Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
July/August 1991 | Volume 42, Issue 4
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
July/August 1991 | Volume 42, Issue 4
Not long ago, while I was in the midst of preparations for an exhibition on early American trade with India, an extraordinary memento of that trade serendipitously appeared at the Peabody Museum of Salem in Massachusetts. Anne Halliday, a retired social worker from Cape Cod, brought in a large, ornate, inscribed silver-gilt presentation cup that had been in her family for many years. Miss Halliday said that her father, a great explorer of the nooks and crannies of Cape Cod during the twenties, had probably acquired the cup for his small collection of sea chests, ship’s clocks, and other things from New England’s sea-faring past. But Miss Halliday didn’t know for certain where the cup was from; she’d seen it for the first time when the family sorted through the father’s things shortly after his death in 1928. The cup spent the next half-century on her brother’s farm in Tennessee. Not until it was returned to her a few years ago did Miss Halliday notice the inscription and realize the object’s historical significance.
The inscription reads: “Presented by Lord William Bentinck, Governor-General and Commander-in-Chief, India, to Mr. Rogers of Boston in Acknowledgement of the Spirit and enterprize which projected and successfully executed the first attempt to import a cargo of American ice into Calcutta—Nov22nd, 1833.”
Eager to learn more, Miss Halliday went to the Heritage Plantation Museum in Sandwich, Massachusetts. The staff there directed her inquiry to the Peabody Museum because of its important collections related to American trade with Asia. For us at the Peabody the appearance of the presentation cup was a minor miracle, permitting a completely unexpected, major addition to an exhibition and offering a fresh look at the origins of an unusual traffic.
Although surprising when first encountered, the ice trade was a mainstay of New England’s nineteenth-century commerce. The name most closely associated with it is Frederic Tudor, a Boston merchant who pioneered the transport of ice to the tropics in 1806. Tudor managed to keep far enough ahead of his imitators to become known as the Ice King. Despite the introduction of artificial refrigeration beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the trade he founded continued to grow until the 1880s.
We knew about Tudor, but none of us had ever heard of “Mr. Rogers,” and he was not mentioned in any of our sources on the ice trade. Fortunately we knew that Tudor’s business papers are preserved in the Baker Library at the Harvard Business School, and they seemed the best place to start looking. The papers, I soon found out, are vast: letters, diaries, account books, patents, and many other documents—an unexpectedly rich resource on mercantile Boston in the nineteenth century, providing rare insight