Grantville Gazette, Volume 40 (32 page)

If you were traveling, you could bring ice with you, or purchase it in a caravanserai (which probably had its own
yakyal
(ice house) and ice production facility. At Merv, in Turkmenistan, one can find the ruins of a fifteenth-century ice house in the shape of a stepped cone, with a shade wall nearby, and I would assume that this house was either built above the trench or alongside it. (215). An ice house of this type was still in use near Sirjan in 1975. (208).

Ottoman Empire
. In Jaffa, Syria, in July 1494, the captain of a Venetian ship was gifted with a large sack of snow. (David xiii). According to the traveler Pierre Belon, who visited the Ottoman lands in 1546
–
51, the Turks "gather the snow, filling certain houses [buzchane] constructed like vaults or else like a hillock of earth," and situated in a location sheltered from the sun, and the packed snow could last for two years without melting. (David 41).

I have not been able to locate any reference to seventeenth-century snow or ice collection for the benefit of the rulers of the Barbary Coast states, but snow does fall regularly in the Atlas Mountains. In the nineteenth century, snow was stored at the icehouse
La Glaciere
, for use in the summer in Algiers. (Strahan 402). But ice was also imported; in 1905, a ton of Norwegian ice sold for fifteen francs ($3).(I&R 9:236).

Pre-Ottoman Egypt
. Snow was transported from Lebanon and Syria to Cairo in the thirteen and fourteenth centuries. (David xii). This took advantage of the existing postal system (destroyed by Timur in 1400), which employed relays of horses and camels. This implies that only small quantities, for the sultan and his favorites, were carried, but they were carried very quickly indeed. (David xii, James 523).

Roman Italy
. Pliny complained about his effete fellow Romans who defied the natural order by using snow to cool wine in summer, and Seneca was in high dudgeon because his compatriots used ice as well as snow. ("Nothing is cold enough for some people," yada yada yada.) Martial says that the cost of the ice or snow could exceed that of the wine it was cooling. (Forbes 113ff). The extreme example of Roman indulgence in natural refrigeration was set by the Emperor Elagabalus; "one summer he made a mountain of snow in the pleasure-garden attached to his house, having snow carried there for the purpose." (Thayer).

Renaissance Italy
. According to Cardinal Ferdinando Medici, in the 1570s, Italians packed snow into pits fifty feet deep, and twenty-five feet wide at the top. The pit was lined and covered with "prunings of trees and straw"; there was a wood grating three feet from the bottom to suspend the snow above a crude drainage space. (David xiii-xiv). In 1583, Ferdinando had a vaulted underground ice-house constructed at the Villa Medici, in Rome.

Apparently, Ferdinando Medici was not the only resident of Rome who fancied ice in summer. On July 24, 1571, he issued instructions "to the Rome chief of Police and all other personages of whatsoever rank or condition, giving notice that Ottaviano da Burrino, his muleteer, and the muleteer's boy, are bringing two loads of snow per day to Rome, are not to be molested in any matter whatsoever, nor the snow to be taken to any other place whatsoever, 'for it is for our use.'"

In 1581, Michel de Montaigne saw the pits at Pratolino, Tuscany, whose snow was delivered to Grand Duke Francesco Medici In 1598, the hydraulic engineer Bernardo Buontalenti, Francesco's Superintendent of Public Works, was granted a monopoly over the delivery of snow to Florence each summer. It carried a pension of 210 scudi and of course the opportunity for profit. The penalty for violating Buontalenti's rights was "a fine of twenty five
scudi
and two strokes of the rope." (David 15ff).

Until Buontalenti's time, the snow was carried down from the mountains; Florence is situated on the Arno river, and the Appenines are no more than twenty miles to the north. However, in 1603
–
5, he constructed several
laghi
(or
peschiera
)
di diaccio
, ice lakes. Presumably, these were artificial lakes that froze over in winter, providing a convenient source of ice. The ice, in turn, was transported to
buca
(or
conserve
)
di diaccio
, ice pits. It appears that the ice was harvested in late December. Buontalenti died in 1608 and the exclusive rights passed to Francesco Paulsanti.

Despite innovation in Florence, ice was carried by cart from the Lessini mountains in Friuli, to Verona, Venice and Mantua. (David 68). In Venice, John Reresby reported in 1657, "in summer the meanest person seldom drinks his wine without having it cooled either with ice or snow, which is preserved in places made for that purpose under ground, and sold publicly in markets." (Reresby 102).

In the Spanish-controlledKingdom of Naples, snow was stored in either ice pits, or the natural caves of Monte Somma and Monte Mauro (David 68).

Spain
. Pits for the preservation of snow were dug during the reign of Carlos III of Navarre. (David xii). In 1492, not only did Columbus sail the ocean blue, the last Emir of Granada surrendered his city to Columbus' patrons, Ferdinand and Isabella. The surrender was in January of that year, but Emir Muhammad XII may have remembered summers past in which he stood on a balcony of Alhambra and drank water chilled with snow from a mountain eighteen miles away, in the Sierra Nevada of Spain. (David 53). By a 1584 English account, the Sierras were "continually covered in snow." (54).

In the late-sixteenth century, "snow was in common use at the Court of Castille by their Majesties, the Princes and princesses, and all the great Nobles and Gentlemen and the common people who reside there." However, this was not then true in Seville, where Nicolas Monardes (1493
–
1588) penned his
Tratao de la Nieve y del Bever Frio
[
Treatise on Snow and Cold Drinks
] (1574).

The Iberian snow trade expanded, and snow was available in Seville, Valladolid, Toledo and Murcia by 1621. (David 53). In 1645, in Madrid, the right to sell snow was auctioned off.

France
. During the reign of Henry III (1560
–
74), the French "began decorating their tables with carved ice sculptures, serving dishes atop piles of snow, and putting ice in their drinks." (Qinzio x).

That ice had to come from somewhere, and, according to Monardes (1574), ice was transported 180 miles, from Flanders to Paris. If that's correct, then it presumably is ice cut from ponds or rivers, because Flanders (northern Belgium) isn't mountainous. But David (43) suggests that perhaps it came ultimately from the Ardennes mountains.

England
. It has been suggested that simple, unlined ice pits were used back in medieval times. The first documented icehouses in England were built by James I; at the Greenwich royal palace in 1619 and 1621, and at Hampton Court in 1625. (Durant 172).

The ice house constructed in 1660 by Charles II in Upper St. James (Green) Park inspired this 1661 verse by Edmund Waller.

"Yonder the harvest of cold months laid up,

Gives a fresh coolness to the royal cup,

There ice, like crystal, firm and never lost,

Tempers hot July with December’s frost"

Nonetheless, ice houses were a rarity in seventeenth-century England. According to David (xv), in seventeenth-century and even eighteenth-century England, "only the most wealthy could afford ice." David indicates that the ice houses were "expensive undertakings on account of the digging," but as we have seen, digging pits was hardly unusual. No doubt the brick added substantially to the cost.

In 1665, the Governor of Virginia, Sir William Berkeley, was granted "licence to gather, make and take snow and ice . . . and to preserve and keep the same in such pits, caves and cool places as he should think fit, saving the king's loving subjects liberty to make and preserve snow and ice necessary for their own proper use." (Visser 290). These pits, presumably, were the old-fashioned unlined pits, and thus cheaper.

Denmark
. Frederick II had an ice-house at Elsinore; on a 1580 map, it looks rather like a tepee. (David plate 2). It was stocked with ice as early as 1564, and in that year, the crown engaged carpenters to make "ice-coffins." (284).

Russia
. It might not seem that Russians had much reason to store ice, but in the 1830s, Georg Kohl said that "their short but amazingly hot summer would render it difficult to keep all those kinds of provisions which are liable to spoil, if their winter did not afford them the means of preventing the decomposition accelerated by heat." The first documented use of the term
lednik
(ice-house) was in 1482. (Molokhovets 41). In the sixteenth century, fish were salted, smoked or packed in ice. (Smith 10). A 1646 report on flood damage to a drink shop at Velikie Luki on the Lovat said that "the water poured over the ice-house and froze. . . ." (Smith 146). In the 1660s, "the Russian Tsar had fifteen ice cellars for storing meat and fish and more than thirty cellars for storing drinks"; the ice was changed each March. (Molokhovets 41). The archbishop's palace also had an ice-cellar; in the attempted robbery of the church treasury in 1663, the thieves "had already broken a tunnel through the floor from the ice cellar into the palace." (Michels 97).

Adam Olearus—who has appeared in 1632 universe canon—wrote in 1656 that the Russians "prepare ice-cellars, in the bottom of which they place snow and ice, and above that a row of kegs, then another layer of snow, and again kegs, and so forth. Over the top they lay straw and boards, since the cellar has no roof. Thus they . . . may have fresh and delicious beer throughout the summer—which is quite hot." (Tatlock 32).

In the nineteenth century, there was a small export trade in frozen fish. "Perch would be sent from Tsaritsyn or Uralsk to Berlin and Vienna in wooden boxes with handles, packed between layers of straw and ice." (Smith 270). Of fish exported from Astrakhan in 1897, 11% were frozen or packed in ice. (272).

Elsewhere in Europe
. Monardes says that ice was also available in the Germanies, Hungary, and Bohemia.

However, despite all this interest in snow and ice, the fact remained that it was an essentially local trade. It was not until the nineteenth century that means were devised for routinely shipping ice across great distances.

Pre-RoF Freezing Methods

Natural ice is great for cooling down drinks, but it won't freeze them. For that, you need some sort of artificial refrigeration.

The Huston article said that Thomas Cullen's process was the "first refrigeration," by which he meant, the first artificial method of freezing a liquid. Evaporating water was absorbed by sulfuric acid, which meant that more water could evaporate. Evaporating requires heat and the heat came from the remaining water. However, there were chemical freezing methods known before Cullen, and indeed before the RoF.

In Bengal, the temperatures usually don't go below freezing, so they couldn't make ice by the Persian method. Prior to 1586, ice for Akbar's table was made by mixing Bengali saltpeter (potassium nitrate) with water. (David 246).

This works because potassium nitrate has a large positive heat (enthalpy) of solution (8,340 cals/mole, CRC 69th D122), meaning that it needs energy to dissolve ("endothermic solvation"). The heat has to come from somewhere, and so the salt takes it from the water. Common salt also has a positive heat of solution, but it's very small: 928 cals/mole.

Now, an important point: You aren't putting the saltpeter into the water that you're trying to freeze. Rather, you have a vessel within a vessel, one containing the water to be frozen and the other the freezing mixture. The temperature of the latter will drop, thanks to endothermic solvation, but it doesn't freeze itself because the salt also depressed the freezing point.

Giambattista della Porta of Naples, in the "cooking" section of his
Magia Naturalis
(1589), explained how wine could be frozen: "Put Wine into a Vial, and put a little water to it, that it may turn to ice the sooner. Then cast snow into a wooden vessel, and strew into it Saltpeter, powdered, or the cleansing of Saltpeter, called vulgarly Salazzo. Turn the Vial in the snow, and it will congeal by degrees. . . ."

Cornelius Drebbel, at the court of James I of England, demonstrated chemical freezing in 1620. The same year, Francis Bacon, in Novum Organum, wrote that "nitre or salt when added to snow or ice intensifies the cold of the latter. . . ."

The
Machinery's Handbook
has a table of freezing mixtures (24th, 2442) featuring combinations of snow or water with common salt, calcium chloride, ammonium chloride (3533 cals/mole), ammonium nitrate (6140) or potassium hydrate (
sic
, exothermic!), and stating the resulting temperature change. EB11/Calcium says that "a temperature of -55
^o
C is obtained by mixing 10 parts of the hexahydrate with 7 parts of snow." It's only the hexahydrate that dissolves endothermically; anhydrous calcium choride releases heat when it dissolves. (Cal-chlor). A calcium chloride brine can be cooled down (mechanically, or by being outdoors in a cold enough clime) to temperatures cold enough to "flash freeze" food. (Shephard 305, 2002EBCD/"food presrvation").

Some old encyclopedias (e.g.,) have articles on "freezing mixtures"; New International Encyclopedia (1903) adds ammonium sulfocyanate (5400), ammonium nitrate, potassium sulphocyanate (5790), and sodium nitrate (4900) to our potential salts.

THE LONG-DISTANCE ICE TRADE

Sources of Ice

A square mile (640 acres) of ice, 12 inches thick, weighs 700,000 tons (Hall 1), and Thoreau was told that one acre of Walden Pond ice yielded 1,000 tons. So finding ice, per se, isn't difficult (if you're in high enough latitudes or altitudes for water to freeze), it's finding ice that's convenient to transport to consumers and yet is unpolluted.

The principal sources of ice were lakes and rivers. Ice is opaque if it contains many air bubbles, which scatter light, and porous ice melts more rapidly. So, as our characters will learn, they should prefer clear ice. As a result, they will prefer a deep, gentle river to a lake, and a deep lake to a shallow one; the current and the depth tend to result in a lower air content. (Hall 8). A strong current inhibits ice formation, however.