Book Reviews 411 Carl Seaburg and Stanley Paterson; ed. Alan Seaburg, The Ice King: Frederic Tudor and His Circle. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society and Mystic, CT: Mystic Seaport [www.mysticseaport.org], 2003. xii + 242 pp., illustrations, notes, notes on sources, index. US $24.95, paper; ISBN 0-939510-80-4. Among the many things we take for granted today is the ability to preserve fruit, vegetables, and meats through refrigeration and to slake our thirst with cold and iced beverages. The association of ice and food in northerly or high-altitude climates where it forms naturally is of considerable antiquity. The Chinese used ice to preserve food three millennia ago. It was also used by the Romans of Nero's day and, as Fernand Braudel relates, in the age of Philip II it was a luxury appreciated the length and breadth of the Mediterranean world, refreshing Spanish courtiers, Maltese knights and Ottomanjanissaries. While enterprising merchants could peddle small quantities of ice over short distances, the long-distance carriage of ice in bulk was pioneered in the nineteenth century by Frederic Tudor. A Boston merchant of unwavering vision and endless drive, Tudor "introduced the world to refrigeration and thus transformed the way we eat and drink and live." His rise was far from smooth. He shipped his first ice in 1806 to Martinique, but it was not until the 1820s that his business achieved stability. In the meantime, he was arrested three times for debt and jailed twice. Even after his business affairs were on an even keel, he lost hundreds of thousands of dollars speculating in coffee in the 1840s. Nevertheless, when the Tudor Ice Company was chartered in 1860, it was valued at $1.3 million and Tudor's reach was global, stretching from the ice ponds of eastern Massachusetts and Maine to southern US ports, Havana, South America, India and East Asia. The details of so complex and esoteric an enterprise would make for a fascinating biography. Instead, the authors focus mainly on Tudor's personal difficulties with his friends, relations and business associates. These three groups comprise "the circle" of the book's subtitle. The result is a farrago of vignettes, many of which would have been better left to footnotes or omitted altogether. Thus, the authors sketch the career of Tudor's great nephew Charles Steward Parnell, the Irish patriot, although thanks to the estrangement of Tudor and his sister it seems unlikely the two ever met. Yet details on the number of ships in the Tudor fleet - whether, in fact, the vessels were owned or chartered - are lacking. The fact that Tudor shipped ice to Singapore is mentioned only in passing two pages from the end of the book; that his ice was known in Persia and China goes unremarked. Nameless rivals in the ice trade crop up from time to time, but there is no indication of the growth, volume or value of the ice trade in Tudor's hands or generally. The authors cannot be held to account too firmly for these deficiencies. Both coauthors died more than four years before the book's publication; it was ushered into print thanks to the efforts of Alan Seaburg. The resulting work has the feel of notes cobbled together without the benefit of a unifying theme. Tudor's contribution to the technological revolution of the nineteenth century was considerable and it certainly deserves to be better known than it is. If this book does nothing more than stimulate further research into the dynamics of the ice trade, it will have been worth the effort. But a more succinct and focussed account of Tudor's career remains Henry G. Pearson's "Frederic Tudor, Ice King," published in the Proceedings ofthe Massachusetts Historical Society in 1933 - not 1940 as is indicated in the notes. Lincoln P. Paine Portland, ME, USA Downloaded from ijh.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on March 27, 2015