Coal Black Heart (5 page)

At some point Dawson made his way to the island’s southwest coast, where the coal seams spectacularly outcrop in the coastal cliffs. Near the Gaelic settlement of Mabou, the exposures rivalled the Joggins shore and the near-vertical position of the faults underscored the geological upheavals that had occurred there. Dawson explored the nearby Inverness field, where coal-bearing rocks occupy a land area of about nine square miles, along with the Mabou field, with its eight coal seams, just twenty-five kilometres away. In the seams near Port Hood he found sigillaria stumps that were almost as good as the ones found at Joggins.

In fits and starts he made his way through the coalfields of the mainland, to Joggins, where the seams rarely exceeded a metre in thickness and the coal itself contained troublesome amounts of sulphur and ash. Then to “a place called Springhill,” where the coal is “of good quality” but the field’s great distance from water meant it would be “waiting for their full development till railways extend across the country, or til domestic manufacturers demand supplies of mineral within the province.” Back to Pictou County, near his
boyhood home, he encountered a relatively small field—Albion Mines—boasting seams of unimaginable diameter.

For years he kept at it, fitting the mapping and surveying in between his important day jobs. Nights he hauled himself back to wherever he was staying and made notes in his elegant hand, sketching whole sections of rock, cliff and terrain with draftsmanship as precise as the drawings of a Renaissance understudy. He approached the job with the eye of a scientist but a poet’s romantic heart. “Acadia … signifies primarily a place or region,” he wrote in his monumental 1855 opus
Acadian Geology,
which stood for more than a century as the best survey of the geology of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, “and, in combination with other words, a place of plenty or abundance.”

Dawson was blunt about what he saw: “the Great Britain of Eastern America,” an area with abundant resources that “must necessarily render them more wealthy and populous than any area of the same extent on the Atlantic coast, from the Bay of Fundy to the Gulf of Mexico, or in the St. Lawrence valley, from the sea to the head of the great lakes.” I imagine him writing those words: the optimism, the excitement, the leap of faith and imagination. I am standing on a beach where the bones of the earth show through, a long time later. It’s crazy, I know, but his words thrill me even now.

Beneath the Golden Salmon

I
recollect seeing coal before I knew what it was: thick ebony chunks of rock near the cellar chute in my grandparents’ backyard on York Street, in Glace Bay. I went digging there one day with a child’s undeniable purpose; someone had told me that when they were kids my father and his brothers used to sometimes bury swordfish bills in the backyard. They would wait long enough for them to be picked clean by insects, dig them up, then brandish the skeletal remains like rapiers as they ran down the block past the miners’ homes, playing at Zorro. Mabel and Clarie Demont’s yard, I seem to recall, was lousy with the rock, making it hard slogging for a little kid with a plastic shovel. I imagine that, being a lazy boy at heart, I must have taken an immediate dislike to it—until, I guess, somebody around there set me straight.

I didn’t know then that coal was a miracle for those who knew how to use it. That scholars think the first indisputable use of coal was for cremation in Bronze Age South Wales, or that, from the remains of Roman coal-fuelled fires along Hadrian’s Wall, we understand that coal has been used in Europe on a small scale for thousands of years. European coal use seems to have disappeared
for hundreds of years after the fall of the Roman Empire, until somehow, as the Middle Ages approached, it was rediscovered; the Venetian traveller Marco Polo marvelled at “stones that burn like logs” when he visited the court of the great Kublai Khan in the thirteenth century. Around then—after hundreds of years of being harvested from the surface by peasants looking to heat their hovels—coal began to be used commercially in Europe, to fuel blacksmith forges and for other metalworking. Liège in Belgium and Newcastle in England became some of the first coal centres. Because of its bulk and the high costs of transportation, coal was first only used in the area around where it was mined. But by the mid-1200s, it was being transported via sea the three hundred miles from Newcastle—home to England’s most important seams—to London.

Coal was in such demand because other fuels were running out. As England’s advancing population colonized and cultivated vast tracts of the country, the forests, marshes and moors disappeared at a startling rate. As wood became scarcer, demand for coal increased. So did supply, once Henry VIII decided, in 1527, to end his marriage to Catherine of Aragon because she couldn’t provide him with a male heir. When Pope Clement VII refused to grant him an annulment, Henry broke with Rome. According to Barbara Freese, that “led to one of the greatest property shifts in English history.” Many of the richest coal mines in England suddenly became the property of the Crown. It auctioned off the land. The mines ended up in the hands of profit-driven merchants and gentry.

By then, the downside of coal was already becoming evident in cities like London, which lay enshrouded in a cloud of choking black smoke and fumes. By the start of the fourteenth century men were refusing to work at night because of pollution from the coal fires, and a royal proclamation forbade the use of coal in lime kilns
in parts of South London. The proclamation was such an abject failure that instructions were given to punish offenders with fines for a first offence and to demolish their furnaces for a second. Yet, as we will repeatedly see, economics almost always trumped all other concerns when it came to coal. As the British Empire gathered momentum, more and more landowners were cutting down woodlands to make room for sheep. By the sixteenth century the iron industry was consuming vast amounts of charcoal, using up even more of the English forests. As the century closed, England had only one option if it hoped to conserve its remaining forests. The coal age, officially, had dawned.

Which makes me wonder: how did they miss it? How did the coal plainly visible in Cape Breton’s cliffs, bays and headlands manage to escape the notice of the first Europeans who plied its waters? No mention from Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot), the Italian-born navigator who may have visited Cape Breton in 1497, claiming the land for England; not a peep, apparently, from the Breton fishermen who began arriving at the start of the sixteenth century; nary a word from João Alvares Fagundes, the Portuguese explorer who established a fishing colony with about two hundred settlers on the island’s northwestern peninsula around 1520. Captain Strong of the
Marigold,
who visited Cape Breton in 1593, went into excruciating detail about the island, including the various kinds of trees and even the small shrubs found there; except not a word about coal. Captain Leigh of the
Hopewell,
who arrived in 1597 and landed, “as he tells us, at five different places all in the middle of the Sydney Coal-field,” is equally silent on the subject. The famed explorer, navigator and geographer Samuel de Champlain circumnavigated the island in 1607; according to Richard Brown, he failed
to “make the slightest allusion to the coal seams, although he notices such small matters as the abundance of oysters.”

Sixty-five years later someone finally opened his eyes. Nicolas Denys, a restless merchant from Tours, France, who had been appointed governor of all of the eastern part of Acadia, received a concession from Louis XIV for the mineral rights of Cape Breton Island. “There are mines of coal through the whole extent of my concession, near the sea coast, of a quantity equal to the Scotch,” he wrote in the preface to
Description géographique et historique des Costs de L’Amérique Septentrionale,
published in Paris in 1672. Denys added, “At Baie Des Espagnols (Sydney) there is a mountain of very good coal, four leagues up the river” and “another near the little entrance of the Bras d’Or Lakes,” and also wrote that “at LeChadye on the north-west coast there is a small river suitable for chaloups, where there is a plentiful salmon fishery and a coal mine.”

Denys, though, had one focus: establishing a thriving fur trade. During his long residence in Cape Breton he did nothing to exploit the coal seams. Neither did Jean Talon, the Intendant of New France, even after discovering good-quality coal in Cape Breton in 1670 and dispatching a functionary to inspect the seams. Yet coal’s value simply couldn’t be denied. Soon the French were using coal from Sydney Harbour to refine sugar in the West Indies and, perhaps as some sort of novelty, to fire the royal forges in France. By the early 1700s, both the French and their British rivals—mainly New England colonists who fished along the coast of Cape Breton in the summer—regularly stopped in Sydney. There they took loose coal from the base of the cliffs, or by cutting into the land with crowbars and shovels and loading the mineral directly onto their boats. In 1711 Rear Admiral Sir Hovenden Walker, commander of a British naval squadron, took refuge there after losing several ships and nearly a thousand men in a disastrous attempt
to take Quebec. The coal reserves, he gushed, were “extraordinarily good here and taken out of the cliff with iron crow bars only, and no other labour.”

Two years later Britain and France signed the Treaty of Utrecht, ending hostilities in Europe and America. Under the pact, France handed almost all of Acadia, the present-day Maritimes, over to England. It held onto only tiny Île Saint-Jean, later to become Prince Edward Island, and Île Royale—eventually known as Cape Breton—which suddenly became the key to French power in North America. The island had long been an integral part of a French cod fishery that stretched from the western shore of Newfoundland, around the Gulf of St. Lawrence and along the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia. In Cape Breton, fishing crews from France and the Basque region arrived every spring and built temporary bases for the summer cod industry. A sheltered, ice-free harbour on Île Royale’s south coast was the natural epicentre of France’s Grand Banks fishery. The Treaty of Utrecht gave the harbour even more strategic import; the French needed a North Atlantic trade hub linking France, North America and the West Indies, and a sentinel to guard the entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Quebec. They renamed the harbour Louisbourg, after the Sun King, made it the administrative headquarters for Île Royale and stationed soldiers there.

In 1713, 150 French settlers arrived in Cape Breton from Placentia, Newfoundland, after Britain surrendered the south coast of that island to the English. Two years later Cape Breton’s civilian population had swollen to 700, and energetic entrepreneurs were setting up shops and trading with visiting ships. To survive, though, Louisbourg needed something else: walls to keep the marauding English out; big guns to train on attacking navies. “If France were to lose this island,” Louisbourg’s Governor Pontchartrain wrote in a
letter to Versailles, “it would be irreparable; and as a result, it would be necessary to abandon the rest of North America.”

Louis XIV took his point. The end result was the great fortress of Louisbourg, with its mortared walls surrounded by moats, its mammoth bastions laid out in a star shape to protect against land assault, its batteries to repulse warships attacking from the harbour side. To protect this precious little town, France erected the largest, most sophisticated fortifications North America had yet seen. Back in the 1960s, partly to create jobs for displaced Cape Breton coal miners, the Canadian government decided to rebuild one-fourth of the stone-walled town. Walking down those reconstructed streets past musket-carrying “French” lookouts with BAs in folklore demanding that visitors “
Arrête,
” you get a sense of what the town must have been like: the trading houses and wharves bustling with commerce generated by one of North America’s busiest seaports; the streets filled with soldiers and priests, merchants and tradesmen, privileged colony administrators and poor labourers indentured to service in the colony. A bustling, wide-open place full of drunken, brawling mercenaries, illicit traders willing to move anything that might turn a profit, and enough high-level corruption that, according to author Lesley Choyce, the fort’s finances were irreparably weakened by all the money skimmed off in various ways by local officials.

No wonder construction work on the fortress cost thirty million French livres, and led Louis XV to wonder aloud whether he would one day see Louisbourg rising over the western horizon from his palace at Versailles. In spite of enduring everything from smallpox epidemic to famine, Louisbourg was a construction boom town as much as a commercial hub. Wood was needed for buildings and
to fire ovens; stone for soldiers’ barracks, the governor’s apartment and the bakery and chapel. Wood and stone were easy to find. The coal to run the artillery forge to make ironwork for the cannon carriages proved a bit more difficult. The only known source was an outcrop at Cow Bay, a place that first appears on a 1580 map of the area, under the name Baie de Mordienne.

Port Morien, as it’s been rechristened, is now a pretty little fishing village a few kilometres from modern-day Sydney. On a 2007 visit I drove around for a bit with a retired RCMP officer who was busy trying to stop a plan to strip mine what’s left of the area’s coal seams. After a while he pulled his van off to the side of the road and walked over to a cairn bearing a modest plaque noting that
TWO THOUSAND FEET SOUTH EASTERLY FROM THIS PLACE ARE THE REMAINS OF THE FIRST REGULAR COAL MINING OPERATIONS IN AMERICA, ESTABLISHED BY THE FRENCH IN 1720
.

Otherwise not a single hint, to my eyes, that for decades soldiers dug into the exposed seams and moved the coal twenty kilometres south to where workmen were fortifying Louisbourg. Somewhere around here were the remnants of the first blockhouse, built by the French in 1725 to protect their valuable coal reserves. The French-English rivalry, after all, extended to the coal seams. Twenty years later the English began building their own blockhouse to protect the seams they were working at Burnt Head, farther up the coastline. That didn’t stop a raiding party of French soldiers and native warriors from seizing nine vessels and capturing nine British soldiers. The English forged on anyway, finishing the fortification and installing 148 officers and men to protect their vessels carrying coal between there and Louisbourg, which had been in English hands since 1745. In 1748 the fortress reverted to French control under the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. A decade later, Wolfe seized Louisbourg again for the English.

In 1784 Cape Breton—expected to be the destination of a massive influx of Loyalists following the American Revolution—became a separate colony and received imperial sanction to use the island’s coal to raise revenue. The colony’s first Lieutenant-Governor, J.F.W. DesBarres, opened a mine at the Sydney Main or Harbour seam. It was hardly an auspicious beginning; DesBarres’s selling price of eleven shillings and sixpence per ton meant he struggled to break even. His successors had an odd recipe for developing the coalfield: short-term leases in return for excessive royalties. In the decades to come, the leases changed hands at a wearisome pace: from Messrs Tremaine and Stout to William Campbell, the attorney general, John C. Ritchie, the superintendent of shipping, back to Campbell, then to two other fellows named Tremaine of Halifax who pulled out altogether after deciding the cost of extracting the coal was prohibitively high, back to Ritchie and someone named Timothy Leaver, before being assigned to G.W. Brown and J. Leaver until the lease expired in 1820. At that point the lease was taken up by two other Browns (T.S. and W.R.) They too didn’t make a cent.