demand for English coal was growing at breakneck speed. The trouble was that the bigger the industry grew, the deeper the operators had to dig in search of larger coal seams. And the farther each shaft punched into the ground, the more each mine filled with water. Enter a blacksmith from Dartmouth named Thomas Newcomen, who came up with a way to use the forces of nature to solve the drainage problem. By burning coal, Newcomen used steam pressure built up in a boiler to power a piston. The piston, in turn, drove a pump that drainedwater from coal mines, allowing them to operate far more cheaply and efficiently. Author Bill McKibben estimates that Newcomen’s engine replaced the equivalent of a team of five hundred horses walking in a circle. The steam engine changed the whole energy equation forever; humans were freed from depending upon their puny muscles or the brawn of horses, oxen and other animals. Now they could use the pent-up energy buried underground to do the work for them.
In 1763 a Scotsman named James Watt went one step further, adding a separate cooling chamber to the machine. His innovation reduced the loss of heat and improved efficiency to the point where his steam engine could be applied to all kinds of industries. An old agrarian world based on manual labour and life on the farm was being replaced by one dominated by industry, machines and life in cities. Coal—which replaced the limited power of human and animal sweat and muscle with the unrelenting potency of soulless machinery—was the raw material that fired the transformation. Coal-fired boilers fired the factories and mills that turned out finished products, and ran the locomotives and steamships that widened the market for those manufactured goods. Coal, it was discovered, also had other uses. For centuries, the British had converted their iron ores to pig iron and steel by heating the raw material with charcoal, made from trees. By the mid-eighteenth century, the nation’s timber supply was failing. Coke, formed by baking coal until the impurities burned off, turned out to be a better, cheaper fuel for iron-ore smelting anyway.
Without coal, in other words, no clouds of smoke forever billowing from the ironworks and smelters of the Western Midlands—the Black Country. No Lancashire and Yorkshire terrifyingly transformed into the world’s greatest textile centres. No canals, roads and rail lines hacked out of the terrain.
All of which made coal-mining’s lack of progress in Cape Breton even more puzzling. The steady procession of names on the leases continued. In 1820, the year that the British Colonial Office reannexed Cape Breton to Nova Scotia, the leaseholders of the day managed to sell less than ten thousand tons of coal, marginally more than their predecessors had sold twenty years earlier. For an island within striking distance of the fast-expanding cities of the eastern United States, that was a startlingly meagre amount. Some of the reasons were obvious. Bootleg coal stolen with picks and shovels from Cape Breton’s uninhabited coastal cliffs ate into commercial production. According to historians of the day, the Nova Scotian product was sent to market in such poor condition that it couldn’t compete against English coal. Economics also conspired against the leaseholders: wages, which accounted for 80 percent of costs, were thought to be breathtakingly high. The shortage of return freight ratcheted up the price of shipping. That left the Cape Breton mine owners relying on local demand in Halifax, which consumed about three-quarters of output, and St. John’s, which took the rest. Even then the high price of Cape Breton coal made it barely competitive against British coal shipped to North America as ballast.
As the new century dawned, the administration’s approach—short-term leases coupled with exorbitant royalties—was as myopic as ever. “It could not be expected,” Richard Brown wrote half a century later, “that men of
In 1763 a Scotsman named James Watt went one step further, adding a separate cooling chamber to the machine. His innovation reduced the loss of heat and improved efficiency to the point where his steam engine could be applied to all kinds of industries. An old agrarian world based on manual labour and life on the farm was being replaced by one dominated by industry, machines and life in cities. Coal—which replaced the limited power of human and animal sweat and muscle with the unrelenting potency of soulless machinery—was the raw material that fired the transformation. Coal-fired boilers fired the factories and mills that turned out finished products, and ran the locomotives and steamships that widened the market for those manufactured goods. Coal, it was discovered, also had other uses. For centuries, the British had converted their iron ores to pig iron and steel by heating the raw material with charcoal, made from trees. By the mid-eighteenth century, the nation’s timber supply was failing. Coke, formed by baking coal until the impurities burned off, turned out to be a better, cheaper fuel for iron-ore smelting anyway.
Without coal, in other words, no clouds of smoke forever billowing from the ironworks and smelters of the Western Midlands—the Black Country. No Lancashire and Yorkshire terrifyingly transformed into the world’s greatest textile centres. No canals, roads and rail lines hacked out of the terrain.
All of which made coal-mining’s lack of progress in Cape Breton even more puzzling. The steady procession of names on the leases continued. In 1820, the year that the British Colonial Office reannexed Cape Breton to Nova Scotia, the leaseholders of the day managed to sell less than ten thousand tons of coal, marginally more than their predecessors had sold twenty years earlier. For an island within striking distance of the fast-expanding cities of the eastern United States, that was a startlingly meagre amount. Some of the reasons were obvious. Bootleg coal stolen with picks and shovels from Cape Breton’s uninhabited coastal cliffs ate into commercial production. According to historians of the day, the Nova Scotian product was sent to market in such poor condition that it couldn’t compete against English coal. Economics also conspired against the leaseholders: wages, which accounted for 80 percent of costs, were thought to be breathtakingly high. The shortage of return freight ratcheted up the price of shipping. That left the Cape Breton mine owners relying on local demand in Halifax, which consumed about three-quarters of output, and St. John’s, which took the rest. Even then the high price of Cape Breton coal made it barely competitive against British coal shipped to North America as ballast.
As the new century dawned, the administration’s approach—short-term leases coupled with exorbitant royalties—was as myopic as ever. “It could not be expected,” Richard Brown wrote half a century later, “that men of
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