Free Coal Black Heart by John Demont Page B

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 beautifulplace: 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.
    The miners hacked the coal out of the seam with picks and wedges. Then it was dumped into two-bushel tubs and hauled over a narrow log roadway “by strong-active young men” who were paid by the tub. At the bottom of the shaft the coal was emptied into a larger tub, which was hauled the ninety feet to the surface. There it was emptied into a hopper and discharged into twelve-bushel carts. If a ship happened to be at the local wharf, the carts were driven along a narrow road to dockside for loading. If no vessel was around—or during the long winter months—the coal was simply dumped at the wharf in a big heap.
    By then, eighty to ninety men worked the Sydney Mines. Most were young and Irish—many of them veterans of the Newfoundland cod fisheries. To a man they were footloose, itinerant and, to Brown’s eye, frighteningly unskilled. “All that had been done was worse than useless as the property, instead of being improved, was seriously damaged,” Brown wrote, perhaps self-servingly, years later, about the scene when he arrived. “About seventy-five acres of the main seam had been worked out, leaving the pillars behind, which, owing to the settling of the roof could not be recovered. To show the wasteful, reckless way in which the works had been conducted, it need only be stated that from seventy-five acres of a six-foot-seam, which ought at least to have yielded 500,000, only 275,000 tons had been raised since the mine was commenced in 1785.”
    Brown held the miners in low esteem. Their