Credit:By Gavin Weightman

Credit:Reviewed By Mary Whipple

“The jewel in the crown of the Boston Ice King was the Calcutta trade.”

The indescribable heat of summer in Calcutta, though burdensome for all residents, must have been especially oppressive for officials of the British Empire, accustomed as they were to cool weather at home, even in the summer months. And when word reached them in September, 1833, that a ship carrying ice from Boston had arrived at the mouth of the Hooghly River, many regarded this as a huge practical joke.

The Calcutta Courier reported that “The Yankees are so inventive, and so fond of a joke at the expense of the old country [England], that we had some misgivings about the reality of brother Jonathan’s manifest, and suspected him to be coolly indicting a hoax upon the wonder-loving daughters of Britain.” The temperature that day was over 90 degrees, and any ice from New England would have had to be cut from rivers or ponds at least six months earlier! Boston was 16,000 miles away, and it would have taken a ship 120 days to navigate its way to Calcutta. How could something like ice possibly survive so long, without refrigeration of any kind, in the hold of a ship?

Fears were rampant that the ice, if it existed at all, had melted. As the ship with the “ice” made its way up the Hooghly, the India Gazette argued that newly developed steamships should have been used to tow the cargo vessel so that it would arrive in Calcutta faster and with more of its ice intact. They increased the suspense by informing their readers that more and more water from melted ice was being pumped out of the ship’s hold each day, and urged that this special cargo be declared free of duty and then unloaded immediately, even at night, when it was cooler. And when a reporter entered the temporary icehouse which was built to hold the fifty tons of ice that were eventually unloaded, he declared he felt “the same sensation from the refreshing radiation which we once experienced in a hot day in February on entering the Caves of Carlee.”

Ice in Calcutta was an unqualified success, and the British vowed to do everything necessary to ensure that the trade in “frozen water” continued, even building by subscription a huge and elaborate stone icehouse in Calcutta, one befitting “the city of palaces.” The city honored the first entrepreneur of the ice industry with a silver cup and lauded him as a “benefactor of mankind,” a man as important as the importer of the potato to Europe. Now it was possible for people to have cold drinks and ice cream for the first time in India. Soon ice would also become available in Bombay and Madras, and icehouses also built there to store it. (Note: The Calcutta icehouse was destroyed in the 1880’s. The Madras icehouse still exists.)

All the above fascinating information comes from Gavin Weightman’s newly published book, The Frozen Water Trade, a story that is so lively and readable that few readers will be able to put it down. Weightman, a British journalist and author, gathers information about the unique and almost-forgotten New England ice industry from archives all over the world, turning his research into a truly compelling narrative by focusing on the lifelong obsession of one man, Frederic Tudor, for whom the successful shipping of ice to India in 1833 was the culmination of a thirty-year dream.

Frederic, “a diminutive, pig-headed Bostonian,” had dropped out of school at thirteen (though his brother had gone to Harvard) and had always been seen as something of a maverick. Local financiers who might have backed his initial experiments shipping ice to people who had never seen it (and didn’t know they “needed” it) ridiculed him and refused to help him finance such an unlikely business. It is only because Frederic came from a prominent family whose wealth and connections subsidized his initial experiments in 1806, when he was 22, that he was able to start his business at all, sending his first shipment of “frozen water” to Martinique.

Devoting his life to sending an easily available and absolutely free commodity--ice from New England’s frozen rivers and ponds--to other parts of the world, Frederic Tudor eventually became one of the great American entrepreneurs of the nineteenth century, ultimately earning a long-term profit of $220,000 in the Calcutta trade alone, an enormous sum made possible through his monopoly on trade there. Though he ran into debt many times and was even sent to jail twice for these debts, Frederic’s business became huge, ranging from Martinique, where ice was not initially a success, to Havana, Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans, and cities in India, where it was hugely successful. Eventually he and his competitors even figured out a way to ship it to the Philippines, China, New Zealand, and Australia.

With fascinating illustrations and many old photographs, Weightman documents how Massachusetts ice cut from Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Spy Pond in Arlington, Walden Pond in Concord, and most famously, Wenham Lake in Wenham, could last in icehouses, if heavily insulated with sawdust, for several years, and, how with similar insulation, it could be shipped throughout the world for most of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. Though we take the concept of refrigeration for granted now, something as simple as an icebox, cooled with blocks of ice, has been a reality for less than 150 years throughout much of the world. And as Weightman points out, even as late as 1950, twenty percent of the US population still relied on the ice in iceboxes to keep their foodstuffs cold.

Much more than a history book, The Frozen Water Trade is a fascinating study of entrepreneurship, engineering, marketing, and old-fashioned Yankee ingenuity, and Weightman’s contribution to our understanding of this unheralded industry is immense. His book, despite its arcane subject, is delightful and great fun to read, and his ability to highlight details which keep the reader enthralled while learning something new makes his scholarly research accessible to even the most reluctant reader of history or non-fiction.