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CHAPTER THREE

From the Ice-House to the Jailhouse

Frederic Tudor had had a miserable time in Martinique: he had lost a great deal of money, and he regarded his brother and cousin as half-hearted business associates; yet he did not abandon his dream of making a fortune selling ice. Why he was so persistent is a mystery, for the prospect before him was not at all promising, and there were many other commodities he might have traded in. The Ice House Diaries he kept almost continuously from 1805 until 1838 do not really provide a satisfactory answer. What they do reveal is a blind commitment to a venture which many times threatened Frederic’s health and sanity, and often caused him acute embarrassment within the Boston community. He had bouts of self-pity, but rarely of self-doubt. What drove him on even when everything seemed hopeless was his pride: he had announced to the world at the age of twenty-two that he could make money out of a commodity other New Englanders regarded as worthless, and he was determined to prove that he was right and all those around him were wrong.

Frederic’s dismay at the apparent bafflement of the people of St Pierre when offered a chunk of ice did not undermine his belief that there was a ready market for it in hot climates. Once they became accustomed to regular deliveries, he felt, people would be hooked. The same would be true in Havana and possibly southern US cities such as Charleston and New Orleans. Nobody could doubt that this luxury would be sought after if there were guaranteed deliveries to cover the hottest months of the year. And a lesson Frederic had learned from the unsuccessful expedition to Martinique was that there must be a properly designed ice-house at the point of delivery, from which small quantities could be sold over weeks or even months.

In August 1806 Frederic’s brother William sailed from New York to London to pursue the grant of exclusive ice-trade rights with British-owned islands in the West Indies. The Judge, along with Frederic’s mother and younger sister Delia, followed him. They intended to enjoy the glamorous social round in England and France and, with luck, find a good match for Delia. However, it was already becoming clear that the family was in serious financial difficulty. The Judge’s South Boston speculation was not yet returning any kind of profit, and he had to sell some of his property and borrow money at a high interest rate to fund the trip to Europe.

Frederic had no money either, and was unable to find any financial backers for the ice venture. His brig the Favorite is not mentioned again in his diaries, and he must have sold it – almost certainly at a loss, for it had needed extensive repairs in Martinique. In future he would have to persuade ship-owners to carry his unconventional cargo. This would prove to be less of a problem, as the voyage to Martinique had demonstrated that it was feasible, and would not sink a vessel.

Throughout the summer and autumn Frederic spent his time making contacts in the West Indies, setting up agents on Jamaica, Barbados, Guadeloupe and St Thomas. He arranged for an ice-house to be built in St Pierre. He had a good contact in Havana, for his cousin William Savage, James’s brother, lived there. Though William failed to persuade the Spanish authorities to grant exclusive rights to sell ice in Cuba, he was able to get an ice-house of sorts built in Havana.

When the first hard frosts of the winter froze Rockwood Pond in January 1807 Frederic began his second season in the ice trade. The technology of harvesting and shipping ice was still very crude: he probably supplemented what he could get from Rockwood with supplies bought from local farmers. Though he had been working on designs for an ice-house at Rockwood, Frederic still had nowhere to hold large reserves which might last through the summer. His shipping would be done in winter and spring, when the temperature in Boston, though very variable, would preserve the ice until it was sent south. Though he would have to pay for the building of ice-houses and freight charges if the trade expanded, the ice itself was free: nobody owned the frozen water of the New England ponds, and he could get supplies wherever he wanted. One excellent source of good clear ice was Fresh Pond in Cambridge, and Frederic almost certainly paid a winter workforce to cut ice from there.

In January 1807 Frederic sent his second cargo of ice to the West Indies, but he did not sail with it. This time it went to Havana, to be stored and sold by his cousin William Savage. There were about 180 tons of ice on board the brig Trident when it left Boston. We do not know how much of this survived the voyage, but William was able to fill the Havana ice-house, and he found a ready market, chiefly among the cafe owners, who used it to make chilled drinks and ice cream. In March and April two more consignments of ice were sent, and though the ice lasted only about two weeks in Havana William was able to sell $6,000-worth. With William, Frederic arranged for the Trident to ship a cargo of molasses from Havana on the voyage back to Boston. This would have been profitable had the customer paid up, but his business failed and Frederic had to foot the bill. He could not afford to send another shipment of ice to Martinique, and his new ice-house there was abandoned.

Meanwhile William Tudor was involved in difficult negotiations with the British authorities in London. He had good contacts there, but nobody could quite believe that he really was asking for exclusive rights to sell ice to West Indian islands. They suspected that this was a cover, and a particularly bizarre one at that, for some Yankee smuggling operation. William had to come up with some special reason to persuade the authorities that the ice trade would be useful to the British in the West Indies. He found it in the claim that ice would be of great medical benefit in the treatment of fevers. A doctor’s letter arguing the case for ice-pack treatment secured the deal, and William was able to inform Frederic that he had the monopoly he wanted in Jamaica, Antigua and Barbados. But by this time he could not afford to pay for any ice shipments, and the hard-won exclusive privileges were worthless.

In the second year of the ice trade Frederic had made only three shipments to Havana, and the prospects there, though promising, were limited by the rapid melting of his cargo once it was landed. He decided to go to Havana himself and build a better ice-house in preparation for his third season. Though he did not know it when he first arrived in Cuba in mid-December 1807, his journey was a waste of time and money. The American President, Thomas Jefferson, had persuaded Congress to put a temporary stop on all shipments from American ports as a demonstration of the new nation’s neutrality in the European conflict. Frederic was left high and dry; he abandoned his half-built ice-house in Havana and sailed back to Boston, as he would be unable to make any shipments that winter.

He had not been back at Rockwood long when his father returned from Europe alone, leaving his wife, son and daughter behind. The family fortune was gone, and what hope there was of retrieving it was locked up in the South Boston venture, the outcome of which remained uncertain. The Judge needed to find work, and through friends obtained an official position in the office of the Secretary of State for Massachusetts, which gave him some income and a modest social status. He and Frederic still believed that the South Boston venture could return $100,000. In fact all the Judge got back was $9,000. Frederic was deeply affected by the decline in his family’s fortunes, and was determined to save them from impending poverty.

Though he could not ship any ice that winter, Frederic did not abandon the venture, as he might well have done. He was still convinced that if he could overcome the problem of how to preserve ice efficiently in hot climates there were good profits to be made. In the summer of 1808 he had time on his hands and a supply of ice in the Rockwood ice-house with which he could experiment. Why ice kept better in some conditions than others was a mystery. Obviously some materials would provide better insulation than others, and Frederic needed something that would be available in bulk and was not too expensive. He had to hand plenty of charcoal and some light, spongy peat which was also used as fuel at Rockwood. To determine which might be the better insulator he took two large wooden casks, put pulverised charcoal in one and peat in the other, filled them with ice and put the lids on. Forty days later, when he opened the casks, the ice had melted in both of them – this was between mid-June and the end of July – but the melt-water was warm in the barrel insulated with charcoal, and cool in the peat barrel. He carried out the experiment again, opening the casks sooner, and found that some ice remained in the peat barrel whereas it had all gone from the charcoal barrel. Peat, although the poorer fuel, was the better insulator.

In Frederic’s mind at this time was the notion that if he could create a thriving industry from otherwise valueless ice and cheap insulating material, he would have cracked a problem that all New Englanders faced. Because they lacked resources of their own to export, and their rivers, running north to south, did not connect them to the developing interior of the country, they were dependent on the sea and trade along the east coast or far overseas for their prosperity. But quite often, when a cargo had been discharged on the wharves at Boston there was nothing in bulk to carry on an outward voyage. Ships were designed to sail with a full hold, and were unstable and difficult to handle without a cargo. If there was no saleable ballast something had to be found to weight the ship down, which would be jettisoned at the end of the outward voyage. In Boston stones were dredged from the bay, which was time-consuming and therefore costly. But if a vessel took on ice rather than stones, there would be a freight charge paid to the shipper. A ship-owner who might otherwise have loaded with worthless ballast had an incentive to take ice even at a very low rate, provided he was convinced that this unusual cargo would not damage the vessel.

Although Frederic was the butt of much wry humour when he first tried to sell ice, the venture was considered in later years as typically ‘Yankee’, because it was making something out of nothing. And in retrospect the ice trade made more sense in the peculiar economy of Massachusetts than even Frederic at first realised. He was later to claim credit for reviving the flagging Boston trade with India, because his ice at least gave the shippers a freight income on their long outward journey. It was just as true, of course, that if ballast had not been a problem for Boston ship-owners, the ice trade would probably never have become established, for frozen water was not the most lucrative cargo to carry.

Although he had made little money from them, Frederic had proved the feasibility of the ice trade with his first four shipments. The ice lasted, the ships were undamaged and there was a market for cool drinks and ice cream in tropical climates. Taking into account the cost of harvesting the ice, carrying it to a wharf on Boston’s Charlestown quays, a modest freight charge and all other expenses, including the building of ice-houses, it seemed that a profit could be made. However, if enjoying ice was to become an established luxury in the West Indies, supplies would have to be regular. When he sought exclusive rights to sell ice Frederic would argue that if he was guaranteed sales and was free of troublesome competition he would be better able to establish regular shipments. That was what he hoped for in Cuba, but in 1808 there was no point in pursuing an exclusive deal because no ships were sailing.^* To add to his frustration, his brother William returned from Europe with the news that in France he had been granted a Napoleonic privilege to trade with France’s West Indian islands.

The shipping embargo was to last until the spring of 1809, and Frederic did not bother to harvest any ice for export the previous winter. However, he and William imagined for a short time that they had chanced upon another speculation which would save them and the family from penury. William had taken his watch to be mended, and learned from the watchmaker that coal had been found in remote land on Cape Cod and the island of Martha’s Vineyard. If there were coal deposits in New England they could be worth their weight in gold, and Frederic became very excited. As with the ice venture, he wanted as few people as possible to know about this find. He asked his father for some funds to explore Martha’s Vineyard and look into the purchase of mineral rights, but the Judge had no money unless he mortgaged Rockwood, and the venture was too risky for that. But Frederic managed to put together a kind of mining company with a committee of six which included his cousin William Savage, back from Havana.

Three of this committee, including Frederic and his cousin William, set out to explore the prospective coalmines disguised as hunters: they took their guns and let it be known they were going to do some shooting. Frederic had been fond of the outdoor life since boyhood, and this was a not implausible cover story. They sailed to Cape Cod, where they found coal specimens, and hired a schooner to take them to Martha’s Vineyard. Here they collected more specimens, in weather which rapidly deteriorated and drove them to put up for the night at an inn. The next day they hired a boatman to take them back to Boston through treacherous seas which were running high. They were very nearly shipwrecked, and had to drop their sails and row eleven miles through the night to make shore. But the venture came to nothing. They had found coal, and a lease to dig for it was obtained from the native Americans who owned the land, but they had no money to take it any further.

The Tudors were at a very low ebb, driven back to their Rockwood estate. It had been left to them as a place to spend happy summer months; now it was their last resort. As a farm it was in a sorry state, with two horses, two yoke of oxen, two cows, one heifer, three hogs and fifty chickens. Because the family had no inclination to run the farm themselves they had hired two people to do the work, and their annual wage bill of $500 was more than the total income from the sale of hay, corn, potatoes and carrots. Rockwood ice was potentially the most valuable crop on the farm – with the possible exception of Frederic’s sister Delia, who was now of marriageable age. Delia had been courted by some respectably wealthy young men, but to Frederic’s annoyance had turned them down, and now she was spending what little Tudor money was left on the European jaunt with her mother.

In the autumn of 1809 Frederic’s only hope of financial salvation was the forthcoming ice harvest. He was aware that few if any Boston merchants regarded his enterprise as worth pursuing, and he must have felt very self-conscious as he mingled with them on their customary trading ground in State Street, where he would go still hoping to find backers. Then, late in 1809 he was approached in State Street by a sheriff and in full view of Boston’s mercantile community was put under arrest for debt. A creditor had waited long enough for payment. The debt laws were harsh, and Frederic expected to be marched straight to jail. However, as it was his first offence he was given a reprieve: if he repaid the money within a week he would not be put behind bars. Somehow the Judge and a few friends raised enough to save Frederic from prison. But he was mortified, and wrote to his brother-in-law Robert Gardiner that the experience had been ‘abominable’.

As the weather was hardening it was time for Frederic to plan his next season of ice sales to Havana. He decided to go himself, leaving William Savage in Boston to organise the harvesting and loading. This would enable Frederic to escape the social embarrassment he suffered in Boston and to continue his plan to build a more efficient ice-house, though just what his design improvements were at this stage is not clear. After a good deal of negotiation and the payment of a few bribes when he got to Havana he secured his monopoly. The following April two cargoes of ice arrived from Boston, and they sold well, bringing in $5,600 by August. In May a shipment of ice by a rival arrived in Havana – there is no record of who sent it – but Frederic was able to crow in his diary that ‘he made so poor a hand of it that after some days he threw his ice overboard and I encountered no further difficulties in my sales.’ It would be interesting to know more about this incident, but we only have Frederic’s curt account. From later reports of his tactics for seeing off rivals, it is probable that he simply put a very low price on his ice for long enough to undermine his competitor’s sales. As nobody else had ice-houses as efficient as his, they could not keep their cargo for long, and their profits would simply melt away. If they sold at the same price as Frederic they would not make a profit and would be discouraged from continuing in the trade.

The Havana venture was looking promising; then Frederic caught yellow fever. He sailed back to Boston in August, leaving another cousin, Arthur Savage, in charge of ice sales, which at the end of the season totalled $7,400. The 1810 season had proved to be the first which returned a profit. When expenses were paid it was a mere $1,000, but, as Frederic noted in his diary, that year ‘must forever remain a monument of the advantage of steady perseverance in a project that is good in the main’. His optimism appeared to be justified as the next season got under way. He put an agent in charge in Havana, and stayed in Boston to handle shipments.

In 1811 Frederic sent his younger brother Harry, then twenty years old, to Kingston, Jamaica, with the aim of setting up an ice trade there. Harry was regarded by most of the family as an idler and good-for-nothing, and this would be a way of getting him to do something useful. True to form, he overslept on the day he was supposed to sail to Jamaica and missed the boat. When he finally got there he demanded more money than Frederic wanted to pay. The first shipment of ice to Jamaica left Boston in April 1811 on the schooner Active, but it never reached Harry. When Frederic heard the news that the Active had been shipwrecked and all the ice lost he was more relieved than disappointed, for it meant he did not have to pay the freight charge, which would probably have been greater than the profit from the ice. That, for the time being, was the end of the Jamaica venture and of Harry’s introduction to the ice trade.

In early March 1812 Frederic still owed money to a number of people in Boston, and was having difficulty settling all his debts on time. It would only take one of his creditors to go to law and Frederic would be marched off to prison. That was what now happened. In his diary on 14 March he wrote:

On Monday the 9th instant I was arrested … and locked up as a debtor in Boston jail… On this memorable day in my little annals I am 28 years 6 months and 5 days old. It is an event which I think I could not have avoided: but it is a climax which I did hope to have escaped as my affairs are looking well at last after a fearful struggle with adverse circumstances for seven years – but it has taken place and I have endeavoured to meet it as I would the tempest of heaven which should serve to strengthen rather than reduce the spirit of a true man.

Buoyed up by his own fine sentiments, Frederic gathered together the money to pay off the debt and was out of jail in time to arrange another ice shipment to Havana. He also established a basement store for ice in Boston, as it was becoming obvious that he needed to retain supplies there during the summer if he was going to ship cargoes on a regular basis. By juggling his precarious financial affairs he managed to keep going, though he was aware that he owed a great deal more than he owned.

He might just have survived had fate not once again dealt him an unfair hand. Just when he had his Boston cellars stocked with ice there was another embargo on American trade, this time as a result of the conflict with Britain which became known as the war of 1812, the origins of which are still a matter of dispute, but which stemmed from continuing tensions between the United States and Britain after the War of Independence. What was not in doubt was that Frederic had to abandon the Havana trade and allow his ice to melt away unsold. By July he was in deep financial trouble. The family still had some assets: Rockwood, the land in South Boston and the house in town were worth around $28,400. But Frederic owed to a number of people, including his blacksmith and his tailor, a total of $38,772.

There was to be no ice trade the coming winter, and Frederic had no money to develop the coalmining venture. But he reasoned that as America was at war a new and faster ship might be an asset, and he had just the design. He had always fancied himself as an inventor, though he had no professional skills to call upon. The key to his revolutionary concept was a ship that had a keel only at the stern, rather than running the length of the boat. He wrote to President Jefferson and to the Secretary of the Navy with an account of his design, but received no reply. Surprisingly, given Frederic’s reputation in Boston at that time, he found a shipyard prepared to build a prototype and backers to pay for it. He christened the ship, which was sixty-six feet long and weighed 130 tons, the Black Swan. If it proved successful, Frederic would be able to profit from the sale of his design.

The Black Swan, built by Barker’s shipyard in Charlestown, was ready for launching the following spring. On 1 May 1813 it made its maiden voyage up the Charles River, with Frederic proudly on deck. It had not gone far when a Boston sheriff came aboard with a demand that Frederic repay a debt of $300. He could not come up with the money, and was once again put behind bars. Of this experience he wrote much later:

The jail was an old one and the room in which they put me had no chair in it. It did not smell very sweet: but there was a long bench which I pulled into the middle and laid down upon my back to reflect upon what was to be done next. I smiled to think that any one should believe I was beaten, or in the slightest degree daunted in the steady purpose I had formed of accomplishing the payment of every dollar of debt and lifting myself to lord it over, if I chose, my humble creditor and his instrument. I never doubted I should accomplish what I have accomplished.

The Black Swan did not impress in its trials, and was never tested on the high seas; but as it turned out the winds of war did blow Frederic one mixed blessing in the form of a fiery sea-captain called Charles Stewart, who emerged from the conflict as a husband for sister Delia. Frederic had ordered her and his mother to return to Boston just as the war was breaking out, not for their safety so much as to put an end to their extravagances, for which he was footing the bill. They had been back just under a year when in June 1813 Captain Stewart arrived in Boston to take command of the United States Frigate Constitution, which had to undergo repairs. A small, convivial, red-haired Irishman, he met Delia and showed some interest in her. Frederic, believing Stewart was just what the family needed, goaded his sister into ensnaring him. They were married on 25 November 1813, a month before Stewart set off to sea. It was by all accounts a disastrous union of a rough seaman and a cultured Boston lady, and no recommendation for Frederic’s gifts as a matchmaker. But it meant Delia was no longer a drain on his uncertain resources.

In the summer of 1814, in a desperate attempt to raise more capital, Frederic considered mortgaging Rockwood and apportioning the proceeds among the family. But his mother demanded a much larger share than he would allow, and the project was dropped. Arrested three times for debt, jailed twice, his ice trade suspended by war, Frederic was in a desperate situation.

Meanwhile, Captain Stewart proved a very able commander, and when the war ended in December 1814 he returned to Boston a hero of many successes against the British (he did not in fact learn until April 1815 that the war was over, and went on attacking British warships during several months of peace). He was fêted in New York, presented with a commemorative sword in Philadelphia and took the lion’s share of the $40,000 awarded by Congress to the officers and crew of the Constitution for the capture of a British naval ship. Naturally enough, Frederic fancied that some of this money might be invested in his next venture in the frozen water trade. Stewart had encouraged the idea that he might help Frederic, suggesting to him a number of ventures he considered worth an investment. But it turned out that ice was not one of them, and Frederic got nowhere with his brother-in-law, despite a persistent campaign of letter-writing.

On 18 January 1814 Frederic had confided to his diary:

I complain of hard destiny, and have I not reason? If it were constitutional habit, I should despise myself. I have manfully maintained as long as I possibly could that ‘success is virtue’. I say so still; but my heart tells me I don’t believe it. Have I not been industrious? Have not many of my calculations been good? And have not all my undertakings in the eventful Ice business been attended by a villainous train of events against which no calculation could be made which have heretofore prevented success which must have followed if only the common chances and changes of this world had not happened against me? They have worried me. They have cured me of superfluous gaiety. They have made my head grey; but they have not driven me to despair.

It was in this defiant mood that Frederic prepared the following autumn to resume the ice trade. He was becoming adept at avoiding the attentions of Boston sheriffs armed with warrants for the execution of debt, and managed to load up a ship and slip out of port on 1 November 1815, bound for Havana. His mother, perhaps a little repentant about demanding too large a share of the proposed Rockwood mortgage, sent him some sweetmeats and a few shirts to see him on his way. Frederic, destitute and still living the life of a single man in lodgings, did not thank her. He had only one thing on his mind: the new and revolutionary ice-house he was going to construct in Havana which would finally set the trade on a proper footing and make him his fortune.