Indian Igloos

It was something that Calcuttans had never seen. There was a sensation in the port as the strange article was being unloaded from the American ship.

- SANJAY PODDER

For most people, the item was a wonder. For the otherwise empty ship that carried it, the item just served as ballast. It was a heavy matter that was dumped in the ship to ensure that it did not sink in the rough sea in its twenty-two-thousand-mile journey from Boston.

The item that was being unloaded was huge blocks of ice!

That was in 1834. Frederick Tudor's idea of dumping ice into a ship and preserving it with straw, bark and sawdust had succeeded. About 40 tons of ice reached the port in Calcutta. The experiment proved that twenty-two thousand miles of sea was not really an impediment to the survival of this perishable object.

The idea occurred to Longueville Clarke, a distinguished barrister practicing in the Supreme Court of Calcutta. He reasoned that as American ships that came to Hooghly had to carry ballast, if ice itself was used for that purpose, the cost of freight of ice would become rather cheap. However, the one concern was whether a major part of the ice would remain unmelted. It did! So, Clarke wrote to Tudor for importing his ice from Boston on a commercial scale. Tudor accepted his terms.