The frozen-water trade that lasted till refrigeration process was invented

As early as in 1833, ice came to Madras and changed desserts on the dining table forever. It also lowered to a great degree the homesickness of the East India Company officials and sustained their empire-building efforts. Till then, affluent families had a servant called the aubdar whose job was to turn the flasks to be cooled in a dish filled with saltpetre and water. But still, it wasn’t ice. 

A seafront building in Madras proudly flew the American flag for decades. And the stars and stripes proudly fluttered at the ingenuity of the enterprise within. Though details are largely forgotten today, the building (and the locality too), though renamed several times, remembers by memory as “the ice house”.

The circular building stored and sold something we all take for granted in today’s tropical Chennai. But in the 1800s only a handful of people in Madras had ever seen a piece of ice (if they had been lucky enough to be outdoors during a hailstorm or made a visit to the Himalayas.)

Frederic Tudor, the American who unleashed such a frosty indulgence on a presidency unacquainted to it, came from an affluent Bostonian family which wanted him to study in Harvard. But young Fredric dropped out of the preparatory school as he entered his teens.

On a trip to Cuba, he found all the drinks bland at room temperature and decided exporting ice to the Caribbean would be a profitable enterprise. On paper, it seemed so. The ice was free, the slaves aplenty, there was ample sawdust for insulating the ice from lumber trade, and many ships returned empty from Boston. But it just wasn’t easy, the town thought him crazy and he was saddled with derision and debt. He almost went mad, it is recorded.

But the genius in him worked all independently on the ways to harvest ice using blade-fitted sleds, ships, insulation material and specially-designed buildings in places where it could be stored and sold. One of them which still survives was in Madras, perhaps the hottest of places he sold his ice. Nearly 150 tonnes of ice, cut in blocks from frozen American lakes, four months earlier in the year, arrived in Madras after crossing two oceans and the equator twice and losing around a third of the cargo. The ship would dock opposite the building, but two kilometres away, and boats used to transfer them to the shore. Coolies would then carry the ice to the basement of the ice house, which was a double-shelled structure and could hold around 150 tonnes of ice.

The cargo realised a profit of $3,300, which was stupendous in 1830s.

Tudor negotiated priority Customs rights in Madras so more ice wouldn’t melt while the ship stood in a queue to be inspected. Ice was such a welcome gift for the Europeans in Madras that there were no duties, no Customs house formalities and Tudor’s ships were allowed to unload ice at night. The Tudor Ice Company-owned icehouses in Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, Galle, Singapore in Asia and Tudor might have received subsidies to develop these houses from an ice-greedy public.

While the Frozen Water Trade was lauded and while the world marvelled at the ingenuity of the enterprise, Madrasis, who had never seen ice before, wondered if ice grew on trees in America. They were amazed at the giant, icy cubes as they were unloaded from the ships and some of the Indians who dared to touch a piece of the ice, believed their fingers had been scorched. Soon, this fantastic piece of commerce was immortalised in literature.

Henry David Thoreau, who witnessed ice harvesting in Walden Pond, wrote in 1854 that “the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras, Bombay and Calcutta drink at my well.”

Kipling in his Second Jungle Book mentions it in an imaginary banter between a bird, a crocodile and a jackal in which the bird describes his feelings after having swallowed a huge lump of ice. Frederic Tudor came to be called the “ice king” and his business survived till one small technological change – the refrigeration process – put an end to this trans-Atlantic trade. The ice house on the Marina, where the American flag flew once, became a home for widows and later had an important guest, Swami Vivekananda, after whom it was renamed.