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