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

Jean Talon, the Intendant of New France, even after discovering good-quality coal in Cape Breton in 1670 and dispatching a functionary to inspect the seams. Yet coal’s value simply couldn’t be denied. Soon the French were using coal from Sydney Harbour to refine sugar in the West Indies and, perhaps as some sort of novelty, to fire the royal forges in France. By the early 1700s, both the French and their British rivals—mainly New England colonists who fished along the coast of Cape Breton in the summer—regularly stopped in Sydney. There they took loose coal from the base of the cliffs, or by cutting into the land with crowbars and shovels and loading the mineral directly onto their boats. In 1711 Rear Admiral Sir Hovenden Walker, commander of a British naval squadron, took refuge there after losing several ships and nearly a thousand men in a disastrous attemptto take Quebec. The coal reserves, he gushed, were “extraordinarily good here and taken out of the cliff with iron crow bars only, and no other labour.”
    Two years later Britain and France signed the Treaty of Utrecht, ending hostilities in Europe and America. Under the pact, France handed almost all of Acadia, the present-day Maritimes, over to England. It held onto only tiny Île Saint-Jean, later to become Prince Edward Island, and Île Royale—eventually known as Cape Breton—which suddenly became the key to French power in North America. The island had long been an integral part of a French cod fishery that stretched from the western shore of Newfoundland, around the Gulf of St. Lawrence and along the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia. In Cape Breton, fishing crews from France and the Basque region arrived every spring and built temporary bases for the summer cod industry. A sheltered, ice-free harbour on Île Royale’s south coast was the natural epicentre of France’s Grand Banks fishery. The Treaty of Utrecht gave the harbour even more strategic import; the French needed a North Atlantic trade hub linking France, North America and the West Indies, and a sentinel to guard the entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Quebec. They renamed the harbour Louisbourg, after the Sun King, made it the administrative headquarters for Île Royale and stationed soldiers there.
    In 1713, 150 French settlers arrived in Cape Breton from Placentia, Newfoundland, after Britain surrendered the south coast of that island to the English. Two years later Cape Breton’s civilian population had swollen to 700, and energetic entrepreneurs were setting up shops and trading with visiting ships. To survive, though, Louisbourg needed something else: walls to keep the marauding English out; big guns to train on attacking navies. “If France were to lose this island,” Louisbourg’s Governor Pontchartrain wrote in aletter to Versailles, “it would be irreparable; and as a result, it would be necessary to abandon the rest of North America.”
    Louis XIV took his point. The end result was the great fortress of Louisbourg, with its mortared walls surrounded by moats, its mammoth bastions laid out in a star shape to protect against land assault, its batteries to repulse warships attacking from the harbour side. To protect this precious little town, France erected the largest, most sophisticated fortifications North America had yet seen. Back in the 1960s, partly to create jobs for displaced Cape Breton coal miners, the Canadian government decided to rebuild one-fourth of the stone-walled town. Walking down those reconstructed streets past musket-carrying “French” lookouts with BAs in folklore demanding that visitors “
Arrête,
” you get a sense of what the town must have been like: the trading houses and wharves bustling with commerce generated by one of North America’s busiest seaports; the streets filled with soldiers and priests, merchants and tradesmen, privileged colony administrators and poor labourers indentured to service in the colony. A bustling, wide-open place