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 andto 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.
This wasn’t the case in the coalfields of England, where something truly transformative was taking place. The country’s coal operators faced a perplexing problem:
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 andto 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.
This wasn’t the case in the coalfields of England, where something truly transformative was taking place. The country’s coal operators faced a perplexing problem:
Similar Books
Behind the Yellow Tape: On the Road With Some of America's Hardest Working Crime Scene Investigators
Jarrett Hallcox, Amy Welch
