The Iceman Saileth
By Jock O’Connell
It’s December, normally the month of festive holidays and joyful gatherings. Even if life is far from normal these days, I thought I should keep in the spirit of the occasion by offering a commentary that is unlikely to offend even the most obstreperous or innumerate among us. So bear with me while I borrow from Gavin Weightman’s The Frozen Water Tradeto share a tale of logistical audacity that makes even the boldest exploits of today’s shippers look timid.
Imagine, for a moment or two, that you’re a senior official with the British East India Company in Calcutta (now Kolkata). It is September 1833, and it is not just hot and muggy—it’s very hot and muggy. And for some perverse reason of national pride or a horribly misguided sense of racial superiority, you’re saddled with a corporate dress code that obliges you to dress yourself in wool all the way up to the starched collar that’s all but strangling you. Your stiff upper lip naturally glistens with perspiration. But that’s the way it is, old boy.
In May of that year, Daniel Wilson, Calcutta’s Lord Bishop, had written to his family in England: “The weather is perfectly suffocating. None can pity us but those who know our sufferings. The mind, body, functions, tempers, words, and feelings are all morbidly affected…a constant heat which unnerves, depresses, annihilates the European mind and energies.”
But life is about to improve, at least for some with connections or money.
With the steadily rising temperature keeping pace with the level of humidity on the first Thursday of that September 187 years ago, a sailing ship some seventy miles down the circuitous Hooghly River stops to take on an East India Company pilot. She is the brig Tuscany, an American vessel under the command of Captain Clement Littlefield of Kennebunkport. Over the next days, the local press – notably, the Calcutta Courier and the India Gazette – anxiously reports news of her slow progress upriver until she arrives at the Calcutta docks eight days later to much celebration. So eager were British authorities to expedite the offloading of the ship’s cargo that they waived all import duties and suspended a prohibition against discharging freight at night.
Why the big fuss?
The East India Company, a private enterprise that effectively ruled much of the Indian subcontinent and commanded an army twice the size of Britain’s, had transformed Calcutta into a major trading entrepôt. Vessels from around the world routinely called there to trade in an astonishing array of goods. So what was so special about this one ship?
Simple. This was decades before mechanical refrigeration, and Tuscany was carrying a most improbable cargo – blocks of ice harvested earlier in the year from a frozen lake not far from Salem, Massachusetts.
The ship had sailed from Boston on May 12 with approximately 160 tons of ice in blocks carefully stowed in her hold. Despite sailing through the warmest of climates, some two-thirds of the cargo survived to be offloaded more than 12,000 nautical miles away in Calcutta. As described by the Calcutta Courier: “These blocks are beautifully transparent and of great size, some of them nearly a foot thick (Boston winters must be very severe).”
So at the end of a day spent running an empire, you leave your office that autumn of 1833 to stroll across to your private club to seek relief from the climate. You ask the barman for a gin and quinine. For medicinal purposes, of course. Malaria, after all, lurks at every corner. But now your drink arrives, complete with a sliver or two of ice. From Boston. It was magical, certainly one of the most outlandish accomplishments of 19th-century logistics.
A committee was soon formed to build a suitable icehouse. Unlike those wooden ones that lined lakes and streams throughout northern states of America, the Calcutta icehouse would be a stone palace where the British would preserve future shipments of New England ice.
In the estimation of the editors of the Calcutta Courier: “The first transport of Ice, from the shores of the United States to the banks of the Ganges, is an event of no mean importance; and the names of those who planned and effectively carried through the adventure at their own cost, deserve to be handed down to posterity with the names of other benefactors of humanity.”
The venture was spawned by the genius (perhaps madness) and daring of one Frederic Tudor, described in a contemporary account as a “diminutive, pig-headed Bostonian who devoted most of his working life to supplying ice to the tropics.” Before wagering on a shipment of ice from Boston to distant India, Tudor had already established a lucrative trade supplying New England ice to customers in Havana, New Orleans, Charleston, Savannah, and New York City, by far the largest single market Tudor’s ships served. As for that initial supply of ice to India, it lasted until December and netted Tudor some $3,300.
New England’s ice trade with India (which eventually came to include Bombay and Madras) continued for nearly fifty years until new technologies in refrigeration and electricity made it obsolete. But the business of slicing up the surface ice on lakes and rivers in the Northeast persisted well into the 20th century. In an ominous foreshadowing of a more contemporary development, gradually milder winters drove ice harvesters from the lakes and ponds of Massachusetts and New York to frozen bodies of water further north.
By the end of the 19th century, Maine’s Kennebec River had become the industry’s mother lode, supplying ice to customers around the world while providing wintertime employment to thousands of otherwise idle farmhands and fishermen. According to some estimates, the ice harvest in 19th-century Maine proved more valuable than all the gold the 49ers found in California.
In time, household ice boxes in America were replaced by electric refrigerators. Having written that sentence, I’m prompted to wonder how many readers not of a certain age have any idea of what an icebox was or what it looked like. Well, children, it was that insulated box that Honeymooners Ralph and Alice Kramden had in their kitchen and which old Mrs. Kowalski had in her third-floor walk-up across the street from our house back in the 1950s. Every few days, the ice man would drive up in his truck to replenish her ice box with a twelve-inch cube he would hoist onto a rubber mat flung over his shoulder. If he was so inclined, he might even use a pick to chip off a couple of shards of cold, crystal-clear ice for the neighborhood street urchins, who were as thrilled by the ice on a hot summer day as were the British residents of Calcutta over a century earlier.
Best wishes to all for your respective holidays and for a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2021.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in Jock’s commentaries are his own and may not reflect the positions of the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association.