The Frozen Water Trade (Text Only). Gavin Weightman

      

       The Frozen WaterTrade

      How Ice from New England Lakes

      Kept the World Cool

      GAVIN WEIGHTMAN

       COPYRIGHT

      The HarperCollins website address is:

      www.harpercollins.co.uk

      This paperback edition 2003

      First published in Great Britain by

      HarperCollinsPublishers 2002

      Copyright © Gavin Weightman 2002

      Source ISBN: 9780007102860

      Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2012 ISBN 9780007375943

      Version: 2019-09-25

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       DEDICATION

      In fond memory of my uncle

      Morris Weightman

      CONTENTS

       COVER

       TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

       NOTE TO READERS

DEDICATION

INTRODUCTION

MAP

Chapter 1: The Frozen Assets of New England

Chapter 2: Tropical Ice Creams

Chapter 3: From the Ice-House to the Jailhouse

       Chapter 4: Exile in Havana

       Chapter 5: Sad Return from Savannah

       Chapter 6: The Crack-Up

       Chapter 7: The Cutting Edge of the Ice Trade

       Chapter 8: A Cool Cargo for Calcutta

       Chapter 9: The Ice Wagon Rolls on

       Chapter 10: Wenham Lake

       Chapter 11: Homage to the Ice King

       Chapter 12: After Tudor

       EPILOGUE

       INDEX

       ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

       ABOUT THE AUTHOR

       OTHER WORKS

       ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

       FOOTNOTES

       INTRODUCTION

      The inspiration for this book was one of those scraps of information that lodge in the mind and refuse to go away. I had read somewhere, while researching the history of nineteenth-century London, that Queen Victoria had for a time enjoyed a supply of ice from Massachusetts in New England. It was delivered by an American enterprise called the Wenham Lake Ice Company, which in the 1840s had an ice store and a shop in London with a window onto The Strand, in which a large cube of crystal clear ice about two feet square was displayed every day in summer. Sometimes a colourful New England fish called a pickerel would be frozen into the block of ice on show.

      I wondered if the ingenious Americans, pioneers of mass production, great inventors and modernisers, had stolen a march on the rest of the world and devised a form of refrigeration which could produce ice cheaply enough to sell at a price the wealthy in London could afford. I discovered that there was in fact a huge ice industry in nineteenth-century North America, but that it was not at all what I had imagined.

      Ice became essential to the American way of life from the mid-nineteenth century. Americans made ice cream at home on Sundays, had ice-boxes in which to keep butter and milk fresh, were served iced drinks