Did people living in the tropics never see ice before there were refrigerators?

In the 1820s, Tudor's icehouses were spread across the southern United States, filled with frozen water from New England. By the 1830s, his merchant ships traveled as far as Rio and Bombay. (India ultimately proved to be Tudor's most profitable market.) By his death in 1864, Tudor had amassed a fortune worth more than $200 million today. Two-thirds of New York households order ice daily. In less than a century, ice has gone from rare treasure to luxury item to necessity. The use of ice for refrigeration changed the landscape of the United States, and nowhere more so than in Chicago. Its strategic location made the city a transportation hub, transporting wheat from the fertile plains to the population centers of the northeast. However, meat spoilage cannot be avoided during transportation. After a century of development, a serious imbalance between supply and demand emerged between the material-poor Northeast and the livestock-rich Midwest. In the 1840s and 1850s, immigration caused the population of New York and Philadelphia to explode, and the local beef supply could not meet the rising demand. At the same time, the United States' reclamation of the Great Plains left ranchers with huge herds of cattle but no corresponding number of consumers. It was the ice that found a way out for people and finally broke the deadlock.