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