Free Coal Black Heart by John Demont Page A

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 shillingssixpence 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 influxpetered 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