Coal Black Heart (7 page)

There was no denying that the arrangement started poorly. The GMA had been misinformed; they expected to find veins of copper, since Nova Scotia’s soil was supposed to teem with it. In 1825 they sent out a Cornish mining engineer named Blackwell to tally up the vast colonial riches. He spent a summer considering every known copper deposit in the province. According to Brown, he found small pieces in the igneous trap rocks in the Bay of Fundy
and some “trifling deposits” in the harder sand stones on the shores of the Northumberland Strait—never enough, though, to be worth the expense and bother of extraction. His message for the bosses back in London was clear: forget about copper. Focus on coal. Coal, by God, that was the future.

A Ponderous Pyramid of Ruins

L
oaded to the gunwales with mining machinery, supplies and equipment, the brig
Margaret Pilkington
entered Pictou Harbour on June 4, 1822. Her deck was a sea of dark wool greatcoats and pale whiskered faces. Among the hundred colliers and their family members arriving from the north of England one man, by dress and demeanour, would have stood out from the others. A painting presumably done during Richard Smith’s thirteen-year tenure as “general mine superintendent for Messrs. Rundell, Bridge, and Rundell of Ludgate Hill, in the City of London” shows a balding man with a fringe of white hair fashioned into a whirling comb-over. Thin lips, an elegantly formed nose festooned with a spiderweb of broken blood vessels, an old man’s sunken cheeks even though he was at most in his early fifties. The eyes get you: slightly bored, condescending maybe—as if it’s all beneath him—which seems about right for the scion of a prominent Staffordshire coal-steel family with something still to prove. Smith, who could trace his ancestry to a courtier in William of Normandy’s entourage, said he knew about coal “from my youth
upwards.” That didn’t stop him from going broke when the coal and iron boom collapsed at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Smith rebuilt his reputation by managing mines in Wales and Portugal. At forty-four, he still had enough fire in his belly to accept when the GMA asked him to help establish their coal-mining operations in Nova Scotia.

There, he supervised the assembly of Nova Scotia’s first steam engine—with pump, hoisting drum and chain and a boiler—at John MacKay’s blacksmith shop in Pictou. Once complete, it was thrown into the harbour, where, to the astonishment of all, it floated rather than sank. From there it was towed seven miles up the East River, an apparition on the black waters, until it reached the spot where the GMA would create the colony of Albion Mines—named, Cameron writes, after the ancient name for Great Britain, Allbyn.

Smith had hardly arrived before petitioning Lieutenant Governor James Kempt for the eviction of settlers who lived on land atop or adjacent to the outcrop of coal. Within days of the
Margaret Pilkington’s
arrival his men were sinking a new pit, the Storr, into the Foord seam; three months later the GMA had its first shipment of coal. Smith described the gas he discovered in the seams as “abundant, almost beyond precedent” and the water as “exceedingly troublesome.” With his employers’ blessing, he forged ahead anyway, using the steam engine instead of the usual horses to pump water out of the mine and to hoist coal to the surface. Under Smith’s direction the men built the first steamship in Nova Scotia, using an engine built in the GMA’s own foundry. They built coke ovens, brickworks, mills, carpenter’s shops and a foundry, run by imported British foundry men. They made wharves, railways and roads. They erected houses for the workingmen, barns and stables for the horses.

Smith was bringing the same forces that were transforming England to the backwaters of Nova Scotia. In that way, the coming of the GMA was rather like the arrival of the banana company in Macondo, the jungle town in Gabriel Garcìa Márquez’s
One Hundred Years of Solitude:
“Endowed with means that had been preserved for Divine Providence in former times they [the company] changed the pattern of the rains, accelerated the cycle of harvests and moved the river from where it had always been.” In time, coal provided cargo for the wooden ships built in Pictou County. The ensuing decades brought heavy industries—machine shops, bridge and structural steelworks, factories that manufactured mining machinery, heavy wagons and trucks, marine and stationary motors, glass products, marble and granite. For a time, as the twentieth century dawned, Pictou County was one of the steelmaking capitals of Canada.

The natives—like newspaperman Joseph Howe, who visited the Albion Mines in 1830—were left gape-mouthed by what they beheld: the store “in which is kept a more various and extensive stock of goods than is to be found in any mercantile Establishment in the country;” the foundry, which resembled a “Vulcan’s workshop” in which “the swarthy artisans are busied adding link to link, and fashioning, by the cunning of their hands and the sweat of their brows those mighty chains to which the ship of some ‘great admiral’ may be indebted for her safety.” Most of all, by the pits themselves, which, once entered, make a visitor feel like “Captain Symmes traveling through the opening at the Poles.” Inside, a visitor would encounter “a lot of Beings, looking more like Demons than men” the lamps on their cap making them appear “like the Cyclops, who has but one glaring eye in his forehead.” From head to toe, he went on to write, “these people are covered with coal dust, which mixing with the perspiration drawn out by their hard toils, gives their features a singular and rather melodramatic expression.”

Howe’s stomach fluttered during the descent into the pit. “Are we blown to a thousand atoms?” he wrote. “Are we suffocated by sulphur and fire damp? Are we not lying, like an Egyptian Mummy, beneath a ponderous pyramid of ruins?”

Smith watched the early days of this metamorphosis unfold from the comfort of Mount Rundell. The man who would become his chief lieutenant in Cape Breton, on the other hand, began his tour of duty in an old framed house—“perfectly innocent of paint”—built over some mine workings that had settled and thrown the floor so far out of whack that one side of the sitting room was two feet below the other. His name was Richard Brown. When he arrived at the Sydney Mines in 1826, the conditions must have seemed squalid to someone with a grammar school education who had grown up on a viscount’s estate. The four hundred acres of land belonging to the mines had fallen into neglect. The roads were “scarcely passable,” he later wrote; before 1830 the only means of transportation was by foot on paths through the woods. There wasn’t a single school. The only place of worship: a small Roman Catholic chapel where the priest from Sydney officiated “once, or perhaps twice, in the course of a year.”

Brown was there to work, not to seek redemption. I’ve been able to find only a single drawing of “Lt.-Col. Richard Brown, ‘F.G.S., F.R.G.S.’” In it he wears a dark coat, patterned bow tie and white, stiff, high-collared shirt. He is seated, looking off to his right, holding some sort of document in his left hand, his right hanging nonchalantly off the back of his chair. There’s a touch of Captain Ahab to that hooked nose, lank swept-back hair, thin lips and haunted stare. He had a hunger that even developing and running the most productive coalfields in the British colonies couldn’t fill.

In his spare time he scoured the island’s cliffs and outcroppings and wrote the definitive book on Cape Breton’s coalfields—along with an authoritative history of the island, which he illustrated with hand-drawn pencil sketches that historians and geologists were still marvelling over a century later. He was a self-taught paleobotanist—someone who uses fossilized plant remains to reconstruct bygone environments—before anyone had coined a word for the specialty. He was visionary enough, as the
Canadian Mining Journal
put it, to be the first person to “see and appreciate the value of the Island’s under sea [sic] coal measures,” which account for about 98 percent of Cape Breton’s coal seams.

Back in 1826, though, he was just a green kid from Westmoreland, in the Lake District of England. His father was a bailiff to a viscount who owned, among other things, coal mines. There, Brown trained as a mining engineer. It was under the nobleman’s aegis that he left for Canada, at the age of twenty-one, to “survey and report upon the coal fields of Nova Scotia and Cape Breton.” Landing in Nova Scotia, he discovered something alarming: the best seams in the Pictou and Sydney coalfields—in other words, the best seams in the whole empire—were already under charter to others, and therefore exempt from the Duke of York’s lease.

He needn’t have worried. George Smith and William Liddell, the owners of the other Pictou County leases said their small mines were no match for the “superior skills and capital of his royal highness’ sub-lessees.” Then there were the favourable terms the GMA squeezed out of the colonial government. Comparisons are hard, because a single standardized unit of coal measure was not yet the norm in the early nineteenth century. But economic historian Marilyn Gerriets found a way to consider how the GMA deal stacked up against a five-year lease three men named Bowen struck in 1822 to develop the Sydney coal mines. The royalty they paid—seven shillings
sixpence per Winchester chaldron (thirty-six bushels)—was more than seven times the royalty paid by the GMA, which by 1828 controlled most of the coalfields in Nova Scotia.

It’s easy to look at things two centuries later and say the government gave way too much and got too little in return. Consider, though, the backdrop. At the start of the nineteenth century, Cape Breton was thinly settled—with an estimated 2,500 inhabitants—extensively forested and economically underdeveloped. Most of the non-indigenous people—Acadians, United Empire Loyalists, Newfoundland Irish and some Gaelic-speaking Scots—lived along the coast and worked in the cod fishery. The arable land in the interior remained pristine, almost untouched. Then, in 1802, the first shipload of ragged settlers from the Western Highlands and islands of Scotland made land. At that point the infamous Highland clearances—in which tens of thousands of men, women and children were evicted from their homes to make room for large-scale sheep farming—were over. The peripheries of Scotland, where most people now lived as subsistence farmers on the estates of a few clan chieftains, were still undergoing wrenching change. Many tenant farmers emigrated, hoping to recreate overseas something of the life that was dying in Scotland. Some of them were so destitute that their Scottish landlords cancelled their rents and debts and even paid their way, just to free up the land.

The exodus from the outer islands was almost biblical in scope. Historian Stephen Hornsby has written that at the peak of the migration, during the late 1820s and early 1830s, more Highland Scots were moving to Cape Breton than anywhere else in North America. By his estimation, some 20,000 Highlanders, many of them speaking exclusively Gaelic, moved there before the influx
petered out in the 1840s. By the time Brown arrived, Scots were in the majority. Half a century later, nearly two-thirds of Cape Breton’s 75,000 people were of Scottish origin. “In large part,” Hornsby writes, “Cape Breton had become a Scottish island.”

Let us for a moment imagine one of them, Alexander Beaton—originally from the Isle of Skye—standing on deck in his sackcloth and baggy trousers with his wife, Mary, and his five children (Anne, Ket, Donald, Isobel and John) as their ship approaches the Cape Breton coastline in 1830. From there they can see the slate-grey sky, the rocky headlands, the impenetrable forest. The ship will have been overcrowded, underprovisioned and unsanitary, with smallpox and “ship fever,” or typhus, taking their toll.

The passengers had no choice; no longer needed back in Scotland, they are among the first of Great Britain’s rural poor to be “shovelled out” to the new world, in the memorable phrase of one writer at the time. Most of them arrived destitute, with barely the clothes on their backs. Some of them were supported by friends and relatives, others by government relief. The government was spending so much on immigrant aid that in 1832 it instituted a head tax, to get some of its money back and slow the flow of newcomers to Nova Scotia. That just made the poverty worse. Arguing for the repeal of the tax, one Cape Breton member of the provincial House of Assembly declared that he had seen “the bedding sold from under a poor woman, to raise the money to pay back [to] the shipmaster the amount of that tax—and he has seen poor children begging through the streets of Sydney for the means of paying that exaction to which they become liable, by venturing from one part of the Empire to another.”

It would be nice to say that all the hardship was worth it. Cape Breton in 1827 was a wild, foreboding, yet heart-stoppingly beautiful
place: rough, glaciated uplands from the old Appalachian mountain range, gently rolling lowlands covered with thick layers of boulder clay and pockmarked by glaciated lakes, everything else blanketed by a sea of coniferous and deciduous forest. The first settlers got the few good patches of farmland. Later arrivals were forced onto the uplands, where they struggled to cobble together a bare existence as best they could, working part-time as wage labour on someone else’s farm or crewing on a cod schooner. Abraham Gesner estimated that most of the 1,500 people who arrived in Cape Breton in 1842 ended up as squatters on private property and, when they were kicked out, simply wandered elsewhere.

Sometimes they even took work in the Cape Breton mines. Not that there was a lot of that in 1827. The earliest mines in the area—the French at Port Morien, the English at Burnt Head, the mine at Sydney Mines opened by Governor DesBarres in 1784—consisted of adits, levels driven horizontally into the coal seams. The operators of Sydney Mines couldn’t afford a steam engine to drain the mine. Rather than dig deeper, they moved westward, sinking shallow shafts every two hundred metres or so for ventilation and to haul up the coal. When Brown arrived there were six to ten of those shafts, the deepest about thirty metres.