Miners of the Deeps

Getting a feel for life in the mines, all these visitors have cricks in their necks.

The miners went down to the sea in Cape Breton. And they continued on down, 600 feet below the sea floor before their carts carried them six miles off the coast to the coal face. That's where they worked for 12 hours a day.

We went down the dripping wet, dark mine shaft on a dreary, foggy Saturday, recreating their daily toil. We were clothed in hard hats and a black smock and our guide was an old miner, Sheldon Gouthro. He'd spent 32 years working under the sea – miners of the ocean deeps, he said they were called.

Sheldon prepared us before the journey down. We were at the Miner's Museum in Glace Bay. Our shaft had been created to give us a genteel taste of that early hell. We paid for the privilege. Sheldon told us the collieries in Cape Breton produced millions of tons of coal until the shafts took the miners so far under the Atlantic Ocean that it became prohibitively expensive - not to mention unsafe – to get the coal out and pump safe air into the mines. They all have been closed for 35 years now in the Glace Bay area.

We started out slowly enough, walking down a slope in a tunnel that was six feet high. My hard hat scraped the roof which was coated with dripping water. When we turned a corner and went through a barrier (used to channel the fresh air below), the tunnel dropped to five feet. There were seams of coal all around us. Sheldon reminded us the lighting is new. Back in the day there were no lights – except for the lamps on the miners' heads.

This colliery recreated conditions in 1932. It was grim. The men would slowly make their way to the face back then, hauling in their own water and lunch bucket and tools. They had to pay for their own powder to blow out the coal seam. The only thing they didn't have to pay for, according to Sheldon, was the canary in a cage. The mine owner provided the canary so he could protect his investment. The canary would sing – a good sign – and the miners would hold it as high on the roof of the tunnel to where the methane gas would rise.

If it kept singing, they would set about extracting the coal, digging with picks and shovels, loading the carts that were pulled by pit ponies – small horses that had been rounded up on Sable Island offshore. They'd been wild for 200 years and their growth was stunted. The miners loved those ponies, Sheldon told us. They were sent down the mine and they stayed there until they died.

The men would return to the surface after their 12-hour shift. They would make their way home to the company-owned houses on which they paid rent. All their food and clothing was bought at the company store. If – or when – they were injured in the mine, the company would send an inspector to the house and tell the miner to find a replacement for himself in the mine or he and his family would be thrown out of the company-owned house. As a result, sons as young as nine years old would be sent down the mine. No girls or women were allowed down there because the miners believed a woman in the mine was bad luck. From what I heard, I would say it was good luck for the women that they weren't allowed down.

This journey was a powerful journey for us. My back was killing me as I stooped for more than an hour in shafts that got as low as four feet 10 inches. We pulled off to the side on our way back to the surface and Sheldon sat us down around a bed of flowers. There was a rose bush, some succulent plants and a number of colorful flowers. He said a German miner, early in the 20^th century, had received permission from the mine owner to grow flowers down in one of the mines and the miners had helped him by using their helmets to carry down the topsoil. The bed was fertilized by the horse manure from the ponies. The recreated bed of flowers was illuminated by fluorescent lamps but I don't know how the early flowers were able to get light.