Vol 4 No 3 | Oct-Dec 2024
The Indian Ice Trade
Story by CG Salamander | Art by Prabha Mallya
Frederic Tudor: Sending American ice to India
This comic in Comixense magazine tells the astonishing story of Frederic Tudor who came up with the madcap scheme of cooling the British in India by shipping ice from frozen lakes in the United States to Indian shores.
Here’s something on that story:
https://www.wired.com/2010/09/0913calcutta-ice-ship/
https://scroll.in/article/720912/how-ice-shipped-all-the-way-from-america-became-a-luxury-item-in-colonial-india
The ice houses of India
Of the three ice houses built by Frederic Tudor in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras, only the last one remains standing. Originally a windowless double-walled building built to keep insulate and store ice, the structure today looks a lot different from when it was first constructed. The edifice was bought over by an advocate of the Madras High Court in the late 1800s and remodeled to include windows, circular verandas, and a fresh coat of paint. The building stands prominently on the Marina Beach Road in Chennai today, and goes by a new name, Swami Vivekananda House, named after the Indian monk and philosopher who started a Mission there in 1897.
Walden Pond
One interesting sidebar of Tudor’s ice trade story is that he harvested his ice from – among other places – Walden Pond in Massachussets, USA, on the shores of which Henry David Thoreau built a cabin in 1845, living in it for two years in an experiment in ‘simple living’.
Here’s Thoreau writing about ‘the ice men’:
https://thecuriouspeople.wordpress.com/2015/02/07/the-ice-men-come-to-walden-pond-walden-186/
This book shown above, written by Lesa Cline-Ransome and illustrated by Ashley Benham-Yazdani, compares and contrasts Tudor and Thoreau, exploring the motivations that drove them to be in close proximity physically while being far apart ideologically.
A review of the book:
https://www.friendsjournal.org/book/of-walden-pond-henry-david-thoreau-frederic-tudor-and-the-pond-between/
Manic trading
The ice mania that gripped the British living in India worked well in Tudor’s favour. It also propelled trade across continents. It is difficult to imagine that the British were willing to pay large sums of money for something that’s just frozen water.
Yet, across the world, different types of mania have swept across different countries at various times.
Tulip mania: The most famous example of a trade mania occurred during the early 1600s when the Dutch spent large sums of money on tulips. Tulips were exported from the east, and they were very hard to grow in the Netherlands which led wealthy merchants to spend 20 times the yearly salary of a carpenter to buy a single flower. At the height of the tulip mania, a tulip bulb was as expensive as a house.
https://www.britannica.com/money/Tulip-Mania
Railway mania: Something that undoubtedly helped Fredric Tudor’s business, the American Railroad mania occurred in the mid-1800s. People bought railway shares for far more than they were worth. As a result, far too many railway lines were built, even ones that weren’t particularly useful at the time.
https://tontinecoffeehouse.com/2023/07/24/railway-mania/
Dotcom mania: The most recent mania occurred in the early 2000s when people paid far too much money for Internet or .com stocks. Euphoric about the promise of the Internet, the dotcom mania saw people invest their money in fraudulent stocks and in companies that didn’t have anything to do with the Internet.
