Coal Black Heart by John Demont

unwillingness to properly differentiate between big and small coal, he said, was responsible for Cape Breton coal’s inability to make any headway in the United States market. As for the compensation arrangement, well, come on: “All the workmen of the establishment, consisting of overmen, mechanics, colliers, haulers and labourers, in addition to their wages, whether by the day or by contract, were allowed rations of beef, pork, bread and molasses, which were given out weekly. If a man was absent from his work, of course he had to pay for his rations; but whether a man worked faithfully or not he received the same allowances, thus placing the industrious and skilful men on the same level as the idle and ignorant.”
    Such, then, was the cushy life of Cape Breton coal miners in the early nineteenth century: the soot and damp, the back-breaking toil in pitch-black tunnels amidst rats and rockfalls. The workdays that began, whether on the surface or in the pit, at five a.m. and ran through to seven p.m., broken up by short breaks for breakfast and dinner, each meal punctuated by a glass of raw rum belted backbefore they picked up tools again. (For good measure, they received another dollop of spirits at quitting time.) Wages were doled out at two paydays per year: one for “four months’ men” on May 1, the other for “twelve months’ men” on December 31. There was no exchange of cash in Nova Scotia’s pioneer economy. Instead, anyone working in the mining industry, fisheries or shipbuilding depended upon merchant credit—an arrangement known as the truck system. But normally, there wasn’t much left after the men had settled up for their clothing, stores and rum.
    A lucky few lived in nearby cottages with their wives and kids or, if they were overmen or mechanics, in a log or sod hut. The rest of the men bunked down in one of the barracks or “cook-rooms” where they ate their meals, and slept in berths along the sides of the room. “It may easily be imagined what sort of a place the cook-room was, where forty men ate, slept and washed—when they did wash which was only once a week—in a single apartment,” wrote Brown.
    In winter it is true they had abundant means of making it warm enough, which is about all that can be said in its favour; in summer it became so very “lively” that most of the men preferred sleeping during the fine weather under the spruce trees in the vicinity. It could hardly be expected that either harmony or good order prevailed in two rooms occupied by eighty or ninety men under such conditions, where all were upon equal terms and free from restraint. Brawling and fighting seemed to be the order, or rather the disorder, of the day, from Monday until Saturday. Sunday being truly a day of rest, which, strange to say, was devoutly observed. The writer, who had the misfortune to occupy a house for more than twelve months about 100 yards from the cook-rooms, can testify that he rarely enjoyed an undisturbed night’s rest during the whole of that period.
    I can see him lying in his bed at night, thin mouth crinkling in disgust at the smells and sounds emanating from the bunkhouse next door, head spinning with what he’d accomplished that day—and everything that lay ahead. Brown had a 30-horsepower engine built to raise the coal to the surface, and another 20-horsepower model to pump water from the shaft. He erected new workshops, warehouses and barracks. Worried that an accident to the steam engines would shut down the whole operation, he had an iron foundry, with fitting shops, lathes and “everything necessary for repairing all kinds of mining machinery” built “as there was at that time no place, within a distance of 800 miles, where such repairs could be efficiently made.” Shiploads of skilled workmen and colliers arrived from England. A light temporary railroad materialized, from the pit to the old wharf. Small vessels continued to load at the old wharf; the larger ones were