The ships that brought us ice

I wonder whether anyone in Madras can tell me anything about the ships that brought ice to Madras. One of the ships, I know, was the Arabella, very similar to the one in the sketch that accompanies this request. The sketch is from a 1964 anthology of poems titled Wings from the Wind, both text and illustrations by Tasha Tudor, who sparked my interest in Madras – and the ships that brought ice to the city.

Rosamand Tudor’s picture of an India-bound ice-carrying clipper.

I curated a centenary exhibition at the Tasha Tudor Museum in Brattleboro, Vermont, a few years ago. Tasha Tudor (1915-2008) was a well-known American children’s book author and illustrator. She was also the great-grand-daughter of Frederic Tudor of the Tudor Ice Company which shipped ice out to Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. Her mother, Rosamand Tudor, was an artist and it was she who sketched the full-rigged ship we see here today. Tasha herself had in her early years done a watercolour of the Madras Ice House as seen in its heyday. This sketch was based on a painting in the Baker Library Historical Collections at Harvard University’s Business School. The painting in the Library is not an original but, accordingly to the Library’s staff, “an antique print of high quality, perhaps almost as old as the original watercolour.” I have since discovered that the print, as a framed picture, was presented to the Business School in 1935 by Frederic Tudor’s son Federic Jr, the grandfather of Tasha Tudor.
Tasha Tudor’s copy of it cannot be found. But as an author and illustrator of children’s books, she has, it would seem, found place for the picture in one of her books. In The Dolls’ Christmas, published in 1950, she has an illustration of a dolls’ bedroom with a picture hanging over the bed of what looks like the Harvard watercolour print. It seems unclear if Tasha’s painting was full-size or was a miniature.

Tasha Tudor’s picture for the book The Dolls’ Christmas with her copy of a
painting of the Madras Ice House X (seen more clearly in another painting on
right).

“One of the loveliest works of art in the exhibition I curated was a very large portrait that Rosamand painted in the 1930s, of Tasha wearing an antique dress once owned by Federic Tudor’s wife, Euphemia Fenno Tudor,” according to Knazek.

The New York Times in June 1938 stated that Tasha at her wedding “wore an embroidered India mull gown and veil that had belonged to her great-grandmother”. A magazine article published in 1939 further states that the wedding dress was “brought from India in a clipper ship” and that “for over a century it had been in the family.” So that would indicate that the dress was made in 1838 or earlier.

Tasha was originally given the name ‘Starling’ but early in her life her father decided to change Starling to Natasha (as in the War and Peace heroine) but soon that name was shortened to Tasha. The first few years of her life, Tasha lived with her family in a home right on the water’s shore in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and the house was adjacent to the Burgess Boatyards (owned by Tasha’s father).

There is mention of at least one clipper ship from Marblehead which sailed to India, full of ice: the Elizabeth Kimball. She was described as a “medium” clipper, built at Marblehead in 1853. The maiden voyage was a round trip between Boston and Calcutta with an outward cargo of ice.

As for the Arabella, she made two voyages to India, carrying ice and other goods, in the 1850s. The 696-ton sailing ship, one of the largest merchant vessels of the time, was named after Arabella Rice, daughter of one of the ship’s co-owners, Capt. Robert Rice of Maine. Her other owner was William H Bordman Jr., who was very much into New England’s export trade from 1826. Arabella Rice, 41 at the time, became the sole heiress to the fortunes of her parents in 1863. She died a spinster when she was 50, leaving a $172,000 to be divided among various good causes. $30,000 of that fortune was left to establish a library in memory of her father in his birthplace, Kittery, Maine. In the Rice Public Library are records of Robert Rice’s overseas trading activities.

Editor’s Note: Knazek co-curated a travelling exhibition on Tasha Tudor and her work. May I urge the US Consulate-General to bring the exhibition and Knazek out this August to be part of the Madras Week celebrations? Should the Consulate-General wish to discuss the Tasha Tudor travelling exhibition with the institutional sponsor, perhaps the first contact at the Norman Rockwell Museum should be with Deputy Director/Chief Curator Stephanie Plunkett. Stephanie co-curated “Tasha Tudor: Around the Year” with Knazek in 2005. Her email address is splunkett@nrm.org

Please follow and like us: