Coal Black Heart by John Demont Read Free Book Online

place called Springhill,” where the coal is “of good quality” but the field’s great distance from water meant it would be “waiting for their full development till railways extend across the country, or til domestic manufacturers demand supplies of mineral within the province.” Back to Pictou County, near hisboyhood home, he encountered a relatively small field—Albion Mines—boasting seams of unimaginable diameter.
    For years he kept at it, fitting the mapping and surveying in between his important day jobs. Nights he hauled himself back to wherever he was staying and made notes in his elegant hand, sketching whole sections of rock, cliff and terrain with draftsmanship as precise as the drawings of a Renaissance understudy. He approached the job with the eye of a scientist but a poet’s romantic heart. “Acadia … signifies primarily a place or region,” he wrote in his monumental 1855 opus
Acadian Geology,
which stood for more than a century as the best survey of the geology of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, “and, in combination with other words, a place of plenty or abundance.”
    Dawson was blunt about what he saw: “the Great Britain of Eastern America,” an area with abundant resources that “must necessarily render them more wealthy and populous than any area of the same extent on the Atlantic coast, from the Bay of Fundy to the Gulf of Mexico, or in the St. Lawrence valley, from the sea to the head of the great lakes.” I imagine him writing those words: the optimism, the excitement, the leap of faith and imagination. I am standing on a beach where the bones of the earth show through, a long time later. It’s crazy, I know, but his words thrill me even now.

CHAPTER TWO
Beneath the Golden Salmon
    I recollect seeing coal before I knew what it was: thick ebony chunks of rock near the cellar chute in my grandparents’ backyard on York Street, in Glace Bay. I went digging there one day with a child’s undeniable purpose; someone had told me that when they were kids my father and his brothers used to sometimes bury swordfish bills in the backyard. They would wait long enough for them to be picked clean by insects, dig them up, then brandish the skeletal remains like rapiers as they ran down the block past the miners’ homes, playing at Zorro. Mabel and Clarie Demont’s yard, I seem to recall, was lousy with the rock, making it hard slogging for a little kid with a plastic shovel. I imagine that, being a lazy boy at heart, I must have taken an immediate dislike to it—until, I guess, somebody around there set me straight.
    I didn’t know then that coal was a miracle for those who knew how to use it. That scholars think the first indisputable use of coal was for cremation in Bronze Age South Wales, or that, from the remains of Roman coal-fuelled fires along Hadrian’s Wall, we understand that coal has been used in Europe on a small scale for thousands of years. European coal use seems to have disappearedfor hundreds of years after the fall of the Roman Empire, until somehow, as the Middle Ages approached, it was rediscovered; the Venetian traveller Marco Polo marvelled at “stones that burn like logs” when he visited the court of the great Kublai Khan in the thirteenth century. Around then—after hundreds of years of being harvested from the surface by peasants looking to heat their hovels—coal began to be used commercially in Europe, to fuel blacksmith forges and for other metalworking. Liège in Belgium and Newcastle in England became some of the first coal centres. Because of its bulk and the high costs of transportation, coal was first only used in the area around where it was mined. But by the mid-1200s, it was being transported via sea the three hundred miles from Newcastle—home to England’s most important seams—to London.
    Coal was in such demand because other fuels were running out. As England’s advancing population colonized and cultivated vast tracts