USA > Massachusetts > The maritime history of Massachusetts, 1783-1860 > Part 21
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When twenty-two-year-old Frederic Tudor pro- posed to ship ice to the West Indies from his father's pond in Saugus, Boston thought him mad; and sea- faring men, fearing such a cargo would melt and swamp a vessel, with some difficulty were persuaded to handle his brig. His first venture was one hundred and thirty tons of ice to Martinique in 1805. On receiving news of its complete failure, he wrote in his journal, "He - who gives back at the first repulse and without striking the second blow despairs of success, has never been, is not and never will be a hero in love, war, or business." By 1812 he had built up a small trade with the West Indies. The war wiped him out. After the Peace of Ghent he obtained government permission to build ice-houses at Kingston and Havana, with a monopoly of the traffic. It began to pay, and between 1817 and 1820 he extended the business to Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans.
Frederic Tudor's letter-books (preserved in an old Boston office, under ship pictures and photographs of Tudor ice-houses in the Far East) reveal something of the pains, ingenuity, and persistence required to build up the ice-exporting business. Vessels had to be double-sheathed, to protect the ice from melting, and the captains had to be cautioned, with wearisome repetition, never to let the hatches be removed. Tudor experimented with all sorts of filling; with rice and wheat chaff, hay, tan-bark, and even coal-dust, before he settled upon pine sawdust as the best insulator. In- stead of filling a long-felt want, he had to create a market at every new port; and to make the market
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pay, he had to educate not only the well-to-do, but the working people. He instructed Osgood Carney, supercargo of the barque Madagascar which took his first shipment to Rio de Janeiro, "If you can make a commencement for introducing the habit of cold drinks at the same price as warm at the ordinary drink- ing places ... even if you give the ice ... you will do well. ... The shop frequented by the lowest people is the one to be chosen for this purpose." In addition, Mr. Carney must promote an ice-cream establishment, instruct people in the art of preserving ice at their homes, construct a temporary ice-house on shore, in- troduce it into the hospitals, and persuade the Brazil- ian government, on the ground of public health, to remit export duties on all products taken away by the Tudor vessels.
Nor did his pioneer work end with creating a market. No one in Southern ports knew how to store ice during hot weather. Mr. Tudor had to provide the materials for ice-houses, employees to construct them, and agents to take charge of distribution. Their careless- ness and dishonesty was a constant trial. He became an expert in what nowadays is called the science of salesmanship. Playing on local excitement and curios- ity, a high price was charged on first shipments. Grad- ually the price was lowered; and in order to stimulate steady sales, tickets were sold at a reduced rate, en- titling the bearer to so many pounds on presentation at the ice-house.1
1 At Charleston, South Carolina, in 1834, Tudor sold ice for 12 cents per pound, but ice tickets were sold at the rate of 1} cents. Previously he had cut the rate to three-fourths of a cent in order literally to freeze out the Thayers of Boston, who endeavored to compete with him. At New Orleans, to which he paid from $435 to $600 for freight per small brig-load of ice, he was selling it for 2 cents; at Havana for 3 cents. The first price at Rio de Janeiro in 1833 was 12 pounds for a Spanish dollar.
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In May, 1833, Tudor made his first venture to Cal- cutta; one hundred and eighty tons of ice in the ship Tuscany. "As soon as you have arrived in latitude 12º north," he instructed Captain Littlefield, "you will have carried ice as far south as it has ever been carried before, and your Ship becomes a discovery ship and as such I feel confident you will do every- thing for the eventual success of the undertaking; as being in charge of the first ship that has ever carried ice to the East Indies."
After sailing twice through the torrid zone, the Tuscany landed almost two-thirds of her chilly cargo in good order at Calcutta. Many are the yarns told of its reception. A Parsee asked the Captain, "How this ice make grow in your country? Him grow on tree? Him grow on shrub?" Indignant natives de- manded their money back, after leaving a purchase in the sun. The poverty of the people made it difficult to establish a wide market; but the Anglo-Indian com- munity quickly took to iced drinks, and paid large sums for the Baldwin apples, which were buried in the chilly cargoes. The trade was as genial for ship- masters as it was profitable for Mr. Tudor. While supercargoes dickered for return freight with the Babu Rajkissen Mitter, or Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy & Co., the Boston captains moored their vessels to the banks of the Hoogly, and played host with drinks mixed Yankee-fashion, to all ships' officers in the port of Calcutta.
Mr. Tudor and his ice came just in time to preserve Boston's East-India commerce from ruin. Our carry- ing trade between Calcutta and Europe had declined almost to extinction. A precarious foothold in Bengal was retained by Boston and Salem houses only by im- porting specie, eked out with 'notions' such as spiced
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Penobscot salmon, cods' tongues and sounds, coarse glassware, sperm candles and Cape Cod Glauber salts.1 Our importing business from Calcutta had been "cut up by the roots" by the tariff of 1816, as Daniel Webster said; and within a few years the Massa- chusetts mills were making cotton cloth in sufficient variety to kill all demand for Allabad Emerties, Beer- boom Gurrahs, and the like, so extensively imported in Federalist days. But the ice business increased to such an extent that by 1841, although pushed by fifteen com- petitors, and forced to lower the retail price to one cent a pound, Frederic Tudor was able to pay off a debt of a quarter-million contracted by his early experiments.
Between 1836 and 1850 the Boston ice trade was extended to every large port in South America and the Far East. When, at the Court of St. James, Ed- ward Everett met the Persian ambassador, his first words were an appreciation of the benefits of American ice in Persia. For a generation after the Civil War, until cheap artificial ice was invented, this export trade increased and prospered. Not Boston alone, but every New England village with a pond near tidewater, was able to turn this Yankee liability into an asset, through the genius of Frederic Tudor.
The center of the business was Gray's (later Tudor's) Wharf, Charlestown. There the ice was brought by pung or train, as it was needed, from the ice-houses at Fresh Pond and other lakes in the neighborhood. In the winter of 1846 "a hundred Irishmen, with Yankee overseers, came from Cambridge every day to get out the ice" from Walden, where Thoreau was dividing his time between the study of nature and the Indian philosophers.
1 The cargo of the Emerald, Captain Augustine Heard, in 1826. See also that of William H. Bordman's Arbella, next chapter.
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"Thus it appears," he writes,1 "that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupen- dous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat-Geeta . .. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With the favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard the names."
As might be expected, the Boston merchants found new East-India products with which to replace cot- tons, and turn over the profits they made on outward cargoes. "East-India goods," between 1830 and the Civil War, meant buffalo hides and jute; indigo and other dyestuffs; linseed and shellac; saltpeter; gunny- bags which Boston supplied to the corn-growers of the West, and gunny-cloth which was sent South for bal- ing cotton. Colonel Francis Peabody, son of Joseph, established a linseed oil and jute factory near Salem about 1841, and began exporting its by-product of oil-cake to England. Adjoining Tudor's Wharf at Charlestown was his linseed oil and cake manufactory, and a shop where rice and gunny-cloth were prepared for the American market. In 1857 ninety-six out of the hundred and twelve vessels that loaded at Calcutta for the United States, landed their cargoes at Boston, earning an average freight of twenty thousand dollars.
The homeward voyage from Calcutta was not so pleasant as the cool outward passage. Various forms
1 Walden, end of chapter XVI.
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TUDOR WHARVE
FOR SALT
VESSELS
DOOK.
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EAST-INDIAMEN LOADING ICE AT CHARLESTOWN
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of insect life came aboard with the jute and gunnies, and propagated with surprising rapidity. Whoever left his boots outside his bunk (it is said) found nothing in the morning but the nails and the eyelets. An arri- val from Calcutta in Boston (I have been told) was sometimes announced by a pack of terrified dogs running up State Street pursued by an army of Cal- cutta cockroaches!
In spite of these unpleasant if true incidents, the East-India trade (including, in the popular meaning of the word, the China, Manila, and Java trades as well as that of British India) enjoyed a greater prestige than any branch of Boston commerce since the North- west fur trade died. An "East-India merchant," in ante-bellum Boston, possessed social kudos to which no cotton millionaire could pretend, unless previously initiated through Federalist commerce. To have an office on India Wharf, Boston, or to live in the India Row that comprised the fine old square-built houses of many a seaport town, conferred distinction. Among sailors, the man who had made an East-India voyage took no back-wind from any one; and on Cape Cod it used to be said of a pretty, well-bred girl, "She 's good enough to marry an East-India Cap'n!"
CHAPTER XVIII MEDITERRANEAN AND BALTIC
1820-1850
WHILE Frederic Tudor was building a bridge of ice between Concord anarchy and Indian philosophy, the Mediterranean trade of Boston ferried Ralph Waldo Emerson to Malta, on his way to Florence and Ferney, Savage Landor and Carlyle. Let Emerson's own jour- nal begin the story:
At Sea, January 2, 1833.
Sailed from Boston for Malta, December 25, 1832. in Brig Jasper, Captain Ellis, 236 tons, laden with logwood, mahogany, tobacco, sugar, coffee, beeswax, cheese, etc. A long storm from the second morn of our departure consigned all the five passengers to the irre- medial chagrins of the stateroom, to wit, nausea, darkness, unrest, uncleanness, harpy appetite and harpy feeding, the ugly "sound of water in mine ears," anticipations of going to the bottom, and the treasures of the memory. I remembered up nearly the whole of Lyci- das, clause by clause, here a verse and there a word, as Isis in the fable the broken body of Osiris.
Out occasionally crawled we from our several holes, but hope and fair weather would not; so there was nothing for it but to wriggle again into the crooks of the transom. Then it seemed strange that the first man who came to sea did not turn round and go straight back again. Strange that because one of my neighbours had some trum- pery logs and notions which would sell for a few cents more here than there, he should thrust forth this company of his poor countrymen to the tender mercies of the northwest wind .. ..
The Captain believes in the superiority of the American to every other countryman. "You will see," he says, "when you get out here how they manage in Europe; they do everything by main strength and ignorance. Four truckmen and four stevedores at Long Wharf will load my brig quicker than a hundred men at any port in the Mediterranean." It seems the Sicilians have tried once or twice to bring their fruit to America in their own bottoms, and made the passage, he says, in one hundred and twenty days.
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One hopes that the last item is nearer the truth than the wild yarns of the Emerald's record passage with which his homecoming captain stuffed Emerson. At Malta he left the brig Jasper, and she disappears into the fleet of undistinguished brigs and topsail schoon- ers that traded from Boston to that part of the world.
Add lumber, 'domestics,' and East-India goods to the Jasper's cargo, and you have a typical outward lading from Boston to the Mediterranean for the pe- riod 1820-1850. The South European and Levantine peoples had by this time lost their taste for New England salt fish, but in compensation they had learned the good wearing qualities of Lowell cottons, and acquired a profitable thirst for New England rum. One Mediterranean firm ran a distillery in its Central Wharf store, importing the molasses and exporting the rum in its own vessels. But most outward cargoes had to be completed outside Massachusetts - in Maine and Chesapeake Bay, in the West Indies, South America, and the East Indies. Honduras logwood was in demand, to give that warm, rich color to Medi- terranean wines. The ports of destination included Gibraltar, Malaga, Marseilles, Genoa, Leghorn, Sar- dinia, Gallipolis, Messina, Marsala, Palermo, Trieste, Zante, Volo, and Salonica. Return cargoes comprised oranges and lemons, wine and currants, nuts and raisins, corkwood, wool, olive oil, and a score of minor products. "I find that a large proportion of our trade with Genoa," wrote the American consul there in 1843,"has been carried on by Boston and Salem mer- chants. Some years, more than half the vessels en- tering this port have been owned by Robert Gould Shaw of Boston."
The letter-book of William H. Bordman, Jr., a young Boston merchant who had been to sea, shows
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in some detail the indirect methods by which the Med- iterranean trade was generally carried on, the way it fitted into other trade routes, and the unspecialized methods by which shipowners won wealth.
In 1824 Bordman ships domestic brown shirtings, Canton goods, soap, ham, and pickled Penobscot salmon, to the value of $1684, in one of his own ves- sels to South America. The supercargo is instructed to use his own judgment as to the port of sale, but is warned that Montevideo is overstocked with shirtings, and that the ship Romeo has just cleared for Buenos Aires with a similar cargo. The salmon will keep only twelve months, and must be sold before it spoils. Returns are left to the supercargo's judgment; but horsehair is suggested, and something must be shipped home "in time for me to take up my notes for the shirtings." The same year Bordman consigns codfish, cheese, and lard to Havana, in exchange for cigars of the "Dos Amygos or Cabañas brands, preferably of a light yellow color." Pipe, hogshead and barrel staves are then obtained at Norfolk, Virginia, where the coop- erage inspection is more strict than in New England, for sale at Gibraltar and Cadiz. On vessels other than his own, he adventures 429 pairs of shoes, invoiced at $347.05, to New Orleans, where they sell for $850, less freight and expenses; and to Liverpool a consignment of sassafras - Gosnold's export from Cuttyhunk in 1602.
In 1826 Bordman sends his ship Arbella to Calcutta, laden with cigars and paint, currant jelly and shaving soap, cider, oakum and ham, Dutch, pineapple, and native cheese - the latter at three and a half cents a pound. The same year, when spices were scarce, one of his father's vessels enters from Sumatra with a cargo of pepper and Bourbon cloves, giving the Bord-
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man family a corner. Part was shipped to Messrs. Perkins & Saltonstall at Baltimore, and the proceeds invested in "superfine Howard St. flour" at $4.122. Part of this, together with more pepper and cloves, is sent to Hayti and Havana, and the proceeds invested in sugar. Three years later Bordman's vessels are taking sugar from Havana to Gothenburg for Swedish iron; and in 1830 he is sending pepper to the Mediter- ranean. His supercargo will decide the destination, when advised at Gibraltar on the state of the pepper market at Antwerp, Leghorn, Genoa, and Trieste; and may invest in a return cargo, or remit balance to London.
By 1830 Bordman has added a new arrow to his quiver - the Northwest Coast and Canton trade. The supercargo of his brig Smyrna is ordered to sell Northwest sea-otter at Canton, but to bring his ac- quisitions of beaver to Boston, where it is selling for eight dollars a pelt. Luckily the letter is not received, for by the time the Smyrna returns, enterprising Yankee hatters have popularized the silk hat, and beaver has fallen to four dollars. In search of the illicit medium for China trading, Bordman in 1832 sends a cargo of sugar from Havana to Smyrna for opium. "If on arrival the sugars will pay a profit, dispose of them at once, as I make it a rule never to speculate on certain gain." At this point the letter-book ends. From the manuscripts of Captain John Suter, who took a share in Bordman's vessels and ventures, we find that he was one of the last to enter and the last to leave the old Northwest fur trade. In 1833 he sent the ship Rasselas to Valparaiso and the Sandwich Islands, and the same year the brig Smyrna to Suma- tra for pepper. Cost of vessel, cargo, and outfit was $28,218.09. Expenses of the fourteen months' voyage
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were $5050.82, including $854 wages to the Captain, and $1404.76 to the crew. Net sales amounted to almost one hundred per cent on the investment.
Massachusetts commerce, lacking a local export medium, was largely triangular, if not four- and five- cornered. For this reason, perhaps, we find that even those merchants who attempted to specialize in a sin- gle line participated in many others as well in order to assemble their outward cargoes and dispose of their acquisitions. On these secondary routes they some- times employed their own vessels, but perhaps more often retained a share in a large number of vessels, in order to have some control over their movements and their cargo space. Specialization shows a marked in- crease about 1830, and by 1850 there was hardly a Boston merchant who did not confine his activities to one or two regions that fitted well together, such as China and East Indies, the Mediterranean and Smyrna, the South Sea Islands and South America, the Baltic and West Indies, or New Orleans, Havre, and Liver- pool.
As yet there was no tendency to separate the ship- owning, purchasing, and distributing functions; and there were merchants who had even more irons in the fire than William Bordman. Ezra Weston built ves- sels in his own yard, opposite his paternal mansion on Powder Point, Duxbury, out of timber brought from Maine and the Merrimac in his schooners, or from Bridgewater and Middleborough on his own ox-teams. He rigged them with the products of his own ropewalk, sparyard, blacksmith shop, and sail loft at Duxbury; loaded them opposite his counting-room on Com- mercial Wharf, Boston; and sent them under his house flag to the Mediterranean, and all parts of the world.
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As a distributing point for Mediterranean fruit and wine, Boston maintained its lead over New York until about 1850. As emporium for the varied products of the Near East, which found vent through Smyrna, it never had a serious rival. The same strange yearning for the Orient which pulled Boston ships around the Horn to Canton, drew her Mediterranean traders to this ancient mart of Lydia, since the dawn of history an outport of the hither East. Rounding the Pelopon- nesus, passing the white columns of Poseidon on Cape Sunium, and crossing the Ægean to Chios, the little brigs and barques of Boston or Plymouth, keeping a sharp lookout for Levantine pirates, entered a gulf that narrowed to a point where sits white Smyrna. Here, in an amphitheater of snow-crowned mountains, whose lower slopes were bright with orange and almond blossoms amid silver-gray olives, verdant fig orchards and somber cypress groves, they found a city in whose narrow streets Kurd and Anatolian rubbed shoulder with Armenian, Frank, and Greek; where Turkish rule rested lightly on survivors of ancient sea-powers - Tyrian and Hellenic, Frankish and Maltese, Genoese and Venetian. Easy it was at the bazaars to swap clocks and cottons, candles and rum, for the products brought in by camel-train, pack-mule, and felucca; easier still to sell them for vague promises of the same. In Smyrna, as in every Eastern port, business ceased to be robbery only when conducted by men who knew the local ways and customs.
It was a loyalist merchant of Boston, after long wanderings settling at Smyrna, who established the permanent connection in Federalist days. Two other Bostonians were resident there by 1816. Through them and their successors almost all the Mediterra- nean merchants of Central Wharf did a certain amount
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of business; but the bulk of the traffic was absorbed by two adopted citizens of Massachusetts. The Marquis Nicholas Reggio, of a Genoese family resident at Smyrna for centuries, and Joseph Iasigi, a Smyrniote Armenian, established themselves in Boston as mer- chant-shipowners about the year 1830. They im- parted color to Boston society, and erected the statues of Columbus and Aristides in Louisburg Square. Their local, almost tribal connections, and instinctive knowledge of the devious, immutable methods of Smyrna, nailed Boston's supremacy in the Eastern Mediterranean for the rest of the sailing-ship era.
In a valley back of Smyrna are produced the best figs in the world, which, sun-dried and packed in drums, were shipped to Boston in sufficient quantities to supply all North America. Feluccas and camel-trains brought in coarse wool for the New England mills; gum-arabic and tragacanth, essentials for cotton printing; sponges and Turkey carpets, and drugs such as myrrh and scam- mony, which ante-bellum physicians loved to adminis- ter in generous doses. Smyrna opium we have already mentioned. The Mediterranean merchants imported it for the domestic drug trade, and the China merchants took it East by West; almost half the entire crop, about 1820, being handled by one Boston firm at Canton.
Naval architecture also profited by our Mediter- ranean trade. Baltimore clipper brigs and schooners were first used by Mediterranean merchants, to get their fruit to market in good season. By 1830 Massa- chusetts builders had created a type of deep, sharp brig with a rakish rig, which produced as much speed as the Chesapeake type and carried more cargo. Among the famous 'fruiters' were the brigs Water Witch,1
1 Brig Water Witch, 86' 6" X 21' 3" X 10' 4", 168 tons; built by Joseph Clapp on the North River, Scituate, in 1831.
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OSMANLI
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BARQUE OSMANLI OF BOSTON LYING AT SMYRNA, 185I
BRIG WATER WITCH OF BOSTON LEAVING THE MOLE OF MALAGA, 1833
MEDITERRANEAN AND BALTIC
News Boy,1 Sea Mew, and Red Rover. After bringing home grapes and oranges for the Thanksgiving and Christmas season, they would often make a winter voyage to Rio de Janeiro or to the West Indies. Cap- tain Paxton, of the Water Witch, would return thence with bunches of bananas hanging from his main boom, for distribution among the friends of her owner, Ben- jamin C. Clark. Rivalry for each new crop of figs be- tween the houses of Reggio and Iasigi led to a com- petitive building of swift barques. Iasigi & Goodard's Osmanli,2 painted in the port of Smyrna by a local artist, is here shown; in the clipper ship era the Reg- gios' Smyrniote was only surpassed by Iasigi's Race Horse,3 which also distinguished herself in the San Francisco trade.
Fayal in the Azores, where in any year (save three) between 1807 and 1892 one would discover the prin- cipal merchant to be a Dabney of Boston, was an out- post of the Mediterranean trade. The outward-bound whalers stopped there to pick up cheap labor, and to unload their early acquisitions of oil, which the Dab- neys then shipped to Boston in their own vessels, bringing back foodstuffs and notions for the Western Islanders. Oranges and Pico wine were local products that found their way to the Boston market. When his Dabney brother-in-law served him "Pico Madeira,"
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