now, the notion that it was possible to cut lake ice in winter in New England and sell it the following summer 1,500 miles away in Cuba or Martinique, with no artificial refrigeration to prevent it from melting, was thought to be ridiculous.
Nevertheless, the plan did make some sense. The Tudor family was privileged. The brothers’ grandfather, John Tudor, was a self-made baker and merchant who had sailed from Devon in England in 1715, at the age of six. His mother was a young widow who remarried in America, well enough for John to receive a basic education. John did sufficiently well in business to send his youngest son, William, to Harvard to study law. He also bought the hundred-acre Rockwood farm, as a kind of rugged country estate where the family could spend the hot summer months away from their town-house in Boston. At Rockwood, like a few of the better-off Bostonians, the Tudors had an ice-house which was stocked in winter from a pond on the farm which usually froze solid in January and February. As a boy Frederic and his brothers and sisters* enjoyed ice cream in summer, and took their drinks cooled with chunks of crystal clear ice from Rockwood Pond. This was a great luxury. In Europe ice-houses – traditionally underground and lined with brick or stone – had long been a privilege of the wealthy, who could afford to excavate them on their estates and had the manpower to fill them in winter with ice from their frozen ornamental lakes.
This luxury was denied to those who lived in tropical climates, including the colonial rulers of the West Indian islands and the prosperous plantation owners of the cotton belt in South Carolina, Georgia and Louisiana. What would they pay for a shipload of perspiring New England ice during their most torrid season, when the heat was hardly bearable and yellow fever raged? Selling them ice, it seemed to Frederic Tudor, would be an excellent and simple proposition provided a few technicalities could be sorted out. It was a straightforward matter of supply and demand, once the problem of how to stop the supply melting before it reached the demand had been solved.
The Tudor brothers were in the happy position of having a bit of family money to invest. In 1794, when Frederic was eleven, their grandfather John had died at the age of eighty-six, and left everything to their father William. This small fortune consisted of $40,000 in cash and investments, some properties in Boston, and the Rockwood farm. William was always known affectionately in the family as ‘the Judge’, a title he had acquired when he served as Judge Advocate† in George Washington’s army. His Harvard education and his military service afforded him many good connections in New England society, where he was well liked for his jovial personality. Before 1794 he had practised as a lawyer, but he felt he was well enough off after John died to give up work and live the life of a landed gentleman. The Judge was a generous man and a spendthrift, and the family lived well. He could afford to send his sons to Harvard and to give them a reasonable allowance which enabled them to travel, and sometimes to dabble in speculations.
In preparation for Harvard, Frederic was sent to Boston Latin School. At the age of thirteen he decided that college was a waste of time, dropped out of school and took a job as an apprentice in a Boston store. His mother Delia, a cultured woman who was anxious her sons should be properly educated, did not approve. Nor did his elder brother William. But neither had any authority over him, and at the time Frederic left school the Judge was off on a jaunt to Europe. Frederic wrote to him: ‘I hope you will not be displeased with my going so young.’ When the Judge returned to Boston, Frederic had already given up his apprenticeship and was spending his days on Rockwood farm, hunting and fishing with a black servant of the family who had been given the name ‘Sambo’. Frederic loved Rockwood and sometimes imagined he could make the farm pay, but he spent most of his time on little schemes which came to nothing, such as designing a water pump which he believed would make ships unsinkable.
When he was seventeen years old and still hanging idly around Rockwood, an opportunity arose which would have an influence on Frederic’s later conviction that there would be a demand for ice in the West Indies. His nineteen-year-old brother John Henry had a bad knee which had turned him into an invalid. Anxious about his son’s health, the Judge suggested that Frederic take John away somewhere. The boys were enthusiastic, and chose to go to Havana, then a thriving trading port on the Spanish island of Cuba. It would not be just a convalescent trip: while they were there they might try their hand trading in coffee or sugar – they had already made a small profit selling mahogany furniture to Havana. On 26 February 1801 they sailed from Boston on the Patty with $1,000 travel money given to them by their father.
John Henry left a jaundiced account of the voyage. Both brothers were seasick for the first week or so, got sunburned, and hated the shipboard diet of beef and soup. They were at sea for a month, arriving in Havana at the end of March. At first they thought Cuba a kind of paradise, full of excitement and tropical fruit, and for two months they took tours, engaged in a little trade and lost money. But by the end of May, as Havana heated up and the mosquitoes and scorpions became bothersome, they decided to leave. John Henry’s knee was getting worse, and gave him pain every day. At the beginning of June they bought passage on a ship bound for Charleston, South Carolina, loaded with molasses, which gave off a fierce and heavy stench. To ensure that they would eat tolerably well on this voyage the brothers loaded up for their own consumption 192 eggs, which would be enough for half a dozen or more each a day.
In Charleston they were entertained by some kindly Bostonians who were living there, but the heat was just as bad as in Havana. The brothers sailed on to Virginia, driven north by the rising summer temperatures, and, still with their ‘tongues hanging out’, as John Henry put it, cruised into the Potomac River, where they had a glimpse of Mount Vernon, which had been George Washington’s estate. In search of a cure for John Henry they went on overland to a spa at Bath, Pennsylvania. Each day his health was deteriorating – he may have been suffering from bone tuberculosis, and lumps appeared on his side. In August they met up by chance with their mother and elder brother William, and all four went to Philadelphia, from where Frederic and William took the stagecoach back to Boston. At the end of January 1802 John Henry died in Philadelphia, with his mother by his bedside. When Frederic, back on the Rockwood estate, heard the news four months after he had last seen his brother, he was deeply affected.
Frederic’s brother William, who had finished his studies, went off to Europe to broaden his education. The Judge found Frederic an unpaid position with a mercantile firm owned by his friends the Sullivan brothers. There he spent two years arranging shipments of pimento, nutmeg, sugar and tea. With this experience behind him, the Judge felt confident enough to set Frederic up in business on his own, though he did not know what exactly he would trade in. The best bet at that time appeared to be speculation in real estate, for Boston was a growing city, and handsome profits had been made by those who owned building land. The Judge himself decided to put the family fortune into a venture in South Boston which was considered to be gilt-edged. A new bridge was being built to connect the town with an isolated area of land in the complex archipelago of Boston Bay. Frederic had a stake in it too, buying land for $7,640 in partnership with his brother William.
While they still mourned the death of John Henry, the family were able to look forward to a happy event, the marriage of Frederic’s younger sister Emma Jane. She was by all accounts an attractive young woman, and her family’s wealth appeared to be assured. Her suitor was a shy young man called Robert Hallowell Gardiner, who had come by a fortune by chance. His father, Robert Hallowell, had been collector of taxes for the Port of Boston before the War of Independence, and had fled to England in 1776. Robert was born in Bristol in 1782, and his family moved back to Boston the same year. When he was six years old his maternal grandfather Dr Silvester Gardiner, who owned a very large estate on the Kennebec River in Maine, died, leaving everything to Robert’s uncle William. A year later William died and left everything to Robert, provided he agreed to change his name to Gardiner. He would come into his inheritance on his twenty-second birthday.
Robert had studied at Harvard, and when he first met Emma Tudor he was a member of the New England elite, a very eligible young man. His marriage to Emma was a great match for the Tudors, and would turn out to be vital for the new trade Frederic and William were about to embark upon. Though they fell out in later life, Robert Gardiner would be the very best friend and supporter Frederic could have hoped for in the years ahead. It was in the heady atmosphere of the summer of 1805, when the wedding was celebrated with picnics and parties on the Tudors’ Rockwood estate, that Frederic and William finally decided to embark on the venture they had talked about for some time.
Emma had married Robert on 25 June. A few weeks later Frederic bought a leather-bound farmer’s almanac and inscribed on the cover the title ‘Ice House Diary’, above a crude drawing of the kind of ice-house, if not the very one, the family had at Rockwood. He also wrote the inscription ‘He who gives back at the first repulse and without striking the second blow, despairs of success, has never been, is not, and never will be, a hero in love, war or business.’ It is probable he added that later, inscribing it as if in stone on the illustration of the ice-house, for he had absolutely no idea in 1805 of the trials he was to face over the next ten years.
The first entry in the diary, written in Frederic’s spidery hand, reads: ‘Plan etc for transporting Ice to Tropical Climates. Boston Augst 1st 1805 William and myself have this day determined to get together what property we have and embark in the undertaking of carrying ice to the West Indies the ensuing winter.’ There is a note written later to the effect that William was not very enthusiastic, and had to be persuaded that it was worth giving the venture a try.
A Tudor family legend had it that it was William’s idea in the first instance. It would have been typical of him, as he was full of hare-brained schemes which came to nothing, and in his privately published autobiography Early Recollections, Robert Gardiner remembered William suggesting selling ice to the West Indies at a picnic. To the end of his life Frederic disputed this, and maintained that it was his inspiration. Whatever the truth of the matter, it was without doubt Frederic who took the idea seriously, and who dedicated his life to making it work.
The second entry in the diary is for 12 August. Frederic writes that he is off on a trip with his cousin James Savage to visit Niagara Falls, and expects to return in October. In the meantime he and William had been laying plans for the shipment of ice that winter. They had realised they would need substantial financial backing, and hoped they might be able to persuade the US Congress to grant them a monopoly in the trade, for once everyone in Boston saw how profitable the shipping of ice was, there would be immediate and damaging competition.
Puffed with youthful enthusiasm and naivety, Frederic could not imagine that such a brilliant scheme could fail to make him and his brother a fortune. His excitement leaps from the pages of his diary as he drafts a letter to a business associate of his father, Harrison Gray Otis, a distinguished Bostonian and US Senator:
Sir, In a country where at some seasons of the year the heat is almost unsupportable, where at times the common necessary of life, water, cannot be had but in a tepid state – Ice must be considered as out doing most other luxuries.
Frederic’s escape from Havana in the blazing June heat four years before with brother John Henry, only to find Charleston, South Carolina, no better, was clearly in his mind. He would have given anything for a lump of Rockwood ice when he felt the heat of Cuba that summer. But there remained the question of whether ice would last the voyage to tropical waters. Frederic had thought about this, and believed he had come across a good deal of evidence that ice could be preserved at sea. His letter to Otis continued:
However absurd Sir the idea may at first appear that ice can be transported to tropical climates and preserved there during the most intemperate heats, yet for the following reasons does appear to me certain that the thing can be done and also to a profit beyond calculation.
The evidence with which he hoped to persuade Otis to take a stake in the business was, to say the least, patchy, and in retrospect a little puzzling. For example, he had it on good authority that an American sea-captain had shipped ice from Norway to London in a year when a mild winter had led to a shortage of ice in England. It is true that by the end of the eighteenth century English fishermen had begun using ice to preserve their catches, but there is no record of any ice shipments from Norway to England before 1822. And even if they had been made, Frederic had no idea how the ice would have been preserved on board.
As if to prove definitively that his scheme was not absurd, Frederic told Otis that he had also heard from a French friend of his family that ice cream had been carried from England to Trinidad in pots packed in earth and sand. He had also been told – this time by a French gentleman, further evidence of his mother’s francophile tendencies – that timber boards shipped in winter from New England still had ice on them when they were unloaded in the West Indies, the only instance that gentleman knew of ice being seen in that part of the world. Frederic had also been told that it had been ‘experimentally proved’ that ice could be preserved in Carolina, a southern state with a summer climate ‘as intemperate as most of the West Indies’. He supposed that wherever you were in the world, if you dug a hole in the ground you would soon reach cool earth, which would keep ice much longer than if it were left on the surface. It was some time before he learned that this assumption was false.
Apparently Frederic knew nothing of the Mediterranean trade in Alpine ice, but he had heard of something similar in Peru, where snow from the mountains was sold in the city of Lima. All in all, Frederic was in little doubt that carrying ice to the West Indies was pretty certain of success, and he was confident that he and his brother would make ‘fortunes larger than we shall know what to do with’. He asked Otis, whatever his own opinion of the scheme, not to mention it to the Judge, as it was a secret and their father did ‘not have a hint of it’.
After he had despatched this letter Frederic set off for Niagara Falls with his cousin James, who at that time had no idea he was to be brought in as a partner in the brothers’ pioneer venture in the ice trade. James had spent most of his childhood with the Tudors and was more or less one of the family, for his mother had died when he was a boy and his father was insane and incapable of caring for him. He was the same age as Frederic, just twenty-one, and had recently graduated from Harvard. The trip to Niagara was just a youthful jaunt, but on the way Frederic made a point of studying the construction of two ice-houses he had heard about. One of them, in upstate New York, had three walls above ground and only one cut into the earth, and Frederic was intrigued to see that it apparently kept ice as efficiently as any other ice-house. Frederic was no scientist and had absolutely no idea about the thermodynamics of ice-houses, which are surprisingly complex. For most of his lifetime the nature of heat was poorly understood. Much thought had gone into the design of ice-houses both in Europe and America, and as Frederic had suggested in his letter to Otis, it was believed that you only had to dig down a few feet anywhere in the world to find cool earth in which to store ice. In time he realised that this was nonsense; and it would prove vital for the continuation of the trade he established that ice could be preserved just as well above ground as below, and that if the atmospheric temperature was above freezing the only source of ‘cold’ was the ice itself.
William, meanwhile, appears to have given the ice venture little thought, and to have spent his time enjoying the beef-steak-and-oyster dinners held weekly by members of a Boston literary society he had helped found called the Anthology Club. He had given business a try on his trip to Europe a few years earlier, and felt he had no talent or taste for it. As he did not need to earn a living, he preferred the pleasant company of Boston’s young literati. It is a wonder that Frederic persuaded him to get involved in the ice trade as winter closed in on Boston in 1805. But he went along with his younger brother’s plans, which were, on the face of it, quite straightforward.
European colonial powers in the West Indies each had a different set of laws and regulations relating to trade, all of them subject to rapid change as treaties were made and broken. It was the year of the Battle of Trafalgar, when Nelson won his famous victory over the combined French and Spanish fleets off the southern coast of Spain. Though the West Indies were thousands of miles away, such momentous European events sent ripples across the ocean. With its newly won independence America was con tinually adjusting its policies on trade to take into account the shifts of European power and allegiance. For reasons that were never made clear, Frederic decided the best bet for his first venture was the French island of Martinique. Maybe he feared that the most promising market, which was certainly Havana, would draw too much attention to his venture too early, or perhaps the tension between Spain and America at the time warned him off.
Wherever he sent the ice, Frederic wanted to have an officially sanctioned monopoly on the trade, for without it he was certain prices would be driven down by competition and he would not make the profits he dreamed of. Both his brother William and his cousin James spoke French, and his mother had many friends and contacts in France, so they felt they had a good chance of presenting their case to the colonial governor, or Prefect, on Martinique. The principal town on the island, St Pierre, had a population of 30,000, a Tivoli pleasure garden and sufficient perspiring expatriates to provide willing buyers of Rockwood ice.
As there was unlikely to be any ice to cut until January 1806, there was time for William and James to sail to Martinique and seek to establish exclusive rights. Once this was done they would make some short hops to other islands which might be interested in putting in advance orders for a spring delivery of the Tudors’ luxury cargo. Frederic would stay behind and make preparations for the first shipment. The whole enterprise would be funded by him, as Harrison Gray Otis had politely declined any involvement, though he thought the scheme ‘plausible’.
As more people learned of the venture in Boston, Frederic discovered that it was not competition he had to contend with, so much as ridicule. The Judge, in particular, who still believed he was going to make a killing with his South Boston land speculation, urged Frederic to abandon his crazy ice scheme. Robert Gardiner, who was Frederic’s most enthusiastic supporter, would write in his Early Recollections:
The idea was considered so utterly absurd by the sober minded merchants as to be the vagary of a disordered brain, and few men would have been willing to stand the scoffs and sneers from those whose assistance it was necessary to obtain, to aid [Frederic] in his enterprise… Merchants were not willing to charter their vessels to carry ice. The offices declined to insure and sailors were afraid to trust themselves with such a cargo.
But Frederic was a stubborn and determined young man who seemed to thrive on the challenge of accomplishing something that others regarded as impossible and foolhardy. He fancied he cut a dashing figure around town, a dapper little man in a blue coat who was going to make a fortune out of a very big and brilliant idea.
CHAPTER TWO
Tropical Ice Creams
Frederic Tudor was always meticulous in keeping financial accounts. He recorded in his diary that he paid $1.50 to the boatman who rowed William and James out to the brig Jane which would take them to Martinique. It was already 2 November 1805, and it would take them at least a month to reach Martinique. They would need time to deliver their letters of introduction and arrange meetings. Frederic had set his two envoys a whole range of tasks, and was anxious that they took the enterprise seriously and did not consider this an excuse for a holiday. They were to arrange for gifts of ice to be offered to prominent French officials, to find an agent to handle sales, and to check out likely sites for an ice-house in St Pierre. Most important of all, they should negotiate the privilege of a monopoly in supplying the island. As soon as they had news they were to send Frederic a letter. This would take at least a month to arrive, by which time the Boston winter should have set in, ensuring that he had a supply of ice.
Once he had bade William and James farewell, Frederic set to work to prepare for the collection and shipping of the ice. It was a lonely and difficult time for him. Many people had now discovered what he was up to, and were making fun of him. He wrote defiantly in his diary, ‘Let those who win laugh.’ His father urged him to cut his losses and stay in Boston: ‘Every person is in wondering mood at our going to the West Indies and the Judge is continually told what a pity it is and how dangerous too and what a miserable prospect there is of success and I have a lecture every morning urging me to abandon the voyage which he says without knowing our plan is wild and ruinous.’
Had Frederic known what William and James were experiencing, he might have taken more notice of this advice; it was not all plain sailing on board the Jane, and there were hazards enough at the end of the voyage. James kept some notes of their adventures, which he later wrote up in the form of a diary. It is perhaps significant that there is not a single mention in his account of what anybody thought about their ice enterprise – did he himself take it seriously? Frederic certainly doubted the commitment of both his cousin and his brother.
By Wednesday, 27 November the Jane had come through some rough weather, but was expected to reach St Pierre by Sunday the following week. On the Saturday James noted: ‘We have spread all sail with a fine fresh breeze and strained our eyes “to see what was not to be seen”.’ As they scanned the horizon for a glimpse of land they saw instead another ship bearing down on them from the north-east. ‘We feared she was a Spanish privateer and dreaded being plundered and ill-treated; or she might be English and order us to another island, altho’ our papers are fair.’ Though the great age of piracy in these seas had ended a century earlier, there were still privateers waylaying ships with a view to stealing what they could. At first James’s fears appeared to be justified, for the ship fired across their bows as a signal to ‘hove to’. They were asked where they had sailed from and where they were going. The captain of the Jane was ordered aboard the ship, which according to James was ‘a handsome schooner with men of all colors on board’. To everyone’s great relief the captain returned within a quarter of an hour to report that it was a French privateer just out from Martinique, and that he had been well treated – in fact he had been offered fruit and liqueurs.
They were sent on their way, and shortly afterwards had sight of land. The next day, as they headed for the port of St Pierre, they were stopped again. This time it was an English ship, the Nimrod, which put another shot across their bows. Again they were treated with civility and allowed to sail on. When they were close enough to the island to make out cultivated fields along the shore, a third vessel, this time a ‘small topsail schooner’, came alongside and sent a boat to ask who they were and where they were going. The schooner then slid away towards the coast. Evening was drawing in and they could see firing in the distance, but had no idea who was involved in the skirmish.
As they were cruising into the harbour a shore battery fired two shots which landed close to them. Then, James wrote, ‘We hung a lantern in the main shrouds and were safe.’ The Jane weighed anchor the following morning, 4 December. William and James found lodgings and took a look around St Pierre, which impressed them. ‘Through every street runs a stream of water, which conveys all the filth from the houses to the sea, and at the same time produced a constant agitation of the air,’ James noted with admiration. The town already had a form of air-conditioning, it seems. But would it ever get a supply of ice cream?
Before William and James had arrived in St Pierre, Frederic had already sent them a letter with the news that he had his eye on an ideal vessel for transporting the ice, a brig called the Favorite. He had looked it over just after they set sail. On 27 November he noted in his diary that he had bought it for $4,750, a considerable sum of money and the best part of his entire capital, which he had raised by mortgaging some of the land he had bought in the South Boston scheme. For a merchant to purchase a ship to carry a single cargo was very unusual: the normal practice was to buy space on a ship and pay a freight charge to its owner. The newspapers had columns of advertisements inviting merchants to buy space on ships destined for particular ports.
Although there is no mention of it in his diary, the reason Frederic went to the expense of becoming a ship-owner was that nobody wanted to carry his ice. What kind of cargo was it that would start to melt as soon as it was loaded? Most ships, whether they were going to China or India or plying the coastal trade, carried a mix of cargoes, and a hold full of melt-water and slush could ruin the whole lot. The ice was heavy, and would therefore weigh down the ship and act initially as ballast; but as it drained away into the sea the ship would become lighter and less easy to handle. Whether or not Frederic was able to get any quotes for freighting ice we do not know, but it is unlikely. There was, anyway, another reason for buying a brig: as the owner, Frederic could fit it out as he wished, and he knew that to carry ice its hold would have to be lined with boards to provide a crude form of insulation. Buying a ship in Boston at that time was as easy as slapping down a few thousand dollars for a second-hand truck would be today, but the Favorite was Frederic’s single largest investment in this first venture, and the cost of it would absorb any profit he managed to make.
There was nothing much else Frederic could do but wait for news from William and James and for the winter to set in. A contact in Philadelphia sent him a copy of a pamphlet called ‘An essay on the Most Eligible Construction of Ice Houses and a Description of the Newly Invented Refrigerator’, written by a Maryland farmer and engineer called Thomas Moore. It had been published two years earlier, in 1803, and was an indication that Americans other than Frederic Tudor were thinking about how to make better and more profitable use of natural ice. Moore’s essay was written for farmers, who still brought their butter to market at night during the summer months, and often had to sell it at a reduced price the following morning when it had melted. Moore urged them to build more efficient ice-houses, and to make themselves refrigerators which would keep their butter hard on even the hottest day. His own patented design was a wooden box with a tin lining and layers of insulation, including rabbit fur, which would preserve ice for a whole day. There had been earlier models of refrigerators, but Moore thought his the most efficient. Frederic does not appear to have been as impressed by Moore’s essay as he might have been. He was evolving his own ideas about how best to build ice-houses, but had not thought much about how his customers on Martinique might preserve the ice they bought from him – an oversight which was to cause him considerable anxiety.
After two days in lodgings in St Pierre, William and James were taken in by the Moneau family, fugitives from the French Revolution, who had fled to South Carolina then moved to Martinique. The two cultured young men from Boston who spoke tolerable French were a social success, and within a week were granted two interviews with the Prefect, who they believed could arrange for exclusive rights to sell ice on the island. They sent a letter to Frederic telling of their safe arrival and warm welcome. However, both suffered bouts of fever, and only James was well enough to present their case when they were called for interview. By Christmas Eve it appeared that they had succeeded: their petition had been granted in the name of the Emperor Napoleon, and they could collect the signed papers the next day. But what appeared to be a fine Christmas present turned out to have a price on it: about $400. They were also asked to give an account of how ice sales in Martinique would proceed, a subject on which they were even vaguer than Frederic. With the whole venture in jeopardy, they decided to soften up the Prefect with a bribe. As they could not find the official himself they left a letter and two gold coins known as ‘Joes’, a Portuguese currency, and worth considerably less than $400, at the home of his secretary. The following day they had their monopoly with no conditions and no fees asked. They wrote immediately to Frederic with the good news in a letter dated 26 December.
Frederic received William and James’s first letter, telling of their arrival, on 10 January 1806. Quite unaware of the difficulties they had had, he noted in his diary the ‘highly pleasing’ news that they had been ‘received into the first company of the Island and met with the most flattering salutations’. On the same day he wrote: ‘It has now begun to freeze for the first time this winter. The Brig is all ready and the sky looks bright for the success of the scheme!’
By that time James was bedridden, struck down by yellow fever. This disease was a scourge of the American South and the Caribbean Islands. It was called ‘yellow’ fever because the most severely affected victims developed jaundice when the virus attacked their liver and kidneys. Those who suffered the most severe toxic phase of the disease had only a fifty-fifty chance of survival, and died within ten to fourteen days suffering horribly from bleeding gums and kidney failure. Most sufferers, however, after a few days of nausea, vomiting and severe aches and pains, recovered fully after a period of convalescence.
James was cared for in the town of Trois Islets by an old friend who had settled in Martinique. Meanwhile, William continued the tour of the West Indies alone. He took a ship to the island of Guadeloupe, then on to Antigua, all the while sounding out the market for Boston ice. He had no idea how Frederic was getting on, and it appears to have been no part of the plan to greet him on his arrival on Martinique.
On 20 January Frederic received William and James’s second letter, with the good news that exclusive rights had been granted and that there was an agent awaiting the arrival of the ice. But the sky was no longer bright for the success of the scheme. Frederic wrote in his diary:
Everything except the weather favors the enterprise. This is indeed most remarkably bad – nothing but storm, frost and snow, it is certainly a difficult thing to see the moment for getting the ice and putting it on board there has not been one opportunity yet. Either the harbor has been frozen up or when open there was no ice. Storms have twice already prevented cutting the ice and when the storm ceases the pond is covered with snow.
The possibility that the weather might not be favourable had not been anticipated, even though Boston’s winter climate was notoriously variable, with huge leaps and falls in temperature. Frederic had nowhere to store ice when it was eventually cut, and was hoping that it could go straight to the ship and on to Martinique without delay. But ships were sometimes ice-bound in Boston harbour in winter, and it had not occurred to Frederic that weather which produced good ice on Rockwood Pond might also prevent the Favorite from sailing. All in all the technicalities of cutting and shipping ice were proving to be much more problematic than he had foreseen. It would be interesting to know where and how Frederic planned to harvest upwards of a hundred tons of ice, but he does not say. As he refers to ‘the pond’, perhaps he meant Rockwood Pond on the family estate. But he might also have contracted with local farmers to get additional supplies, as he certainly did later on. We do not know who cut his ice, but presumably it was hacked and sawn out, delivered to his ship in irregular blocks by horse-drawn wagon, then thrown or lowered into the specially prepared hold and sealed over with some hay as insulation.
It was already the end of the first week in February 1806 when Frederic felt confident enough to provision his ship, paying $5.75 for rum, brandy and other essentials. Captain Thomas Pearson was engaged for $50 a month. The ice was cut and the ship loaded and ready to sail by 10 February. They were bade farewell by the Boston Gazette, which expressed the whole mercantile community’s derision in three sentences:
No joke. A vessel with a cargo of 80 tons of Ice has cleared out from this port for Martinique. We hope this will not prove to be a slippery speculation.
Bad weather kept the Favorite in harbour until 13 February, but then she made good passage and arrived in St Pierre on 5 March, a voyage of only twenty-one days. According to Frederic, when she left Boston she had on board not eighty but 130 tons of ice, though exact measurement was hardly relevant: what was important was how much was left when he got to Martinique. This he did not record, stating only that the ice which did survive the trip was in ‘perfect condition’ – an odd description, as ice in any other state would presumably have disappeared. He certainly had a considerable quantity left, but found he had nowhere in St Pierre to store it. He put the blame for this on William and James, who had left a letter for him suggesting sites for an ice-house, although none was ready. They also gave the names of nine prominent people who expected complimentary blocks of ice – ‘as much as a negro could carry’ – and the Captain-General should be sent a hundred pounds of it. An agent called William Dawson had a copy of the privilege which had been granted, but William and James advised Frederic not to bother staying on Martinique, as there did not seem to be much demand for ice there.
All he could do was seek permission to sell his ice directly from the Favorite, though this meant that it would melt rapidly when the hold was open. He sold $50-worth in two days, charging sixteen cents a pound. He was offered $4,000 for the whole cargo, but decided to turn this down. To draw in more customers he had printed some handbills which were distributed in St Pierre. He kept a copy and later pasted it in his Ice House Diary. Headed ‘Glace’, it announced in French that from that day, 7 March, and for the following three days small quantities of ice would be sold aboard ship from a well preserved consignment brought from Boston on the brig Favorite, and that after three days the brig would move on to another island. The price was thirty French sous per pound. Buyers were advised to bring a woollen cloth or some other material to wrap around the ice they bought in order to preserve it.
There were no refrigerators in St Pierre, and according to Frederic most islanders had no idea what to do with the ice once they had bought it. This inhibited sales, and business was sluggish. Frederic was in a state of great anxiety, and ready to blame everyone but himself for the predicament he was in. He wrote to his brother-in-law Robert Gardiner:
It is difficult to conceive how determined to believe most of the people here are that ice will melt in spite of all precautions; and their methods of keeping it are laughable, to be sure. One carries it through the street to his house in the sun noonday, puts it in a plate before his door, and then complains that ‘il fond’. Another puts it in a tub of water, a third by way of climax puts his in salt! And all this notwithstanding they were directed in the handbill what to do.
Frederic does not say what he expected the islanders to do with a few small lumps of ice which would melt rapidly whether or not they were wrapped in a blanket en route from the Favorite to their homes. His best trade, it seems, was making ice creams, and in his letter to Robert Gardiner he told of one small triumph:
The man who keeps the Tivoli Garden insisted ice creams could not be made in this country and that the ice itself would all thaw before he could get it home! I told him I had made them here … and putting my fist pretty hard upon the table I called … for an order of 6olbs of ice and in a pretty warm tone directed the man to have his cream ready and that I would come to freeze it for him in the morning, which I did accordingly, being determined to spare no pains to convince these people that they cannot only have ice but all the luxuries arising here as elsewhere. The Tivoli man rec’d for these creams the first night $300; after this he was humble as a mushroom.
Frederic’s account of his first attempt to sell ice in the West Indies is not entirely convincing. It is very unlikely that when the Favorite docked in St Pierre his ice was, as he claimed, ‘in perfect condition’. A considerable portion of the cargo would have melted on the voyage, as at that time he did not know how to insulate it really effectively. He must have realised as soon as the Favorite weighed anchor that he was not going to sell $10,000 worth of ice as he had hoped, and from the very beginning he was cutting his losses. He should have accepted the offer of $4,000 for the entire shipment and found a cargo for the return voyage, for which he could at least charge freight. Instead he hung on, selling about twenty to thirty dollars-worth of ice a day. He had no idea where William and James were, and had nowhere to sail on to.
Towards the end of March, with the ice melting faster than he could sell it, Frederic accepted a proposition that he take a cargo of sugar back to Boston, and that the remaining ice be unloaded and sold on commission. In the meantime he sailed the 120 miles south-east to Barbados, hoping to get the same kind of exclusive privilege he had on Martinique. He was unsuccessful, and by the time he returned to St Pierre all his ice had gone and the Favorite was loaded with sugar and ready to sail. Two hours out from port the brig hit a squall and lost her masts, which had only recently been repaired. The disconsolate Frederic had to return to St Pierre, where he was given a compensatory box of oranges by the man who had sold the last of his ice on commission. It was not until late April that he finally headed back to Boston, with a paragraph from a St Pierre newspaper as a keepsake:
It will be a remarkable epoch in the history of luxury and enterprise that on the 6th March ice creams have been eaten in Martinique probably for the first time since the settlement of the country. And this too in a volcanic land lying 14 degrees north of the equator.
When he got home Frederic pasted this proudly into his Ice House Diary.
William and James were still on their tour of the West Indies when the Favorite left St Pierre. James’s yellow fever had laid him low for seven weeks, and he did not meet up with William again until the end of February, on the island of St Croix, near Puerto Rico. From there they sailed to Jamaica, where the English governor, Sir Eyre Coote, heard their case for exclusive rights to supply the island with ice. Sir Eyre was courteous, according to William, ‘though he thought it a cursed strange thing’. Throughout the British Empire, however, only the Privy Council in London could grant exclusive trade deals.
The ice envoys did not set sail for Boston until 4 May, when they boarded the Huntress, which was loaded with seventy hogsheads of high-proof rum. They were once again waylaid by privateers, including a Spanish ship which gave them the most unpleasant reception of the whole voyage. An officer came aboard rattling a cutlass and ordered everyone to disembark and to go on board the privateer. When some of them, including James, were slow to obey the officer waved the cutlass above their heads, and gave James a tap on the shoulder with the blunt edge. They later discovered that while on the privateer they had been robbed of a few valuables, including William’s set of pistols and two gold watches. After that the Huntress made slow progress, as the captain had trouble establishing his position. On 15 May, when they discovered they were further away from Boston than they had been the day before, James scribbled a note: ‘Ah! what a glorious fellow will he be who can discover a mode of finding Longitude, easy, certain and expeditious, as that of ascertaining Latitude.’ A clock which kept good time at sea and was unaffected by changes in weather and atmosphere was what was needed. Chronometers had been made by the Englishman John Harrison more than thirty years earlier, but do not appear to have been in use in New England in the early 1800s.
After a few days in quarantine in Boston harbour – to guard against the importation of yellow fever and smallpox – William and James set foot again on New England soil on 3 June. They had been away for six months. Frederic was not at all pleased with their efforts, and showed no sympathy for the illness James had suffered. Instead he wrote in his diary:
The advantages derived from their part of the expedition were not equal to the expense of it, which was near $2,000. They never entered into the undertaking with the ardour which was necessary to insure success in the outset of the business. They were easily discouraged and did not announce the thing with that confidence that defies ridicule and opposition, insures friends and leads in every project more than anything to success. I make no apology to myself for expressing here my private opinions as it is for myself alone I minute down here all the circumstances attending the undertaking which I projected. If I am so unfortunate as to have connected with me friends who have not aided me, let them if they ever read what I am now writing remember that I only blame them for not understanding ‘how to conduct a new and as the world says extravagant enterprise’.
Frederic calculated that the losses from this first venture in the ice trade amounted to between three and four thousand dollars, with total ice sales of about $2,000. However, he reasoned that he was not responsible for this setback, and that though the first shipment of ice had proved to be a costly failure he now knew how to make it pay. In fact he was already planning his next venture, this time to Havana.
CHAPTER THREE
From the Ice-House to the Jailhouse
Frederic Tudor had had a miserable time in Martinique: he had lost a great deal of money, and he regarded his brother and cousin as half-hearted business associates; yet he did not abandon his dream of making a fortune selling ice. Why he was so persistent is a mystery, for the prospect before him was not at all promising, and there were many other commodities he might have traded in. The Ice House Diaries he kept almost continuously from 1805 until 1838 do not really provide a satisfactory answer. What they do reveal is a blind commitment to a venture which many times threatened Frederic’s health and sanity, and often caused him acute embarrassment within the Boston community. He had bouts of self-pity, but rarely of self-doubt. What drove him on even when everything seemed hopeless was his pride: he had announced to the world at the age of twenty-two that he could make money out of a commodity other New Englanders regarded as worthless, and he was determined to prove that he was right and all those around him were wrong.
Frederic’s dismay at the apparent bafflement of the people of St Pierre when offered a chunk of ice did not undermine his belief that there was a ready market for it in hot climates. Once they became accustomed to regular deliveries, he felt, people would be hooked. The same would be true in Havana and possibly southern US cities such as Charleston and New Orleans. Nobody could doubt that this luxury would be sought after if there were guaranteed deliveries to cover the hottest months of the year. And a lesson Frederic had learned from the unsuccessful expedition to Martinique was that there must be a properly designed ice-house at the point of delivery, from which small quantities could be sold over weeks or even months.
In August 1806 Frederic’s brother William sailed from New York to London to pursue the grant of exclusive ice-trade rights with British-owned islands in the West Indies. The Judge, along with Frederic’s mother and younger sister Delia, followed him. They intended to enjoy the glamorous social round in England and France and, with luck, find a good match for Delia. However, it was already becoming clear that the family was in serious financial difficulty. The Judge’s South Boston speculation was not yet returning any kind of profit, and he had to sell some of his property and borrow money at a high interest rate to fund the trip to Europe.
Frederic had no money either, and was unable to find any financial backers for the ice venture. His brig the Favorite is not mentioned again in his diaries, and he must have sold it – almost certainly at a loss, for it had needed extensive repairs in Martinique. In future he would have to persuade ship-owners to carry his unconventional cargo. This would prove to be less of a problem, as the voyage to Martinique had demonstrated that it was feasible, and would not sink a vessel.
Throughout the summer and autumn Frederic spent his time making contacts in the West Indies, setting up agents on Jamaica, Barbados, Guadeloupe and St Thomas. He arranged for an ice-house to be built in St Pierre. He had a good contact in Havana, for his cousin William Savage, James’s brother, lived there. Though William failed to persuade the Spanish authorities to grant exclusive rights to sell ice in Cuba, he was able to get an ice-house of sorts built in Havana.
When the first hard frosts of the winter froze Rockwood Pond in January 1807 Frederic began his second season in the ice trade. The technology of harvesting and shipping ice was still very crude: he probably supplemented what he could get from Rockwood with supplies bought from local farmers. Though he had been working on designs for an ice-house at Rockwood, Frederic still had nowhere to hold large reserves which might last through the summer. His shipping would be done in winter and spring, when the temperature in Boston, though very variable, would preserve the ice until it was sent south. Though he would have to pay for the building of ice-houses and freight charges if the trade expanded, the ice itself was free: nobody owned the frozen water of the New England ponds, and he could get supplies wherever he wanted. One excellent source of good clear ice was Fresh Pond in Cambridge, and Frederic almost certainly paid a winter workforce to cut ice from there.
In January 1807 Frederic sent his second cargo of ice to the West Indies, but he did not sail with it. This time it went to Havana, to be stored and sold by his cousin William Savage. There were about 180 tons of ice on board the brig Trident when it left Boston. We do not know how much of this survived the voyage, but William was able to fill the Havana ice-house, and he found a ready market, chiefly among the cafe owners, who used it to make chilled drinks and ice cream. In March and April two more consignments of ice were sent, and though the ice lasted only about two weeks in Havana William was able to sell $6,000-worth. With William, Frederic arranged for the Trident to ship a cargo of molasses from Havana on the voyage back to Boston. This would have been profitable had the customer paid up, but his business failed and Frederic had to foot the bill. He could not afford to send another shipment of ice to Martinique, and his new ice-house there was abandoned.
Meanwhile William Tudor was involved in difficult negotiations with the British authorities in London. He had good contacts there, but nobody could quite believe that he really was asking for exclusive rights to sell ice to West Indian islands. They suspected that this was a cover, and a particularly bizarre one at that, for some Yankee smuggling operation. William had to come up with some special reason to persuade the authorities that the ice trade would be useful to the British in the West Indies. He found it in the claim that ice would be of great medical benefit in the treatment of fevers. A doctor’s letter arguing the case for ice-pack treatment secured the deal, and William was able to inform Frederic that he had the monopoly he wanted in Jamaica, Antigua and Barbados. But by this time he could not afford to pay for any ice shipments, and the hard-won exclusive privileges were worthless.
In the second year of the ice trade Frederic had made only three shipments to Havana, and the prospects there, though promising, were limited by the rapid melting of his cargo once it was landed. He decided to go to Havana himself and build a better ice-house in preparation for his third season. Though he did not know it when he first arrived in Cuba in mid-December 1807, his journey was a waste of time and money. The American President, Thomas Jefferson, had persuaded Congress to put a temporary stop on all shipments from American ports as a demonstration of the new nation’s neutrality in the European conflict. Frederic was left high and dry; he abandoned his half-built ice-house in Havana and sailed back to Boston, as he would be unable to make any shipments that winter.
He had not been back at Rockwood long when his father returned from Europe alone, leaving his wife, son and daughter behind. The family fortune was gone, and what hope there was of retrieving it was locked up in the South Boston venture, the outcome of which remained uncertain. The Judge needed to find work, and through friends obtained an official position in the office of the Secretary of State for Massachusetts, which gave him some income and a modest social status. He and Frederic still believed that the South Boston venture could return $100,000. In fact all the Judge got back was $9,000. Frederic was deeply affected by the decline in his family’s fortunes, and was determined to save them from impending poverty.
Though he could not ship any ice that winter, Frederic did not abandon the venture, as he might well have done. He was still convinced that if he could overcome the problem of how to preserve ice efficiently in hot climates there were good profits to be made. In the summer of 1808 he had time on his hands and a supply of ice in the Rockwood ice-house with which he could experiment. Why ice kept better in some conditions than others was a mystery. Obviously some materials would provide better insulation than others, and Frederic needed something that would be available in bulk and was not too expensive. He had to hand plenty of charcoal and some light, spongy peat which was also used as fuel at Rockwood. To determine which might be the better insulator he took two large wooden casks, put pulverised charcoal in one and peat in the other, filled them with ice and put the lids on. Forty days later, when he opened the casks, the ice had melted in both of them – this was between mid-June and the end of July – but the melt-water was warm in the barrel insulated with charcoal, and cool in the peat barrel. He carried out the experiment again, opening the casks sooner, and found that some ice remained in the peat barrel whereas it had all gone from the charcoal barrel. Peat, although the poorer fuel, was the better insulator.
In Frederic’s mind at this time was the notion that if he could create a thriving industry from otherwise valueless ice and cheap insulating material, he would have cracked a problem that all New Englanders faced. Because they lacked resources of their own to export, and their rivers, running north to south, did not connect them to the developing interior of the country, they were dependent on the sea and trade along the east coast or far overseas for their prosperity. But quite often, when a cargo had been discharged on the wharves at Boston there was nothing in bulk to carry on an outward voyage. Ships were designed to sail with a full hold, and were unstable and difficult to handle without a cargo. If there was no saleable ballast something had to be found to weight the ship down, which would be jettisoned at the end of the outward voyage. In Boston stones were dredged from the bay, which was time-consuming and therefore costly. But if a vessel took on ice rather than stones, there would be a freight charge paid to the shipper. A ship-owner who might otherwise have loaded with worthless ballast had an incentive to take ice even at a very low rate, provided he was convinced that this unusual cargo would not damage the vessel.
Although Frederic was the butt of much wry humour when he first tried to sell ice, the venture was considered in later years as typically ‘Yankee’, because it was making something out of nothing. And in retrospect the ice trade made more sense in the peculiar economy of Massachusetts than even Frederic at first realised. He was later to claim credit for reviving the flagging Boston trade with India, because his ice at least gave the shippers a freight income on their long outward journey. It was just as true, of course, that if ballast had not been a problem for Boston ship-owners, the ice trade would probably never have become established, for frozen water was not the most lucrative cargo to carry.
Although he had made little money from them, Frederic had proved the feasibility of the ice trade with his first four shipments. The ice lasted, the ships were undamaged and there was a market for cool drinks and ice cream in tropical climates. Taking into account the cost of harvesting the ice, carrying it to a wharf on Boston’s Charlestown quays, a modest freight charge and all other expenses, including the building of ice-houses, it seemed that a profit could be made. However, if enjoying ice was to become an established luxury in the West Indies, supplies would have to be regular. When he sought exclusive rights to sell ice Frederic would argue that if he was guaranteed sales and was free of troublesome competition he would be better able to establish regular shipments. That was what he hoped for in Cuba, but in 1808 there was no point in pursuing an exclusive deal because no ships were sailing.* To add to his frustration, his brother William returned from Europe with the news that in France he had been granted a Napoleonic privilege to trade with France’s West Indian islands.
The shipping embargo was to last until the spring of 1809, and Frederic did not bother to harvest any ice for export the previous winter. However, he and William imagined for a short time that they had chanced upon another speculation which would save them and the family from penury. William had taken his watch to be mended, and learned from the watchmaker that coal had been found in remote land on Cape Cod and the island of Martha’s Vineyard. If there were coal deposits in New England they could be worth their weight in gold, and Frederic became very excited. As with the ice venture, he wanted as few people as possible to know about this find. He asked his father for some funds to explore Martha’s Vineyard and look into the purchase of mineral rights, but the Judge had no money unless he mortgaged Rockwood, and the venture was too risky for that. But Frederic managed to put together a kind of mining company with a committee of six which included his cousin William Savage, back from Havana.
Three of this committee, including Frederic and his cousin William, set out to explore the prospective coalmines disguised as hunters: they took their guns and let it be known they were going to do some shooting. Frederic had been fond of the outdoor life since boyhood, and this was a not implausible cover story. They sailed to Cape Cod, where they found coal specimens, and hired a schooner to take them to Martha’s Vineyard. Here they collected more specimens, in weather which rapidly deteriorated and drove them to put up for the night at an inn. The next day they hired a boatman to take them back to Boston through treacherous seas which were running high. They were very nearly shipwrecked, and had to drop their sails and row eleven miles through the night to make shore. But the venture came to nothing. They had found coal, and a lease to dig for it was obtained from the native Americans who owned the land, but they had no money to take it any further.
The Tudors were at a very low ebb, driven back to their Rockwood estate. It had been left to them as a place to spend happy summer months; now it was their last resort. As a farm it was in a sorry state, with two horses, two yoke of oxen, two cows, one heifer, three hogs and fifty chickens. Because the family had no inclination to run the farm themselves they had hired two people to do the work, and their annual wage bill of $500 was more than the total income from the sale of hay, corn, potatoes and carrots. Rockwood ice was potentially the most valuable crop on the farm – with the possible exception of Frederic’s sister Delia, who was now of marriageable age. Delia had been courted by some respectably wealthy young men, but to Frederic’s annoyance had turned them down, and now she was spending what little Tudor money was left on the European jaunt with her mother.
In the autumn of 1809 Frederic’s only hope of financial salvation was the forthcoming ice harvest. He was aware that few if any Boston merchants regarded his enterprise as worth pursuing, and he must have felt very self-conscious as he mingled with them on their customary trading ground in State Street, where he would go still hoping to find backers. Then, late in 1809 he was approached in State Street by a sheriff and in full view of Boston’s mercantile community was put under arrest for debt. A creditor had waited long enough for payment. The debt laws were harsh, and Frederic expected to be marched straight to jail. However, as it was his first offence he was given a reprieve: if he repaid the money within a week he would not be put behind bars. Somehow the Judge and a few friends raised enough to save Frederic from prison. But he was mortified, and wrote to his brother-in-law Robert Gardiner that the experience had been ‘abominable’.
As the weather was hardening it was time for Frederic to plan his next season of ice sales to Havana. He decided to go himself, leaving William Savage in Boston to organise the harvesting and loading. This would enable Frederic to escape the social embarrassment he suffered in Boston and to continue his plan to build a more efficient ice-house, though just what his design improvements were at this stage is not clear. After a good deal of negotiation and the payment of a few bribes when he got to Havana he secured his monopoly. The following April two cargoes of ice arrived from Boston, and they sold well, bringing in $5,600 by August. In May a shipment of ice by a rival arrived in Havana – there is no record of who sent it – but Frederic was able to crow in his diary that ‘he made so poor a hand of it that after some days he threw his ice overboard and I encountered no further difficulties in my sales.’ It would be interesting to know more about this incident, but we only have Frederic’s curt account. From later reports of his tactics for seeing off rivals, it is probable that he simply put a very low price on his ice for long enough to undermine his competitor’s sales. As nobody else had ice-houses as efficient as his, they could not keep their cargo for long, and their profits would simply melt away. If they sold at the same price as Frederic they would not make a profit and would be discouraged from continuing in the trade.
The Havana venture was looking promising; then Frederic caught yellow fever. He sailed back to Boston in August, leaving another cousin, Arthur Savage, in charge of ice sales, which at the end of the season totalled $7,400. The 1810 season had proved to be the first which returned a profit. When expenses were paid it was a mere $1,000, but, as Frederic noted in his diary, that year ‘must forever remain a monument of the advantage of steady perseverance in a project that is good in the main’. His optimism appeared to be justified as the next season got under way. He put an agent in charge in Havana, and stayed in Boston to handle shipments.
In 1811 Frederic sent his younger brother Harry, then twenty years old, to Kingston, Jamaica, with the aim of setting up an ice trade there. Harry was regarded by most of the family as an idler and good-for-nothing, and this would be a way of getting him to do something useful. True to form, he overslept on the day he was supposed to sail to Jamaica and missed the boat. When he finally got there he demanded more money than Frederic wanted to pay. The first shipment of ice to Jamaica left Boston in April 1811 on the schooner Active, but it never reached Harry. When Frederic heard the news that the Active had been shipwrecked and all the ice lost he was more relieved than disappointed, for it meant he did not have to pay the freight charge, which would probably have been greater than the profit from the ice. That, for the time being, was the end of the Jamaica venture and of Harry’s introduction to the ice trade.
In early March 1812 Frederic still owed money to a number of people in Boston, and was having difficulty settling all his debts on time. It would only take one of his creditors to go to law and Frederic would be marched off to prison. That was what now happened. In his diary on 14 March he wrote:
On Monday the 9th instant I was arrested … and locked up as a debtor in Boston jail… On this memorable day in my little annals I am 28 years 6 months and 5 days old. It is an event which I think I could not have avoided: but it is a climax which I did hope to have escaped as my affairs are looking well at last after a fearful struggle with adverse circumstances for seven years – but it has taken place and I have endeavoured to meet it as I would the tempest of heaven which should serve to strengthen rather than reduce the spirit of a true man.
Buoyed up by his own fine sentiments, Frederic gathered together the money to pay off the debt and was out of jail in time to arrange another ice shipment to Havana. He also established a basement store for ice in Boston, as it was becoming obvious that he needed to retain supplies there during the summer if he was going to ship cargoes on a regular basis. By juggling his precarious financial affairs he managed to keep going, though he was aware that he owed a great deal more than he owned.
He might just have survived had fate not once again dealt him an unfair hand. Just when he had his Boston cellars stocked with ice there was another embargo on American trade, this time as a result of the conflict with Britain which became known as the war of 1812, the origins of which are still a matter of dispute, but which stemmed from continuing tensions between the United States and Britain after the War of Independence. What was not in doubt was that Frederic had to abandon the Havana trade and allow his ice to melt away unsold. By July he was in deep financial trouble. The family still had some assets: Rockwood, the land in South Boston and the house in town were worth around $28,400. But Frederic owed to a number of people, including his blacksmith and his tailor, a total of $38,772.
There was to be no ice trade the coming winter, and Frederic had no money to develop the coalmining venture. But he reasoned that as America was at war a new and faster ship might be an asset, and he had just the design. He had always fancied himself as an inventor, though he had no professional skills to call upon. The key to his revolutionary concept was a ship that had a keel only at the stern, rather than running the length of the boat. He wrote to President Jefferson and to the Secretary of the Navy with an account of his design, but received no reply. Surprisingly, given Frederic’s reputation in Boston at that time, he found a shipyard prepared to build a prototype and backers to pay for it. He christened the ship, which was sixty-six feet long and weighed 130 tons, the Black Swan. If it proved successful, Frederic would be able to profit from the sale of his design.
The Black Swan, built by Barker’s shipyard in Charlestown, was ready for launching the following spring. On 1 May 1813 it made its maiden voyage up the Charles River, with Frederic proudly on deck. It had not gone far when a Boston sheriff came aboard with a demand that Frederic repay a debt of $300. He could not come up with the money, and was once again put behind bars. Of this experience he wrote much later:
The jail was an old one and the room in which they put me had no chair in it. It did not smell very sweet: but there was a long bench which I pulled into the middle and laid down upon my back to reflect upon what was to be done next. I smiled to think that any one should believe I was beaten, or in the slightest degree daunted in the steady purpose I had formed of accomplishing the payment of every dollar of debt and lifting myself to lord it over, if I chose, my humble creditor and his instrument. I never doubted I should accomplish what I have accomplished.
The Black Swan did not impress in its trials, and was never tested on the high seas; but as it turned out the winds of war did blow Frederic one mixed blessing in the form of a fiery sea-captain called Charles Stewart, who emerged from the conflict as a husband for sister Delia. Frederic had ordered her and his mother to return to Boston just as the war was breaking out, not for their safety so much as to put an end to their extravagances, for which he was footing the bill. They had been back just under a year when in June 1813 Captain Stewart arrived in Boston to take command of the United States Frigate Constitution, which had to undergo repairs. A small, convivial, red-haired Irishman, he met Delia and showed some interest in her. Frederic, believing Stewart was just what the family needed, goaded his sister into ensnaring him. They were married on 25 November 1813, a month before Stewart set off to sea. It was by all accounts a disastrous union of a rough seaman and a cultured Boston lady, and no recommendation for Frederic’s gifts as a matchmaker. But it meant Delia was no longer a drain on his uncertain resources.
In the summer of 1814, in a desperate attempt to raise more capital, Frederic considered mortgaging Rockwood and apportioning the proceeds among the family. But his mother demanded a much larger share than he would allow, and the project was dropped. Arrested three times for debt, jailed twice, his ice trade suspended by war, Frederic was in a desperate situation.
Meanwhile, Captain Stewart proved a very able commander, and when the war ended in December 1814 he returned to Boston a hero of many successes against the British (he did not in fact learn until April 1815 that the war was over, and went on attacking British warships during several months of peace). He was fêted in New York, presented with a commemorative sword in Philadelphia and took the lion’s share of the $40,000 awarded by Congress to the officers and crew of the Constitution for the capture of a British naval ship. Naturally enough, Frederic fancied that some of this money might be invested in his next venture in the frozen water trade. Stewart had encouraged the idea that he might help Frederic, suggesting to him a number of ventures he considered worth an investment. But it turned out that ice was not one of them, and Frederic got nowhere with his brother-in-law, despite a persistent campaign of letter-writing.
On 18 January 1814 Frederic had confided to his diary:
I complain of hard destiny, and have I not reason? If it were constitutional habit, I should despise myself. I have manfully maintained as long as I possibly could that ‘success is virtue’. I say so still; but my heart tells me I don’t believe it. Have I not been industrious? Have not many of my calculations been good? And have not all my undertakings in the eventful Ice business been attended by a villainous train of events against which no calculation could be made which have heretofore prevented success which must have followed if only the common chances and changes of this world had not happened against me? They have worried me. They have cured me of superfluous gaiety. They have made my head grey; but they have not driven me to despair.
It was in this defiant mood that Frederic prepared the following autumn to resume the ice trade. He was becoming adept at avoiding the attentions of Boston sheriffs armed with warrants for the execution of debt, and managed to load up a ship and slip out of port on 1 November 1815, bound for Havana. His mother, perhaps a little repentant about demanding too large a share of the proposed Rockwood mortgage, sent him some sweetmeats and a few shirts to see him on his way. Frederic, destitute and still living the life of a single man in lodgings, did not thank her. He had only one thing on his mind: the new and revolutionary ice-house he was going to construct in Havana which would finally set the trade on a proper footing and make him his fortune.
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