(1,678 kb)
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The coal seams that stretch from the eastern shores of Nova Scotia for miles out under the Atlantic Ocean have drawn generations of Cape Bretoners to excavate the rock for its natural source of fuel. In dust, darkness and dank water, men have worked these mines for hundreds of years.
In the 1800s, men—and boys as young as nine—toiled in the coal pits from dawn to dusk six days a week. Even in the early 1900s, workers were still using primitive methods to extract the coal. Miners would lie on their sides or crouch on their knees, breathing coal dust as they swung picks at the rock face and used augers to drill holes for packing explosives. The coal was shovelled into carts pulled along underground roads by 'pit ponies.' Horses worked in the mines until the mid-1960s.
While the risky work in the mines has taken its human toll, it has at the same time fuelled a miners' camaraderie. A powerful tradition has grown out of an industry that captured the hearts of generations of men who followed their fathers and grandfathers into the mines.
Writer Alistair MacLeod describes the relationship between men and mines in "The Vastness of the Dark": "Once you start it takes a hold of you, once you drink underground water, you will always come back to drink some more. The water gets in your blood. It is in all of our blood."
Cape Breton Island's coal once seemed an inexhaustible source of riches. Its first mine provided fuel for the Fortress of Louisbourg in the 1700s. By the end of the Victorian era, the mines employed thousands. From 1940 to 1943, the Sydney Coalfield alone produced some 5 million tonnes of coal annually.
By 1998, however, Nova Scotia's seven coal mines together accounted for only about 2 million tonnes of the 75 million produced in Canada. Once exported to Denmark (about 50,000 tonnes in 1997), Nova Scotia coal no longer leaves the country. In fact, more than half a million tonnes of coal is imported into Nova Scotia, primarily for the generation of electricity.
The coal mining industry has seen its share of challenges. Attempts to unionize have led to violent confrontations: in Cape Breton mining towns, June 11 is Davis Day—a memorial for miner Bill Davis, shot dead by company police in 1925.
In 1966, the Dominion Steel Corporation announced its coal operations would be terminated. Shortly after that, the federal government established the Cape Breton Development Corporation (Devco) and assumed control of the mines, with plans to phase them out by 1981. These plans were themselves phased out after the oil crises of the 1970s led to the belief that mining was still viable.
Nevertheless, mining reserves became less profitable, mine disasters injured and killed miners and closed mines, and the government became reluctant to continue subsidizing coal.
In January 1999, the federal government announced a future direction—one that includes privatization of one Devco mine and closure of the others.
As the years go by there will be fewer generations living by the pit. But the "dark recess of the mines," as Cape Breton singer Rita MacNeil calls it, will live on in song and story.