Coal Black Heart by John Demont Read Free Book Online Page A

of the country, the forests, marshes and moors disappeared at a startling rate. As wood became scarcer, demand for coal increased. So did supply, once Henry VIII decided, in 1527, to end his marriage to Catherine of Aragon because she couldn’t provide him with a male heir. When Pope Clement VII refused to grant him an annulment, Henry broke with Rome. According to Barbara Freese, that “led to one of the greatest property shifts in English history.” Many of the richest coal mines in England suddenly became the property of the Crown. It auctioned off the land. The mines ended up in the hands of profit-driven merchants and gentry.
    By then, the downside of coal was already becoming evident in cities like London, which lay enshrouded in a cloud of choking black smoke and fumes. By the start of the fourteenth century men were refusing to work at night because of pollution from the coal fires, and a royal proclamation forbade the use of coal in lime kilnsin parts of South London. The proclamation was such an abject failure that instructions were given to punish offenders with fines for a first offence and to demolish their furnaces for a second. Yet, as we will repeatedly see, economics almost always trumped all other concerns when it came to coal. As the British Empire gathered momentum, more and more landowners were cutting down woodlands to make room for sheep. By the sixteenth century the iron industry was consuming vast amounts of charcoal, using up even more of the English forests. As the century closed, England had only one option if it hoped to conserve its remaining forests. The coal age, officially, had dawned.
    Which makes me wonder: how did they miss it? How did the coal plainly visible in Cape Breton’s cliffs, bays and headlands manage to escape the notice of the first Europeans who plied its waters? No mention from Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot), the Italian-born navigator who may have visited Cape Breton in 1497, claiming the land for England; not a peep, apparently, from the Breton fishermen who began arriving at the start of the sixteenth century; nary a word from João Alvares Fagundes, the Portuguese explorer who established a fishing colony with about two hundred settlers on the island’s northwestern peninsula around 1520. Captain Strong of the
Marigold,
who visited Cape Breton in 1593, went into excruciating detail about the island, including the various kinds of trees and even the small shrubs found there; except not a word about coal. Captain Leigh of the
Hopewell,
who arrived in 1597 and landed, “as he tells us, at five different places all in the middle of the Sydney Coal-field,” is equally silent on the subject. The famed explorer, navigator and geographer Samuel de Champlain circumnavigated the island in 1607; according to Richard Brown, he failedto “make the slightest allusion to the coal seams, although he notices such small matters as the abundance of oysters.”
    Sixty-five years later someone finally opened his eyes. Nicolas Denys, a restless merchant from Tours, France, who had been appointed governor of all of the eastern part of Acadia, received a concession from Louis XIV for the mineral rights of Cape Breton Island. “There are mines of coal through the whole extent of my concession, near the sea coast, of a quantity equal to the Scotch,” he wrote in the preface to
Description géographique et historique des Costs de L’Amérique Septentrionale,
published in Paris in 1672. Denys added, “At Baie Des Espagnols (Sydney) there is a mountain of very good coal, four leagues up the river” and “another near the little entrance of the Bras d’Or Lakes,” and also wrote that “at LeChadye on the north-west coast there is a small river suitable for chaloups, where there is a plentiful salmon fishery and a coal mine.”
    Denys, though, had one focus: establishing a thriving fur trade. During his long residence in Cape Breton he did nothing to exploit the coal seams. Neither did