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