1831.] 
making Ice at Hooghly . 
19 
About a mile from tlie river, and nearly twice as far from tlie new Gk&t, you 
suddenly quit the dense border of trees which cluster among the native houses, and 
arrive upon an open plain which, in the rainy season, is covered with paddy cul- 
tivation. At a short distance from the opening, on either side of the road, are the 
first ice fields : the rest are all situated within a few hundred yards. The beds I 
examined were on the left, or east side : they occupied about half the space between 
the road and a thick range of high trees, which intercepted the beams of the rising 
sun ; they consisted of four rectangular excavations, two feet deep, and 115 feet long, 
by 25 feet wide, parallel to the road on the shorter side. One of them, which was 
empty, appeared to have been recently cut ; the other three were filled with straw, 
which is put in very dry, to the depth of eighteen inches. Two of these were cover- 
ed with little circular round bottomed earthen pans, of 9 inches diameter, an inch and 
three-eighths deep, and a quarter of an inch thick : I give the dimensions of one I 
measured as that of the whole, there being very little difference of size : they were 
just such as are commonly used in the bazar, for musters of grain. The pans were 
all placed touching each other, in rows of 150 by 32, so as to cover as much of the beds 
as possible ; but as the wind had been southerly the evening before, (on the 16th 
January,) no ice was expected, although the sky was cloudless, and they had conse- 
quently been suffered to remain without water. In one or two pans, however, which 
accidentally contained a little, there was a slight crust of ice at 7 a. m. of the 1/th, 
and I found the temperature of the dry pans only 35, tried by a very small thermo- 
meter left some minutes in one of them, while that of the air, four or five feet above 
them, was 52. The pans belonging to the third bed were standing on end, resting 
against each other in a row on each side, ready for use. When laid out upon the straw, 
they are fed with water, by a small earthen vessel, tied at the end of a bamboo, about 
14 feet long, by which the most distant pans may be reached without stepping upon 
the bed; and on each side is a row of about 20 large gamlahs, fixed in the ground, 
and kept full of water ; a span of 6 or 7 feet is left between the beds for the people 
to pass freely, and to allow room for the gamlahs, &c. 
The collection of the ice from each bed, of 4,800 pans, occupies ten men for two 
hours, beginning at daylight. Every pan is lifted, and its entire contents are quick- 
ly scooped out with a small iron trowel, shaped like a sickle, into a wide mouthed 
gumlah, which is occasionally emptied into a mat basket, whereby the water is drain- 
ed off, and the ice is carried to the first reservoir. This consists of a hole in the 
earth, from 34 to 4 feet deep, and 4 or 5 feet in diameter, lined with dry whisps of 
straw, and matted within and above the straw. In a very cold night 10 maunds have 
been collected from one bed of 4800 pans — say from a surface of water of about 
2000 square feet, but sometimes the quantity does not exceed half a maund. The 
selling price on the spot is 12 Rupees per maund. The best freezing month is 
December, and the next best is January : November is more productive than Febru- 
ary, which has seldom more than three or four collecting nights ; but both these 
months yield very little. Perhaps a season may reckon 50 freezing nights in the 
whole. 
The ice preserves, or ice houses, are on the same principle as the reservoir above 
described, but larger. It is daily brought from the several works to the principal 
dealer, a native who has four large reservoirs on the right ot the road, opposite to 
the works I have described. Three of them were 12 to 15 feet in diameter, and 10 
feet deep, including 3 feet of raised earth, and contained between six and seven hun- 
dred maunds of ice altogether. The fourth was of much larger dimensions, and had 
alone contained 1200 maunds last year, but it was now empty. In one of the first 
three, which was not full, I examined the state of the ice ; it had been beaten down, 
