Captains of Industry Part 11

ICE EXPORTER.

Edward Everett used to relate a curious anecdote of the time when he was the American minister at London. He was introduced one day to an Eastern prince, who greeted him with a degree of enthusiasm that was altogether unusual and unexpected. The prince launched into eulogium of the United States, and expressed a particular grat.i.tude for the great benefit conferred upon the East Indies by Mr. Everett's native Ma.s.sachusetts.

The American minister, who was a good deal puzzled by this effusion, ventured at length to ask the prince what special benefit Ma.s.sachusetts had conferred upon the East Indies, wondering whether it was the missionaries, or the common school system, or Daniel Webster's Bunker Hill oration.

"I refer," said the prince, "to the great quant.i.ty of excellent ice which comes to us from Boston."

Mr. Everett bowed with his usual politeness, but was much amused at the excessive grat.i.tude of the prince for the service named.

The founder of this foreign ice business, which has now attained such large proportions, was a Boston merchant named Frederick Tudor, son of that Colonel William Tudor who studied law under John Adams, and who served his country on the staff of General Washington, and afterwards became a judge. Frederick Tudor, who was born in 1783, the year of the peace between England and the United States, entered early into business, being at twenty-two already owner of a vessel trading with the West Indies.

It was in 1805 that the idea of exporting ice first occurred to him--an idea which, as he was accustomed to relate in his old age, was received with derision by the whole town as a "mad project." He had made his calculations too carefully, however, to be disturbed by a little ridicule; and that same year he sent out his first cargo of a hundred and thirty tons, to the Island of Martinique.

The result justified his confidence. The ice arrived in perfect condition, and he was encouraged to follow up his single cargo with many others larger and more profitable. During the war of 1812 business was somewhat interrupted by the English cruisers, which were ever on the alert for prizes in the West Indian waters, but, after peace was declared, his trade increased rapidly. He supplied ice to Charleston and New Orleans also, those cities at first requiring but a ship-load each per annum, although the demand increased so rapidly that a few years later New Orleans alone consumed thirty cargoes.

Almost from the first, Mr. Tudor had believed that ice could be transported as safely and profitably to Calcutta as to Havana; but he could not bring others to share this opinion--at least, not to the point of risking money upon it. It was not, therefore, until 1834, twenty-nine years later than his Martinique experiment, that he sent his first cargo of one hundred and eighty tons of ice to India. Notwithstanding a waste of one third of the whole cargo during the voyage, he was able to sell this Ma.s.sachusetts ice at one half the price charged for the artificially frozen ice formerly used in Calcutta by the few families who could afford such a luxury.

The cold commodity which he provided met, therefore, with a warm welcome from the English inhabitants. They recognized the boon afforded them, and expressed their grat.i.tude by raising a subscription and presenting to the enterprising Yankee merchant a fire-proof building in which to store his ice. He met them in the same spirit of wise liberality, and sold the article at no more than a reasonable profit--about three cents a pound--which enabled the great body of English residents to use the ice habitually. Mr. Tudor used to boast that in Jamaica he sold the best Wenham ice at half the price which an inferior article brought in London; and even at Calcutta he made ice cheaper than it was in London or Paris. On the pa.s.sage to the East Indies, ice is four or five months at sea, traverses sixteen thousand miles of salt water, and crosses the equator twice; and on its arrival it is stored in ma.s.sive double-walled houses, which are covered by four or five separate roofs. It has also to be unloaded in a temperature of ninety to one hundred degrees.

Notwithstanding all this, the inhabitants of the most distant tropical seaports are supplied with ice every day of the year at the moderate price mentioned above.

It was Frederick Tudor also who originated and developed the best methods of cutting, packing, storing, and discharging ice, so as to reduce the waste to the minimum. I am a.s.sured by a gentleman engaged in the business that the blocks of ice now reach Calcutta, after the long voyage from Boston, with a waste scarcely noticeable. The vessels are loaded during the cold snaps of January, when water will freeze in the hold of a vessel, and when the entire ship is penetrated with the intensest cold. The glittering blocks of ice, two feet thick, at a temperature below zero, are brought in by railroad from the lakes, and are placed on board the ships with a rapidity which must be seen to be appreciated. The blocks are packed in sawdust, which is used very much as mortar is used in a stone wall. Between the topmost layer of ice and the deck there is sometimes a layer of closely packed hay, and sometimes one of barrels of apples. It has occasionally happened that the profit upon the apples has paid the freight upon the ice, which usually amounts to about ten thousand dollars, or five dollars a ton.

The arrival of an ice ship at Calcutta is an exhilarating scene. Clouds of dusky natives come on board to buy the apples, which are in great request, and bring from ten to thirty cents each, according to the supply. Happy is the native who has capital enough to buy a whole barrel of the fruit. Off he trudges with it on his back to the place of sale, or else puts it on a little cart and peddles the apples about the streets. In a day or two that portion of the cargo has disappeared, and then the ice is to be unloaded. It was long before a native could be induced to handle the crystal blocks. Tradition reports that they ran away affrighted, thinking the ice was something bewitched and fraught with danger. But now they come on board in a long line, and each of them takes a huge block of ice upon his head and conveys it to the adjacent ice-house, moving with such rapidity that the blocks are exposed to the air only a few seconds. Once deposited there, the waste almost ceases again, and the ice which cost in Boston four dollars a ton is worth fifty dollars.

When Frederick Tudor had been employed twenty-five years in this trade, finding it inconvenient to be separated from the great body of merchants, he embarked again in general mercantile business, by way of re-uniting himself to his former a.s.sociates. The experiment resulted in ruinous losses. In less than three years he was a bankrupt, and owed his creditors two hundred and ten thousand dollars more than he could pay.

The ice business being still profitable and growing, it was proposed to him that he should conduct it as the agent of his creditors, retaining a specified sum per annum for his personal expenses. To this he objected, and said to them:--

"Allow me to proceed, and I will work for you better than I can under any restriction. Give me the largest liberty, and I will pay the whole in time with interest."

He was then fifty-two years of age, and he had undertaken to pay an indebtedness, the mere interest of which was about ten thousand dollars a year. By the time he had got fairly at work the treachery of an agent whom he had raised from poverty to wealth lost him his Havana monopoly, his princ.i.p.al source of profit. Then it became necessary to buy land bordering the lakes from which he gathered ice, and to erect in Calcutta, New Orleans, and elsewhere expensive and peculiarly constructed buildings for storage. Occasionally, too, he experienced the losses and adverse incidents from which no business is exempt.

Nevertheless, in fourteen years from the date of his bankruptcy he had paid his debts, princ.i.p.al and interest, amounting to two hundred and eighty thousand dollars, besides having acquired a large quant.i.ty of real estate, some of which had increased in value tenfold. Thus, while paying his debts, and in the very process of paying, and while thinking only of his creditors' interest, he had gained for himself a very large fortune. He continued an ice merchant for more than fifty years; or, as he said himself:--

"I began this trade in the youthful hopes attendant on the age of twenty-two. I have followed it until I have a head with scarcely a hair that is not white."

It was this enterprising merchant who may be said to have created the beautiful seaside retreat near Boston called Nahant, where he invented many ingenious expedients for protecting trees and shrubs from the east winds which lacerate that rock-bound coast. His gardens and plantations in Nahant were famous many years before his death. He died in 1864, aged eighty-one, leaving to his children and to his native State a name which was honorable when he inherited it, and the l.u.s.tre of which his life increased.

[Ill.u.s.tration:

Yours Myron Holley]

MYRON HOLLEY,

MARKET-GARDENER.

Fifty years ago, this man used to sell vegetables and fruit from door to door in the streets of Rochester, N. Y. He had a small farm a few miles out of town, upon which he raised the produce which he thus disposed of.

An anecdote is related of a fine lady who had recently come to Rochester as the wife of one of its most distinguished clergymen. She ran up into her husband's study one morning, and said to him:--

"Why, Doctor, I've just seen the only gentleman I have yet met with in Rochester, and he was at our bas.e.m.e.nt door selling vegetables. How wonderful! Who is it? Who can it be?"

"It must be Myron Holley," said her husband.

Another of his lady customers used to say that he sold early peas and potatoes in the morning with as much grace as he lectured before the Lyceum in the evening. Nor was it the ladies alone who admired him. The princ.i.p.al newspaper of the city, in recording his death in 1841, spoke of him as "an eminent citizen, an accomplished scholar, and n.o.ble man, who carried with him to the grave the love of all who knew him."

In reflecting upon the character of this truly remarkable person, I am reminded of a Newfoundland dog that I once had the honor of knowing near the spot on the sh.o.r.e of Lake Ontario where Myron Holley hoed his cabbages and picked his strawberries. It was the largest and most beautiful dog I have ever seen, of a fine shade of yellow in color, and of proportions so extraordinary that few persons could pa.s.s him without stopping to admire. He had the strength and calm courage of a lion, with the playfulness of a kitten, and an intelligence that seemed sometimes quite human. One thing this dog lacked. He was so dest.i.tute of the evil spirit that he would not defend himself against the attacks of other dogs. He seemed to have forgotten how to bite. He has been known to let a smaller dog draw blood from him without making the least attempt to use his own teeth in retaliation. He appeared to have lost the instinct of self-a.s.sertion, and walked abroad protected solely, but sufficiently, by his vast size and imposing appearance.

Myron Holley, I say, reminds me of this superb and n.o.ble creature. He was a man of the finest proportions both of body and of mind, beautiful in face, majestic in stature, fearless, gifted with various talents, an orator, a natural leader of men. With all this, he was dest.i.tute of the personal ambition which lifts the strong man into publicity, and gives him commonplace success. If he had been only half as good as he was, he might have been ten times as famous.

He was born at Salisbury, Conn., in 1779, the son of a farmer who had several sons that became notable men. The father, too, ill.u.s.trated some of the best traits of human nature, being one of the men who make the strength of a country without asking much from the country in return. He used to say to his sons that the height of human felicity was "to be able to converse with the wise, to instruct the ignorant, to pity and despise the intriguing villain, and to a.s.sist the unfortunate." His son Myron enjoyed this felicity all the days of his life.

After graduating at Williams, and studying law at New Haven, he set his face toward western New York, then more remote from New England than Oregon now is. He made an exquisite choice of a place of residence, the village of Canandaigua, then only a hamlet of log huts along the border of one of the lakes for which that part of the State is famous. The first step taken by the young lawyer after his arrival fixed his destiny. He was a.s.signed by the court to defend a man charged with murder--a capital chance for winning distinction in a frontier town.

Myron Holley, however, instead of confining himself to his brief and his precedents, began by visiting the jail and interviewing the prisoner. He became satisfied of his guilt. The next morning he came into court, resigned the case, and never after made any attempt to practice his profession.

He was, in fact, const.i.tutionally disqualified for the practice of such a calling. Having a little property, he bought out a bookseller of the village, laid out a garden, married, was soon elected county clerk, and spent the rest of his life in doing the kind of public service which yields the maximum of good to the country with the minimum of gain to the individual doing it.

The war of 1812 filled all that region with distress and want. It was he who took the lead in organizing relief, and appealed to the city of New York for aid with great success. As soon as the war was over, the old scheme of connecting Lake Erie with the Hudson by a ca.n.a.l was revived.

It was an immense undertaking for that day, and a great majority of the prudent farmers of the State opposed the enterprise as something beyond their strength. It was Myron Holley who went to the legislature year after year, and argued it through. His winning demeanor, his persuasive eloquence, his intimate knowledge of the facts involved, his entire conviction of the wisdom of the scheme, his tact, good temper, and, above all, his untiring persistence, prevailed at length, and the ca.n.a.l was begun.

He was appointed one of the commissioners to superintend the construction of the ca.n.a.l at a salary of twenty-five hundred dollars a year. The commissioners appointed him their treasurer, which threw upon him for eight years an inconceivable amount of labor, much of which had to be done in situations which were extremely unhealthy. At one time, in 1820, he had a thousand laborers on his hands sick with malaria. He was a ministering angel to them, friend, physician, and sometimes nurse. He was obliged on several occasions to raise money for the State on his personal credit, and frequently he had to expend money in circ.u.mstances which made it impossible for him to secure the legal evidence of his having done so.

In 1825 the work was done. A procession of boats floated from Lake Erie to New York Harbor, where they were received by a vast fleet of steamboats and other vessels, all dressed with flags and crowded with people. In the midst of this triumph, Myron Holley, who had managed the expenditures with the most scrupulous economy, was unable to furnish the requisite vouchers for a small part of the money which had pa.s.sed through his hands. He at once gave up his small estate, and appealed to the legislature for relief. He was completely vindicated; his estate was restored to him; but he received no compensation either for his services or his losses.

He returned to his garden, however, a happy man, and during the greater part of the rest of his life he earned a modest subsistence by the beautiful industry which has since given celebrity and wealth to all that fertile region. He remained, however, to the end of his days, one of those brave and unselfish public servants who take the laboring oar in reforms which are very difficult or very odious. After the abduction of Morgan, he devoted some years to anti-masonry, and he founded what was called the Liberty Party, which supported Mr. Birney, of Kentucky, for the presidency.

One of his fellow-workers, the Hon. Elizur Wright, of Boston, has recently published an interesting memoir of him, which reveals to us a cast of character beautiful and rare in men; a character in which the moral qualities ruled with an easy and absolute sway, and from which the baser traits appeared to be eliminated. He was like that great, splendid, yellow king of dogs which escaped perfection by not having just a spice of evil in his composition.

Let me add, however, that he was as far as possible from being a "spoony." Mr. Wright says:--

"He had the strength of a giant, and did not abstain from using it in a combative sense on a fit occasion. When his eldest daughter was living in a house not far from his own, with her first child in her arms, he became aware that she was in danger from a stout, unprincipled tramp who had called on her as a beggar and found her alone. Hastening to the house, without saying a word he grasped the fellow around body and both arms, and carried him, bellowing for mercy, through the yard and into the middle of the street, where he set him down. Greatly relieved, the miserable wretch ran as if he had escaped from a lion."

Mr. Wright adds another trait: "Once in Lyons (N. Y.) when there was great excitement about the 'sin of dancing,' the ministers all preaching and praying against it, Myron Holley quietly said: 'It is as natural for young people to like to dance as for the apple trees to blossom in the spring.'"

THE FOUNDERS OF LOWELL.

We do not often hear of strikes at Lowell. Some men tell us it is because there are not as many foreigners there as at certain manufacturing centres where strikes are frequent. This cannot be the explanation; for out of a population of seventy-one thousand, there are more than twenty thousand foreign-born inhabitants of Lowell, of whom more than ten thousand are natives of Ireland. To answer the question correctly, we must perhaps go back to the founding of the town in 1821, when there were not more than a dozen houses on the site.

At that time the great water-power of the Merrimac River was scarcely used, and there was not one cotton manufactory upon its banks. At an earlier day this river and its tributaries swarmed with beaver and other fur-yielding creatures, which furnished a considerable part of the first capital of the Pilgrim Fathers. The Indians trapped the beaver, and carried the skins to Plymouth and Boston; and this is perhaps the reason why the Merrimac and most of its branches retain their Indian names Merrimac itself is an Indian word meaning sturgeon, and of its ten tributaries all but two appear to have Indian names: Contoocook, Soucook, Suncook, Piscatagoug, Souhegan, Nashua, Concord, Spiggot, Shawshine, and Powow.

Besides these there are the two rivers which unite to form it, the names of which are still more peculiar: Pemigewa.s.set and Winnepiseogee. The most remarkable thing with regard to these names is, that the people who live near see nothing remarkable in them, and p.r.o.nounce them as naturally as New Yorkers do Bronx and Croton. It is difficult for us to imagine a lover singing, or saying, "Meet me by the Pemigewa.s.set, love,"

or asking her to take a row with him on the lovely Winnepiseogee. But lovers do such things up there; and beautiful rivers they are, flowing between mountains, and breaking occasionally into falls and rapids. The Merrimac, also, loses its serenity every few miles, and changes from a tranquil river into a--water-power.