Ice King Fredric Tudor exported frozen luxury from Boston to India.
Photo: Essex Institute Historical Collections

The transoceanic operation, undertaken by the Tudor Ice Co., began in early May 1833, when approximately 180 tons of freshwater ice was loaded into the insulated hold of the sailing ship Tuscany in Boston.

The historic four-month trip of the precious, perishable cargo was made possible by advances in ice harvesting and storage adopted and pioneered by Frederic Tudor, aka Boston’s “Ice King,” member of an influential Boston Brahmin family that had already built a lucrative business shipping Northeastern ice to the Caribbean and Europe.

Chief among the technological leaps was a horse-drawn metal ice plow invented by Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth that allowed mass-production of the substance.

Previously, slabs of ice had been hand-harvested by workers, who used axes and saws to hack the frozen water from Northern lakes during winter months. The labor-intensive undertaking made ice a luxury item that only the wealthy could afford.

Refrigerated merchant vessels hadn’t yet been invented, but advances in storage during shipping decreased the amount of ice lost due to melting.

An article titled “The Ice Trade Between America and India,” published in an 1836 edition of Mechanics’ Magazine, laid out in great detail the practices employed to prevent the ice from liquefying during months at sea:

For the voyage to India, a much longer one than had been hitherto attempted, some additional precautions were deemed necessary for the preservation of the ice. The ice hold was an insulated house, extending from the after part of the forward hatch, about fifty feet in length.

It was constructed as follows: A floor of one-inch deal planks was first laid down upon the dunnage at the bottom of the vessel; over this was strewed a layer, one foot thick of tan; that is, the refuse bark from the tanners’ pits, thoroughly dried, which is found to be a very good and cheap non-conductor. Over this was laid another deal planking, and the four sides of the hold were built up in exactly the same manner. The pump, well, and main-mast, were boxed round in the same manner.

The cubes of ice were then packed or built together so close as to leave no space between them, and to make the whole one solid mass: About 180 tons were thus stowed. On the top was pressed down closely a foot of hay, and the whole was shut up from access of air, with a deal planking one inch thick nailed upon the lower surface of the lower deck timbers; the space between the planks and deck being stuffed with tan.

The arrival of pure U.S. ice in Calcutta signaled the end of “Hooghly ice,” a dirty, slushy substance made by freezing water in shallow pits in the Indian town of Hooghly-Chinsurah on the Hooghly River in West Bengal. While the inferior Hooghly ice could be used to cool containers, it wasn’t fit to be added to a drink — gin and tonic, for instance.

The imported ice, on the other hand, was pristine. Locals marveled at the giant, icy cubes as they were unloaded from the specially outfitted seafaring vessels.

“One of the first of the shipments to India … brought disbelief and amazement to the large crowd of natives gathered at the wharf to witness the unloading of these ‘crystal blocks of Yankee coldness,’” wrote historian Philip Chadwick Foster Smith. “One of the Indians braved to touch a piece of the ice, and, believing that he had burned himself, wrapped his hand in his robe and rushed away, followed by a number of the alarmed onlookers.”

As trade took off, ice was stored in ice houses built in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. (The sole remaining storage center — dubbed Vivekanandar Illam, or Vivekananda House, in 1963 in honor of Hindu leader Swami Vivekananda — is in Madras.)

Over the next two decades, India became Tudor’s most lucrative market for ice exports.

It was a short-lived victory of shipping over science, however: The Bengal Ice Company, India’s first artificial-ice manufacturer, began production in 1878. The availability of cheaper domestic ice killed the Boston-to-India ice trade within four years.

Source: Various

See Also:

• July 14, 1850: Gorrie Demonstrates Ice-Maker
• Nov. 11, 1930: Einstein Gets Ice Cold
• Lasers Can Chill Stuff Super Fast
• A Year of Global Shipping Routes Mapped by GPS
• June 5, 1833: Ms. Software, Meet Mr. Hardware
• Sept. 13, 1899: New Yorker Becomes First U.S. Pedestrian Killed by Car

Authors: Lewis Wallace

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