It was already the end of the first week in February 1806 when Frederic felt confident enough to provision his ship, paying $5.75 for rum, brandy and other essentials. Captain Thomas Pearson was engaged for $50 a month. The ice was cut and the ship loaded and ready to sail by 10 February. They were bade farewell by the Boston Gazette, which expressed the whole mercantile community’s derision in three sentences:
No joke. A vessel with a cargo of 80 tons of Ice has cleared out from this port for Martinique. We hope this will not prove to be a slippery speculation.
Bad weather kept the Favorite in harbour until 13 February, but then she made good passage and arrived in St Pierre on 5 March, a voyage of only twenty-one days. According to Frederic, when she left Boston she had on board not eighty but 130 tons of ice, though exact measurement was hardly relevant: what was important was how much was left when he got to Martinique. This he did not record, stating only that the ice which did survive the trip was in ‘perfect condition’ – an odd description, as ice in any other state would presumably have disappeared. He certainly had a considerable quantity left, but found he had nowhere in St Pierre to store it. He put the blame for this on William and James, who had left a letter for him suggesting sites for an ice-house, although none was ready. They also gave the names of nine prominent people who expected complimentary blocks of ice – ‘as much as a negro could carry’ – and the Captain-General should be sent a hundred pounds of it. An agent called William Dawson had a copy of the privilege which had been granted, but William and James advised Frederic not to bother staying on Martinique, as there did not seem to be much demand for ice there.
All he could do was seek permission to sell his ice directly from the Favorite, though this meant that it would melt rapidly when the hold was open. He sold $50-worth in two days, charging sixteen cents a pound. He was offered $4,000 for the whole cargo, but decided to turn this down. To draw in more customers he had printed some handbills which were distributed in St Pierre. He kept a copy and later pasted it in his Ice House Diary. Headed ‘Glace’, it announced in French that from that day, 7 March, and for the following three days small quantities of ice would be sold aboard ship from a well preserved consignment brought from Boston on the brig Favorite, and that after three days the brig would move on to another island. The price was thirty French sous per pound. Buyers were advised to bring a woollen cloth or some other material to wrap around the ice they bought in order to preserve it.
There were no refrigerators in St Pierre, and according to Frederic most islanders had no idea what to do with the ice once they had bought it. This inhibited sales, and business was sluggish. Frederic was in a state of great anxiety, and ready to blame everyone but himself for the predicament he was in. He wrote to his brother-in-law Robert Gardiner:
It is difficult to conceive how determined to believe most of the people here are that ice will melt in spite of all precautions; and their methods of keeping it are laughable, to be sure. One carries it through the street to his house in the sun noonday, puts it in a plate before his door, and then complains that ‘il fond’. Another puts it in a tub of water, a third by way of climax puts his in salt! And all this notwithstanding they were directed in the handbill what to do.
Frederic does not say what he expected the islanders to do with a few small lumps of ice which would melt rapidly whether or not they were wrapped in a blanket en route from the Favorite to their homes. His best trade, it seems, was making ice creams, and in his letter to Robert Gardiner he told of one small triumph:
The man who keeps the Tivoli Garden insisted ice creams could not be made in this country and that the ice itself would all thaw before he could get it home! I told him I had made them here … and putting my fist pretty hard upon the table I called … for an order of 6olbs of ice and in a pretty warm tone directed the man to have his cream ready and that I would come to freeze it for him in the morning, which I did accordingly, being determined to spare no pains to convince these people that they cannot only have ice but all the luxuries arising here as elsewhere. The Tivoli man rec’d for these creams the first night $300; after this he was humble as a mushroom.
Frederic’s account of his first attempt to sell ice in the West Indies is not entirely convincing. It is very unlikely that when the Favorite docked in St Pierre his ice was, as he claimed, ‘in perfect condition’. A considerable portion of the cargo would have melted on the voyage, as at that time he did not know how to insulate it really effectively. He must have realised as soon as the Favorite weighed anchor that he was not going to sell $10,000 worth of ice as he had hoped, and from the very beginning he was cutting his losses. He should have accepted the offer of $4,000 for the entire shipment and found a cargo for the return voyage, for which he could at least charge freight. Instead he hung on, selling about twenty to thirty dollars-worth of ice a day. He had no idea where William and James were, and had nowhere to sail on to.
Towards the end of March, with the ice melting faster than he could sell it, Frederic accepted a proposition that he take a cargo of sugar back to Boston, and that the remaining ice be unloaded and sold on commission. In the meantime he sailed the 120 miles south-east to Barbados, hoping to get the same kind of exclusive privilege he had on Martinique. He was unsuccessful, and by the time he returned to St Pierre all his ice had gone and the Favorite was loaded with sugar and ready to sail. Two hours out from port the brig hit a squall and lost her masts, which had only recently been repaired. The disconsolate Frederic had to return to St Pierre, where he was given a compensatory box of oranges by the man who had sold the last of his ice on commission. It was not until late April that he finally headed back to Boston, with a paragraph from a St Pierre newspaper as a keepsake:
It will be a remarkable epoch in the history of luxury and enterprise that on the 6th March ice creams have been eaten in Martinique probably for the first time since the settlement of the country. And this too in a volcanic land lying 14 degrees north of the equator.
When he got home Frederic pasted this proudly into his Ice House Diary.
William and James were still on their tour of the West Indies when the Favorite left St Pierre. James’s yellow fever had laid him low for seven weeks, and he did not meet up with William again until the end of February, on the island of St Croix, near Puerto Rico. From there they sailed to Jamaica, where the English governor, Sir Eyre Coote, heard their case for exclusive rights to supply the island with ice. Sir Eyre was courteous, according to William, ‘though he thought it a cursed strange thing’. Throughout the British Empire, however, only the Privy Council in London could grant exclusive trade deals.
The ice envoys did not set sail for Boston until 4 May, when they boarded the Huntress, which was loaded with seventy hogsheads of high-proof rum. They were once again waylaid by privateers, including a Spanish ship which gave them the most unpleasant reception of the whole voyage. An officer came aboard rattling a cutlass and ordered everyone to disembark and to go on board the privateer. When some of them, including James, were slow to obey the officer waved the cutlass above their heads, and gave James a tap on the shoulder with the blunt edge. They later discovered that while on the privateer they had been robbed of a few valuables, including William’s set of pistols and two gold watches. After that the Huntress made slow progress, as the captain had trouble establishing his position. On 15 May, when they discovered they were further away from Boston than they had been the day before, James scribbled a note: ‘Ah! what a glorious fellow will he be who can discover a mode of finding Longitude, easy, certain and expeditious, as that of ascertaining Latitude.’ A clock which kept good time at sea and was unaffected by changes in weather and atmosphere was what was needed. Chronometers had been made by the Englishman John Harrison more than thirty years earlier, but do not appear to have been in use in New England in the early 1800s.
After a few days in quarantine in Boston harbour – to guard against the importation of yellow fever and smallpox – William and James set foot again on New England soil on 3 June. They had been away for six months. Frederic was not at all pleased with their efforts, and showed no sympathy for the illness James had suffered. Instead he