IRON MINES UNDER THE SEA
I have just returned from a trip through caves richer than those of
Aladdin. They lie far under the ocean, and their treasures surpass the
wildest dreams of the Arabian Nights. The treasures are in iron ore,
from forty nine to fifty two per cent. pure, and so abundant that they
will be feeding steel mills for many generations to come.
I am speaking of the Wabana iron mines, located on, or rather under,
Conception Bay on the southeast coast of Newfoundland. They are on an
island seven miles long, three miles in width, and three hundred feet
high. Along about a generation ago deposits of rich hematite ores were
discovered in veins that ran down under the water with a slope of about
fifteen degrees. They were gradually developed and within the last
thirty years millions of tons of ore have been taken out. The under-sea
workshops have been extended more than two miles out from the shore and
it is believed that the great ore body crosses the bay. The capacity
yield at this time averages about five thousand tons for every working
day of the year, and the location is such that the ore can be put on
the steamers for export almost at the mouth of the mines. The property
is owned by the British Empire Steel Company, made up of British,
American, and Canadian capital.
But let me tell you of my trip. I left my hotel in St. John’s in the
early morning. The rocky promontories that form the narrow entrance to
the harbour were canopied in light fog, under which fishing schooners
could be seen tacking back and forth, beating their way out to the open
sea beyond. As we drove out over the hills the moisture gathered on the
windshield of the motor-car so that we had to raise it and take the
fog-soaked air full in our faces. We went through King’s Road, where
many of the aristocracy of St. John’s reside in big frame houses with
many bay windows and much gingerbread decoration. They were set well
back from the street, and, in contrast with most of the houses of the
town, were surrounded by trees.
As we reached the open country, rolling hills stretched away in the
mist. They were gray with rock or red-brown with scrub. Here and
there were patches of bright green, marking vegetable gardens or tiny
pastures for a cow or goat. The growing season in Newfoundland is
short, and the number of vegetables that can be successfully raised is
limited. I saw patches of cabbages, turnips, and beets, and several
fields of an acre or more that had yielded crops of potatoes. Most of
the fields were small, and some no bigger than dooryards. All were
fenced in with spruce sticks. The houses were painted white, and had
stones or turf banked up around their foundations. A few farms had
fairly large barns, but most had no outbuildings except a vegetable
cellar built into a hillside or half-sunk in the ground.
Newfoundlanders follow the English fashion of driving on the left-hand
side of the road. It made me a bit nervous, at first, whenever we
approached another vehicle. It seemed certain that we would run into
it unless we swung to the right, but of course it always moved to the
left, giving us room on what an American thinks of as the “wrong side
of the road.”
We met an occasional motor-car, and many buggies, but every few minutes
we passed the universal vehicle of Newfoundland, the two-wheeled “long
cart,” as it is called. Strictly speaking, it is not a cart at all, in
our sense of the word, as it has no floor or sides. It consists of a
flat, rectangular frame of rough-hewn poles, balanced like a see-saw
across an axle joining two large wooden wheels. The long cart is the
common carrier of all Newfoundland. It is used on the farms, in the
towns, and in the fishing villages. One of these carts was carrying
barrels of cod liver oil to the refinery at St. John’s, while on
another, a farmer and his wife sat sidewise, balancing themselves on
the tilting frame.
After a drive of ten miles we reached Portugal Cove, where I waited on
the wharf for the little steamer that was to take me to Bell Island,
three miles out in the Bay. The men of the village were pulling ashore
the boat of one of their number who had left the day before to try
his luck in the States. The boat was heavy, and seemed beyond their
strength. Some one called out: “Come on, Mr. Chantey Man, give us
Johnny Poker,” whereupon one of the men led in a song. On the last
word, they gave a mighty shout and a mighty pull. The boat moved, and
in a moment was high and dry on the beach.
This was the chantey they sang:
Oh, me Johnny Poker,
And we’ll work to roll her over,
And it’s Oh me Johnny Poker _all_.
The big pull comes with a shout on the final word “all.”
After a few minutes on the little mine steamer, I saw Bell Island loom
up out of the fog. Its precipitous shore rose up as high and steep as
the side of a skyscraper, but black and forbidding through the gray
mist. I was wondering how I could ever reach the top of the island when
I saw a tiny box car resting on tracks laid against the cliff side,
steeper than the most thrilling roller coaster. The car is hauled up
the incline by a cable operated by an electric hoist at the top of the
hill. I stepped inside, and by holding on to a rail overhead was able
to keep my feet all the way up. Nearly everybody and everything coming
to Bell Island is carried up and down in this cable car.
From the top of the cliff, I drove across the island toward the mines,
and had all the way a fine view of the property. The mine workings are
spread out over an area about five miles long and two miles in width.
The houses of the miners are little box-like affairs, with tiny yards.
Those owned by the company are alike, but those built by the miners
themselves are in varying patterns.
The miners are nearly all native Newfoundlanders. They are paid a
minimum wage, with a bonus for production over a given amount, so that
the average earnings at present are about three dollars and fifty cents
a day. When the mines are working at capacity, about eighteen hundred
men are employed.
The offices of the company occupy a large frame structure. In one
side of the manager’s room is a great window that commands a view of
the works. Looking out, my eye was caught first by a storage pile of
red ore higher than a six- or seven-story building. No ore is shipped
during the winter because of the ice in the Bay, and the heavy snows
that block the narrow gauge cable railway from the mines to the pier.
Also, since the ore is wet as it comes out of the mine, it freezes
during the three-mile trip across the island. This makes it hard to
dump and load. Another difficulty about winter operations above ground
comes from the high winds that sweep over the island, sometimes with a
velocity of eighty miles an hour.
With the manager I walked through the village, passing several ore
piles, to one of the shaft houses. Trains of cars are hauled by cable
from the depths of the mine to the top of the shaft house, where their
contents are dumped into the crusher. From the crusher the broken rock
is loaded by gravity into other cars and run off to the storage piles
or down to the pier. The cable railways and crushers are operated by
electricity, generated with coal from the company’s mines at Sydney,
Nova Scotia. The same power is used to operate the fans that drive
streams of fresh air into the mines and to work the pumps that lift the
water out of the tunnels.
At the shaft house I put on a miner’s working outfit, consisting of
a suit of blue overalls, rubber boots, and a cap with its socket
above the visor for holding a lamp. These miners’ lamps are like the
old bicycle lanterns, only smaller. The lower part is filled with
broken carbide, on which water drips from a reservoir above and forms
acetylene gas.
I was amazed at the ore trains that came shooting up out of the mine
at from thirty to forty miles an hour, and trembled at the thought of
sliding down into the earth at such speed, but my guide gave the “slow”
signal and we began our descent at a more moderate rate.
I sat on the red, muddy bottom of an empty ore car. My feet reached
almost to the front and I could just comfortably grasp the tops of the
sides with my hands. It was like sitting upright in a bathtub. As
we plunged into the darkness, the car wheels roared and rattled like
those of a train in a subway. My guide shouted in my ear that the shaft
was fifteen feet wide, and about eight feet from ceiling to floor.
I noticed that some of the timber props were covered with a sort of
fungus that looked like frost or white cotton, while here and there
water trickling out of the rock glistened in the light of our lamps.
As we descended the air grew colder. It had a damp chill that bit to
the bone, and though our speed kept increasing there seemed to be no
end to the journey. Suddenly, out of the darkness I saw three dancing
lights. Were they signals to us of some danger ahead? Another moment,
and the lights proved to be lamps in the caps of three miners, drillers
who had finished their work for the day and were toiling their way up
the steep grade to the world of fresh air and warm sunshine.
Another light appeared ahead. Our train slowed up and stopped on a
narrow shelf deep down in the earth and far under the ocean. Just
ahead, the track plunged steeply down again into the darkness. We were
at the station where the underground trains are controlled by electric
signals. On each side curved rails and switches led off into branching
tunnels.
For an hour or more we walked about in the under-sea workings. At times
we were in rock-walled rooms where not a sound could be heard but the
crunch of the slippery red ore under our rubber-booted feet, or the
sound of water rushing down the steep inclines. At other times the rock
chambers reverberated with the chugging and pounding of the compressed
air drills boring their way into the rock.
We went to the head of a new chamber where a gang was loading ore into
the cars. There was a great scraping and grinding of shovels against
the flinty rock as the men bent their backs to their work. The miners’
faces were streaked with sweat and grimy with smears of the red ore. I
picked up a piece. It was not as big as a dinner plate, but was almost
as heavy as lead.
We rode out of the mine at top speed. Upon reaching the surface, the
air of the chilly foggy day felt positively hot, while the sunlight
seemed almost unreal after the dampness below.
[Illustration: Halifax has a fine natural harbour well protected by
islands and with sufficient deep water anchorage for great fleets. The
port is handicapped, however, by the long rail haul from such centres
of population as Montreal and Toronto.]
[Illustration: Cape Breton Island has a French name, but it is really
the land of the Scotch, where village pastors often preach in Gaelic,
and the names in their flocks sound like a gathering of the clans.]