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