Frederic Tudor, a Horribly Old & Ugly Man

FREDERIC TUDOR, A HORRIBLY OLD & UGLY MAN

NOT WORTH THE HAVING WITH ALL HIS MONEY1

“A man without money is like a body without a soul — a walking dead man.”

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

1.Comment of January 24, 1834 by Charlotte Everett to Edward Everett when the 19-year-old Euphemia “Effie” Fenno married wealthy Frederic Tudor, who was nearly 50. “What a foolish girl to marry such an old man.” The honeymoon was quickly over, when it came out that Mr. Tudor had been obtaining “marriage privileges” from another woman during the decade of his 40s. When Mrs. Euphemia Fenno Tudor tried to learn French, he threw her books into Boston harbor. Although she had expected a home of her own, it would turn out that he would insist on their residing permanently in his suite at the Tremont House downtown. It has been suggested that Frederick “Ice King” Tudor was the inspiration for Amy’s suitor in Louisa May Alcott’s LITTLE WOMEN. I’m not making this up, he actually did utter the words “A man without money is like a body without a soul — a walking dead man.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

COOLNESS FREDERIC TUDOR

1783

September 4, Thursday: Frederic Tudor was born. He was not yet horribly old & ugly & not worth the having with all his money.

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

coolness “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

FREDERIC TUDOR COOLNESS

1806

March: A young man named Frederic Tudor, the son of the Judge Advocate General of George Washington, began in the business of producing and wholesaling natural ice in Boston.2 He had borrowed $10,000.00 and had purchased the ice brig Favorite, for $4,750.00, that had been being used to transport ice from a pond in New York near the Hudson River to the hotels and plantations in the vicinity of Charlestown NC, and loaded 130 tons of ice from Massachusetts ponds onto this brig and sent it off to the port of Saint Pierre on the island of Martinique in the Caribbean to cool down the planters, who could well afford to pay for it. It was an obvious idea, not a new idea, to send coolness from some place where there was too much of it to some place where there was not enough of it. The Romans had done this, for instance, with teams of slaves toting snows down from the mountains to ice the Emperor Nero. Tudor would spend the next fifteen years of his life experimenting with the laws of world supply and demand in relation to this obvious idea. Ironically, however, in this initial venture he would lose $3,000.00 to $4,000.00 of his capital, in part because of inadequate insulation. If you are in the ice business but your ice has turned to water, it seems nobody wants to know you. This man would visit debtors’ prison several times over the next few years, before his dedication and concentration began to pay off for him, and pay off big, and cause his customers to begin to refer to him proudly/enviously as the American Ice King.

2. Did he get this idea from President Washington’s humongous icehouse at Mount Vernon? HDT WHAT? INDEX

FREDERIC TUDOR COOLNESS

1812

Mr. Frederic Tudor senior deeded to his son Frederic Tudor the some 75 acres of the “Rockwood” estate at Nahant. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1816

February 13, Tuesday: The Teatro San Carlo of Naples was destroyed by fire (the cost of rebuilding would be paid entirely by the wealthy Domenico Barbaja).

As an experiment Frederic Tudor began construction, in Havana, Cuba, of the 1st above-ground-level structure for the storage of large quantities of nice, clean ice to be placed on the tongues of white slavemasters in exchange for coins they had in their pockets on account of the blood, sweat, and tears of their forced labor (not to put too fine a point on it). He would spend $2,400 in the construction of this building.

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

March 15, Friday: Frederic Tudor’s Havana, Cuba ice-house was fully charged and its doors were sealed. He began to carefully monitor the hogsheads of water that ran off from this enclosed stack of ice, to determine the “product decay” per hour. Eventually, by experimenting with various insulation materials, such as blankets and boards and dry and wet sawdust, he would get his losses down to about 18 pounds of saleable product per hour. “We cannot know how long it took the Walden block to melt, but a millennium or two is quite realistic based on modern analogs and heat flux calculations.”

coolness “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

FREDERIC TUDOR COOLNESS

June 16, Sunday: Celebrations took place in Vienna honoring the 50th anniversary of Antonio Salieri’s arrival in the city. He received a gold medal from the Lord Chamberlain in the name of the Emperor. During a celebration of the High Mass Salieri conducted his own music. In the evening, a concert by his pupils took place in his Vienna home, wherein Beitrag zur fünfzigjährigen Jubelfeier des Herrn Salieri D.441 for solo voices and piano by Franz Schubert was performed for the initial time.

That night Percy Bysshe Shelley and his 18-year-old bride Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft were holed up at the Villa Diodati near Geneva, with Dr. John Polidori and George Gordon, Lord Byron, because during this particularly violent storm of that strangely rainy summer, they simply would not have been able to make their way back comfortably to where they had been staying at Chapuis. Evidently due to the bad weather the group was unable to get a good cable connection for their TV (or something), and so they decided to amuse themselves by reading aloud a collection of German ghost stories, THE FANTASMAGORIANA, in one of which a group of travelers were trying to amuse one another with their respective supernatural experiences. Byron proposed the agenda that they were each to invent a story such as found in this volume, for one another’s entertainment. Shelley wrote a piece which was entirely forgettable, Byron dashed off a fragment, and Polidori began what would become the “The Vampyre,” the first modern vampire tale, the main character of which, Lord Ruthven, could well have been based upon Byron (for some time it would be presumed that Byron himself had invented the story). Mary herself did not at this point put anything on paper. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FREDERIC TUDOR COOLNESS

In every month during this year there was a severe frost. January and February were comparatively mild, though there were a few cold days. The greater part of March was as might be expected, cold and boisterous. April opened warm, again, as might be expected, but then grew colder, ending in snow and ice and wintry cold. In May ice formed half an inch thick. Opening buds and flowers were killed and the corn froze. Frost, ice, and snow occurred throughout June. On Inauguration Day, in June, there was four inches of snow on the level ground in Warner, New Hampshire, while across the border in Maine there was ten inches. Almost every green thing was killed. There would be no fruit this year. Then there was frost and ice even in July. On July 5th, ice covered the ponds of New England and New York state like window glass. In August this ice thickened to half an inch. The wind was from the north, and cold, nearly all summer. About all that could be done with the corn this year was cut it and dry it for fodder. Farmers would be obliged to pay $4 and even $5 a bushel for corn from the 1815 harvest, in order to get seed for the next spring’s planting. Then the first two weeks of September were mild but the remainder of the month was cold, with frost, and ice again formed, a quarter of an inch thick. October was more than usually cold, with frost and ice. November was cold and blustering, with snow enough HDT WHAT? INDEX

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for good sleighing, but then December proved to be quite mild and comfortable.

Cold weather was persisting through the summer in much of the world’s temperate zones. Crops were being killed by frost and snow would be occurring in June and July in the United States. The weather this summer was so dreadful for farming, that during the following traveling season, the summer of 1817, a number of families would pack up and leave for points west. (This population migration phenomenon caused by the cold summer of 1816 would come to be known as “Ohio fever.”)

Why was this summer of 1816 in the Northern Hemisphere exhibiting such strange weather? Well, it wasn’t just the sunspots, which were extraordinarily prominent and which people were observing through smoked glass during that May and June, and also, it wasn’t just the “ice king” Frederic Tudor of Boston who was cooling off the hot spots of this planet! For in fact dust, circling the earth from the explosion of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815, in this season was reaching the northern latitudes.3 Crop-damaging summer frosts caused SUNSPOTS some of the hard-won farmlands of New England to be abandoned — fields upon which cultivation has not since been attempted. Indiana experienced an unprecedented surge of some 42,000 settlers in this year, many of them fleeing the cold weather back in New England. The drop in mean temperature was amounting to some 7 degrees in New England4 and the price of hay was rocketing from like $30.00 per ton to like $180.00 per ton. People were praying “God, please do not inflict on us another year without a summer.” Of course, in Switzerland that summer, Mary was huddling indoors to stay out of the cold and damp, and her story FRANKENSTEIN; OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS, if you go back and look into it, or the last half of it, is a story with what would have appeared to be a wholly gratuitous amount of guess what, snow and ice and coldness.

3. Soufrière on St. Vincent had blown in 1812, Mayon in the Philippines had blown in 1814, but these became almost as pop-tarts popping up in a toaster when Tambora in Indonesia blew, as this was by far the most powerful volcanic blast of the past 10,000 years. All but 26 of the 12,000 Sumbawa islanders had lost their lives. We would have a mild taste of this volcano weather, in our own lives, in the series of cool summers after 1991 when Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines blew its top. 4. What happened in New England, what happened for instance to the denizens of Thoreau’s “Easterbrooks Country,” of course doesn’t compare at all with what was happening on the islands immediately around this Indonesian volcano, for some 80,000 people were starving to death in huts staring out at the barren, buried fields that had been their entire livelihood. (That’s them and we’re us, I suppose.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Because of this explosion of which they were unaware, Americans would come to refer to their year 1816 as “eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death.”

Samuel Griswold Goodrich, the children’s author, would write the best-known contemporary account of this strange year. The season appears to have been a repeat of the growing season of the year 1454 in the Northern Hemisphere, when the Chinese wheat crop was destroyed by frosts after a winter in which the Yellow Sea had frozen, along the coast, to as much as a dozen miles out from the shoreline.

To bring this home to Concord, Massachusetts, please note that per John Hanson Mitchell: Departures are not necessarily well documented, but there is good evidence that 1816 might have broken the back of Estabrook [Thoreau’s “Easterbrooks Country”]. In 1815 the great volcano Tambora in Indonesia blew its top, and ... here in New England the effects were especially troublesome, since the soils were wearing out and the hardscrabble hilltop farms and marginal areas such as Estabrook were already hard-pressed.... The Estabrooks, the Kibbes, the Clarks, the Browns, and other “outlivers,” as they were called, who inhabited the poor farms in the tract that would come to be known as Estabrook Woods, were not immune to this pattern of settlement, and one by one, for varying reasons, the families pulled up stakes and went west ... and by Thoreau’s time Estabrook was a haunted land, the farms deserted, the families departed, and only a wind blowing.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day / Our afternoon meeting was not quite as large as usual but proved a quiet favor’d opportunity - James Greene opened the meeting in a rather short testimony which savor’d well to me Then Gerrard F Hopkins in a large & excellent testimony, wherein the power of Truth was remarkably conspicuous - Margaret Judge concluded in a living prayer In the Afternoon James Greene again, & as usual when present opened the Service then David Harkness, then Calvin Straight, then Christopher Healy & then Calvin Straight a second time — all the appearances, I thought were in the life - & The meeting as quiet as so large & mixed a gathering could be - in addition to our lodgers, we have tonight Isaac Thorne & wife of Nine Partners & Robert Pary & wife of Pennsylvania — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

coolness “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

FREDERIC TUDOR COOLNESS

1818

Winter: Because the winter was exceptionally mild and ice was not forming in adequate supply on the lakes and ponds of New England, Frederic Tudor sent men with picks to Labrador to get ice from icebergs. Evidently, the cooling dust from the explosion of Mount Tambora in 1815 had gotten out of this planet’s atmosphere by this date. Normally, Tudor was able to use the ice from Fresh Pond near Cambridge, Massachusetts, owned by Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth, where Jarvis had been developing ice cutting machines with iron runners and saw teeth which cut the ice into such neat blocks that they could be stored and shipped tight up against each other, thus reducing melting. At the suggestion of Wyeth, the ships used to transport ice, and the Tudor ice warehouses in Havana, Cuba, Charleston, and the West Indies, would begin to use cheap sawdust, an industrial waste product from Maine, in the 1820s to gradually reduce losses due to melting below the figure of 8%.

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project coolness HDT WHAT? INDEX

FREDERIC TUDOR COOLNESS

1819

September 16, Thursday: Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla’s Grito de Dolores ignited an insurrection led by Ignacio Allende, that would produce both their deaths promptly and, after eleven years, the independence of Mexico.

Frederic Tudor wrote to Samuel Parkman, who had made his nut in real estate, that he also was beginning to consider himself a rich man. Owning four icehouses worth $40,000 (not counting the value of their extensive real estate) can do that to you! This year he had already sold $30,000 worth of ice and expected to sell $6,000 or $8,000 more.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 16th of 9th M 1819 / Our meeting was rather small J Dennis & father Rodman appeared in short testimonies, & to me it was a season of but little life, tho’ I thought in the forepart of it there was a little life & perhaps closed with a little. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project coolness HDT WHAT? INDEX

FREDERIC TUDOR COOLNESS

1820

At the suggestion of Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth, the ships used to transport ice, and Frederic Tudor’s ice warehouses in Havana, Cuba, Charleston, South Carolina, and the West Indies, would begin to use cheap sawdust, an industrial waste product from Maine, during the 1820s to gradually reduce losses due to melting below the figure of 8%.

Fall: Frederic Tudor, with the help of his two brothers, prepared to ship the ice of Massachusetts to New Orleans. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FREDERIC TUDOR COOLNESS

1824

Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth, who owned Fresh Pond near Cambridge, Massachusetts and had been running the Fresh Pond Hotel, became the manager of Frederic Tudor’s ice factory there.

A Brighton brewer, John Vallance, took out two patents for an apparatus which improved to some degree upon the invention of Sir John Leslie of 1804 for absorbent cooling, that is, for the production of artificial ice in all climates. COOLNESS HDT WHAT? INDEX

FREDERIC TUDOR COOLNESS

1825

The Frederic Tudor “Ice King” family caused to be built, on their Rockwood estate at Nahant, a “rustic stone” summer cottage:

THE MAINE WOODS: But Maine, perhaps, will soon be where Massachusetts is. A good part of her territory is already as bare and commonplace as much of our neighborhood, and her villages generally are not so well shaded as ours. We seem to think that the earth must go through the ordeal of sheep-pasturage before it is habitable by man. Consider Nahant, the resort of all the fashion of Boston, — which peninsula I saw but indistinctly in the twilight, when I steamed by it, and thought that it was unchanged since the discovery. John Smith described it in 1614 as “the Mattahunts, two pleasant isles of groves, gardens, and cornfields”; and others tell us that it was once well wooded, and even furnished timber to build the wharves of Boston. Now it is difficult to make a tree grow there, and the visitor comes away with a vision of Mr. Tudor’s ugly fences, a rod high, designed to protect a few pear-shrubs. And what are we coming to in our Middlesex towns? — a bald, staring town-house, or meeting-house, and a bare liberty-pole, as leafless as it is fruitless, for all I can see. We shall be obliged to import the timber for the last, hereafter, or splice such sticks as we have; — and our ideas of liberty are equally mean with these. The very willow-rows lopped every three years for fuel or powder, — and every sizable pine and oak, or other forest tree, cut down within the memory of man! As if individual speculators were to be allowed to export the clouds out of the sky, or the stars out of the firmament, one by one. We shall be reduced to gnaw the very crust of the earth for nutriment.

Winter: Frederick Douglass’s mother, the field slave Harriet Bailey, died. Free at last.5

5. I don’t know what the weather was like in the United States of America during this winter or whether Harriet Bailey would have as a field slave suffered from exposure, but in Europe this is known to have been a particularly long and intense winter, with the laboring classes suffering. Ireland and Germany were being particularly hard hit. By this period, the mid-1820s, Frederic Tudor and Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth were obtaining 1,000 tons of ice per acre of surface from such places as Fresh Pond near Cambridge, Massachusetts, harvesting this surface at the rate of an acre a day. Some of New England’s white coolness was making its way to countries such as Persia. Newspapers were describing the pantry’s “ice box” as an appliance which had become an “article of necessity,” like unto having a carpet in one’s drawing room. The iceman, muscular and virile, cometh up your back porch steps with a wet burlap sack on his shoulder and a huge pair of tongs. Hey, I remember, it was still this way when I was a child, the weekly arrival of the iceman was something to be looked for because it meant that the restrictions on the opening and closing of the lid of the ice box could be expected to be eased for the next few days. And ice, on a hot Indiana day it was like candy. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FREDERIC TUDOR COOLNESS

1832

Frederic Tudor’s company began shipping ice from the surface of Fresh Pond in Cambridge to the port of Calcutta, India. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1833

May: The capital of British India, the city of Calcutta, witnessed the arrival of an American “discovery ship,” the Tuscany, which had carried a cargo of 40 tons of crystal-clear, high quality lake ice as ballast all the 16,000 tropical miles from Boston. The ship also brought as its primary cargo Boston’s Baldwin apples, butter, and cheese. This ice ballast was in blocks weighing as much as two Bengal maunds, or 160 pounds, each, and its high visual and taste qualities were quite as attractive as the concept that this was a high-cost remainder which had survived four months at sea and two crossings of the equator. The voyage had required 4 months and 7 2 days and /3ds of the ice were still in existence upon arrival for use by the nabobs of the East India Company. This shipment of New England’s heavy winter coolness placed Frederic Tudor and Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth of Fresh Pond in Cambridge in head-on competition with local ice being produced by ordinary ancient night evaporation methods in shallow pans along the Hoogly River.6

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

6. The brig Tuscany would on its return voyage carry a cargo of monkeys destined as expensive exotic house pets for the New Englanders (who by this point were not being allowed to have human slaves). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1838

May 2, Wednesday: Miss Prudence Ward wrote more to her sister in Scituate, Mrs. Edmund Quincy Sewall, Sr.:

...Mr. Thoreau has begun to prepare his garden, and I have been digging the flower-beds. Henry has left us this morning, to try and obtain a school at the eastward (in Maine). John has taken one in West Roxbury. Helen is in another part of Roxbury, establishing herself in a boarding and day-school. Sophia will probably be wanted there as an assistant; so the family are disposed of. I shall miss the juvenile members very much; for they are the most important part of the establishment....

JOHN THOREAU, SR. JOHN THOREAU, JR. HELEN LOUISA THOREAU SOPHIA E. THOREAU HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“Went to Maine for a school.” Searching for a teaching position with a letter of recommendation from Waldo Emerson in his pocket, Henry Thoreau was taking a steamer out of Boston past Gloucester’s Eastern Point and Cape Ann to Portland, to travel through Brunswick, Bath, Gardiner, Hallowell, Augusta, China, Bangor, Oldtown, Belfast, Castine, Thomaston, Bath, and Portland and back to Boston. Passing Nahant, he was underimpressed at the sight of the Frederic Tudor “Rockwood” estate and its ugly fences:

While he was in Oldtown he would meet an old Indian on the dock who would point up the Penobscot and inform Thoreau that:

Two or three miles up that river one beautiful country.

TIMELINE OF THE MAINE WOODS HDT WHAT? INDEX

FREDERIC TUDOR COOLNESS

1842

Ice from the ponds of New England began to arrive in England. The first cargos were brought over not by the Frederic Tudor firm from Fresh Pond in Cambridge but by Gage, Hittinger & Company and then by the Wenham Lake Ice Company, both of Boston. A large block of ice from the lake near Wenham, Massachusetts was presented to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at Windsor, and the royals exclaimed in public over the purity and clarity of the ice and allowed it to be generally known that they were arranging for a regular supply for themselves.7

Completion of the Wapping tunnel under the Thames River below London. “Wapping” merely refers to the wharves of London. How come you didn’t know that? The tunnel engineered under the Thames River by Marc Isambard Brunel between 1825 and this year, which was the 1st tunneling ever done underwater except by worms, connected Wapping and Rotherhithe, which would otherwise be unconnected. This Thames Tunnel is now a part of the Metropolitan Line of the London Underground, which means that you may enjoy it at your leisure. It is 1,506 feet in length and 23 feet by 37 feet in bore, so you can close your eyes and imagine that for the longest time this was the biggest bore of any tunnel made through soft ground. Or, you may close your eyes and imagine that it is the 20th Century and you are traveling under the Channel in a new Chunnel through the chalk connecting England and France, which would otherwise be unconnected. Readers of Charles Dickens’s 1849 DAVID COPPERFIELD will remember Wapping as the spot at which Martha Endell the soiled dove committed herself to the garbage-laden Thames. (For an illustration, refer to the “Wapping” painting — the

7. After the assassination attempt of 1839, two attempts would be made on Queen Victoria’s life during this year, and then attempts would be made in 1849, 1850, 1872, and 1882. However, to the best of our knowledge, nobody ever made an attempt at her life by stabbing her with an icicle. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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most famous one done by Whistler.)

THE SCARLET LETTER: Furthermore, on the left hand as you enter the front door, is a certain room or office, about fifteen feet square, and of a lofty height, with two of its arched windows commanding a view of the aforesaid dilapidated wharf, and the third looking across a narrow lane, and along a portion of Derby Street. All three give glimpses of the shops of grocers, block- makers, slop-sellers, and ship-chandlers, around the doors of which are generally to be seen, laughing and gossiping, clusters of old salts, and such other wharf-rats as haunt the Wapping of a seaport. The room itself is cobwebbed, and dingy with old paint; its floor is strewn with grey sand, in a fashion that has elsewhere fallen into long disuse; and it is easy to conclude, from the general slovenliness of the place, that this is a sanctuary into which womankind, with her tools of magic, the broom and mop, has very infrequent access. In the way of furniture, there is a stove with a voluminous funnel; an old pine desk with a three-legged stool beside it; two or three wooden-bottom chairs, exceedingly decrepit and infirm; and – not to forget the library – on some shelves, a score or two of volumes of the Acts of Congress, and a bulky Digest of the Revenue laws. A tin pipe ascends through the ceiling, and forms a medium of vocal communication with other parts of be edifice. And here, some six months ago – pacing from corner to corner, or lounging on the long-legged tool, with his elbow on the desk, and his eyes wandering up and down the columns of the morning newspaper – you might have recognised, honoured reader, the same individual who welcomed you into his cheery little study, where the sunshine glimmered so pleasantly through the willow branches on the western side of the Old Manse. But now, should you go thither to seek him, you would inquire in vain for the Locofoco Surveyor. The besom of reform hath swept him out of office, and a worthier successor wears his dignity and pockets his emoluments. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1844

February 4, Sunday and 5, Monday: Boston Harbor was frozen out a number of miles. While the Cunard sidewheeler Britannia was being prepared to steam for Liverpool –it being a Royal Mail packet being on a fixed schedule– a budget of $1,500 was established to bring all the ice king Frederic Tudor’s men from the inland fresh-water ponds down to the locked harbor for a couple of days of intense labor cutting a 7-mile channel 200 feet wide through the half-foot to foot-thick ice, all the way from the East Boston wharf out to the open water. The suitability of Boston as an all-seasons port was at stake!8

In this year a cast-iron stairway was being added to Boston Light on Little Brewster Island. (In 1859 the tower would be raised 14 feet to its present height of 102 feet above sea level and a 2d-order Fresnel lens would be installed.)

8. Nowadays, thermal pollution of the harbor, as well as global warming, make it exceedingly unlikely that the harbor will freeze across like this even during the coldest season. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1847

February 19, Friday: An undated letter from Margaret Fuller on the sights she was seeing in Europe and the public people9 she was meeting was printed as a column by the New-York Tribune: ARTHUR FULLER’S BOOK

According to The Concord Freeman, “Ice King” Frederic Tudor’s work crew was harvesting between 800 and 1,000 tons of ice per day from the surface of Walden Pond.

On one or another morning Waldo Emerson mused about the prospect of profiting from Walden Pond (not very realistically, since no part of the surface of said pond was within the plotlines of his abutting woodlot):

I woke up this morning & find the ice in my pond promised to be a revenue. It was as if somebody had proposed to buy the air that blew over my field.

March 7, Sunday: Waldo Emerson wrote to Judge William Emerson: I received your letter in reply to mine concerning money. And am glad you are not scared. I should not however have bought my land until another year, had I foreseen the inconveniences of it. I am not without a prospect that my woodlot by Walden Pond will get an increased value soon; as Mr. Tudor has invaded us with a gang of Irishmen & taken 10,000 tons of ice from the Pond in the last weeks. If this continues, he will spoil my lot for purposes for which I chiefly value it, & I shall be glad to sell it. FREDERIC TUDOR

9. The term “celebrities” would not be first used, by Emerson, until the following year. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1861

It would be the civil war years which would produce, paradoxically, for the Tudor Company which stripped the winter ice from the ponds of New England, the quite temporary prosperity which would enable Frederic Tudor, when he would die at the age of eighty, to leave behind him a million-dollar fortune. For these would be the years of the frenzied boom in bulk cotton from India, a boom produced by the North’s blockade of Southern ports and a consequently greater demand for this Indian cotton. The British in India would not only have plenty of cash with which to procure ice, but also, this the ice could travel virtually for free, for it would be mere ballast in the ships which would travel to India to obtain this cotton. Samuel Eliot Morison would comment “Mr. Tudor and his ice came just in time to preserve Boston’s East India commerce from ruin.”10 This blockade also cut off the supply of Tudor’s northern ice to the ports of New Orleans, Charleston, Savannah, etc., and what this meant was that the hospitals there would have to turn to artificial ice produced by the ammonia-absorption machine patented by Ferdinand Carré. Thus this temporary boom for pond ice was presaging a permanent defeat by manufactured ice. COOLNESS

10. Professor Morison was the last Harvard historian to ride a horse to work. He taught the young Harvard men while attired in riding breeches. He refused to teach the Radcliffe girls because girls are so frivolous. He believed so passionately that the writing of history was an art that, when interrupted at his desk by the barking of a dog, he shot the dog. After WWII he taught while attired in an Admiral’s uniform. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1864

Professor Sir Charles Lyell was made a baronet. Cool.

In this year the American “Ice King” Frederic Tudor died. Also, in this year, an experimental plant for the production of artificial ice using the ammonia process began operation in New Orleans. Production in this plant would be a mere 600 pounds every 3 hours, which would hardly be sufficient to threaten the regular shipment of the pond ice of this defunct functionary by schooner from Maine and Massachusetts ports.11 COOLNESS

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING, HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

11. However, do consider the 1986 Harrison Ford/Helen Mirren/River Phoenix movie “The Mosquito Coast” for some truly extraordinary special effects, in regard to tropical ice production via this ammonia process. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2014. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: March 2, 2014 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FREDERIC TUDOR COOLNESS

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh. HDT WHAT? INDEX

FREDERIC TUDOR COOLNESS