The Wake

by Linden MacIntyre

  There was one persistent question, however, and it would return occasionally in the months ahead: Were they raising unrealistic expectations among these needy people? Poynter wondered if they were taking unfair advantage of a crisis to cut a deal with the people here that would have boggled the minds of just about anyone who heard of it back in the boardrooms of New York. Free labour for an indefinite period? Credit from the merchants to keep men working? It was reminiscent, in a way, of how the pharaohs built the pyramids. The people who were doing all the heavy work had no options. And when people have no options, they really have no rights.

  However, from what Donald Poynter and his fellow American on the ground in St. Lawrence, Doc Smith, could conclude from what they knew, the local folks were going into this with open eyes. The goal was simple: dig up two thousand tons of high-grade fluorspar and transport it to the wharf, load it on a ship and carry it to a steel plant in Sydney, Nova Scotia. The chemists at the steel plant would evaluate the shipment. If it met their specs, the Dominion Steel and Coal Corporation would pay for it. And keep buying it. And paying for it.3

  The value of the miners’ labour had been established in a flimsy contract with a local merchant, Aubrey Farrell, and a handshake: fifteen cents an hour—a fraction of what miners were earning elsewhere in Newfoundland, but never mind. Seibert promised that the local men would soon catch up. Farrell’s faith would be rewarded. He’d keep track of the hours they worked and give them credit at his store. It would all work out when Walter started earning money.

  And Walter promised Donald that he’d eventually become a partner in the new company, the St. Lawrence Corporation of Newfoundland. He’d get shares when the business was up and running. The company would build a nice house in St. Lawrence for Don and Urla and the inevitable children. Doc Smith, who had agreed to work without a salary for a while, would not regret this investment of time and talent.4

  All the deals were sealed mainly by trust, affirmed in an earnest handshake and a steady, honest gaze. Weird, even by rough-and-ready pioneering standards, and in retrospect naive. It would take years for the miners’ wages to match what miners earned in other places. Poynter never would become a partner. Doc Smith never would get paid. Aubrey Farrell and St. Lawrence would one day have reason to regret ever hearing Walter Seibert’s name.

  But it was a start.

  AND what did Walter think? What did he think of this place, these unusual people? It was difficult to tell with Walter, he was so focused on the business opportunity. For sure he was enthusiastic about the fishing and the hunting. He’d make many visits to St. Lawrence just for those amenities. Walter was, at heart, a sportsman. You could see it in the way he approached a business deal. Warily and patiently. He recognized the potential wealth, an unused resource just waiting to be gathered up.

  And the people—it was difficult to know just what he thought of them. Certainly, he loved their trusting attitude, their open-heartedness. That would be enough to start with. The times were anything but normal, and they called for imagination and improvisation and temporary sacrifice. Walter Seibert had the nerve and the imagination and a deep respect for sacrifice, especially by other people.

  Progress, in the world that he inhabited, stemmed from a kind of marriage between enterprise and sacrifice. And he was nothing if not enterprising. From the little that we know of him, it’s apparent that Walter Seibert was driven by his instincts: see opportunity where others don’t; move swiftly, aggressively, creatively to exploit what destiny delivers. To start a mine from scratch in a remote part of a thinly populated island in the middle of the Atlantic, with no knowledge of the mining business and no money in the bank, during a global financial crisis—it would have daunted even a Carnegie or a Rockefeller.

  And it would have failed without the unquestioning commitment of a rare community of trusting people.

  Walter Seibert had made a crucial connection in Aubrey Farrell. The Farrells were related by marriage to the other major merchant family in St. Lawrence, the Giovanninis—Aubrey’s mother was a Giovannini. Almost everybody in the area depended, one way or another, on the Farrells and the Giovanninis. Eventually they’d all get to know the real Walter Seibert—but for the moment their trust and support were factors that, more than any other, launched the audacious New York accountant into the mining business.

  He would eventually find investors willing to put up initial capital of $100,000, but that would take a while. His investment in equipment at the outset was laughable—$2,000 for mostly obsolete second-hand machinery.5 But he’d cleverly figured out a way to launch a labour-intensive project without spending anything on labour. That was the key to any prospect of success.

  THERE were obviously no mining men available in or anywhere near St. Lawrence. Because of the recent earthquake and the tsunami and the collapse of the local fishery, people in the area were desperate for jobs, any kind of work, no matter how low the wages. But cheap labour wasn’t quite what Walter had in mind. He wanted local people to make a real investment in the venture by working, at least in the beginning, for no wages at all. To work hard for a promise of payment in the future. Wasn’t that the essence of doing business? Borrowing and promising repayment?

  In this case, he would borrow sweat and time. When and if it all worked out, he’d pay the fifteen cents an hour. If it didn’t . . . well, that’s the nature of investment, a form of gambling.

  He would present his scheme as an opportunity. The payoff for the workers was a lifetime of job security and steady income. It was, as Walter Seibert would explain it, a win-win all around. Even the parish priest, Father Thorne, seemed enthusiastic, at least in the beginning, and urged the local Catholics to have faith in the Americans. And when Walter Seibert had his venture functioning by mid-1933, it would have made him happy to discover that the local people were referring to his company as “the cooperation.” They understood the spirit of the enterprise, and they embraced it. The St. Lawrence cooperation. The miners were his partners, just like Farrell, Smith and Poynter.

  But there would be early signs of discontent among the workers and the merchants. These Newfoundlanders weren’t as simple as they seemed. Sophisticated outsiders like Walter Seibert will sometimes mistake open-hearted simplicity for stupidity. Time, for the Americans, would be educational.

  THE practical imperative was the production and delivery of two thousand tons of fluorspar to the steel mill in Cape Breton. And by March 1934, with their picks and shovels, antiquated drills and wheelbarrows, the men had pulled it off. The next chapter should have been straightforward, but as always seemed to be the case with Walter, events didn’t unfold as expected. Seibert’s company got paid. Seibert took his time—until late June that year, more than a year after everyone had started working—sharing the proceeds with his partners in “the cooperation,” the merchants and the miners.

  Part of Donald Poynter’s job in St. Lawrence was to reassure the locals. Annoyances and disappointments, frequent as they would be, should be written off as growing pains. In time, Poynter would become good at troubleshooting, persuading when he could, playing hardball when he had to.

  Those early days, late in 1933 and in 1934, would mark the beginning of a long and often awkward life experience for young Donald—caught between a distant, arbitrary boss and a community into which he would, in the coming years, slowly be absorbed socially and personally.

  IT’S difficult to imagine now what Donald Poynter thought his job would be when he and his wife disembarked from the SS Portia in St. Lawrence, Newfoundland, in mid-September 1933. His immediate assignment was to turn his engineering skills to surveying Seibert’s mining properties, to work with local prospectors and to help Doc Smith with the early stages of the Black Duck development.6

  It was both more and less than he had anticipated. And he must have felt some deep misgivings, watching as young Walter Seibert casually manipulated and reneged on promises while local workers busted their guts to hold up their end o
f the strange bargain they’d made with him.

  But even if he’d wanted to turn back, even if his background had been mining and he’d understood just how much sweat and capital it would take to turn this Black Duck operation into a profit-making mine, Poynter seemed to realize from day one that he was beyond a place from which he could easily retreat.

  There was a Depression on. Engineers weren’t exactly in high demand. There were engineers lining up for free soup and bitter coffee all over America. There could be no turning back. Luckily, the athlete in Poynter’s character enjoyed a challenge that pitted him against himself, against his limitations.

  Getting to Black Duck involved a long walk from the Giovannini boarding house, on the west side of St. Lawrence harbour, along a route that passed the graveyard at the northeast edge of town. To Donald Poynter, a young man in his twenties, this mournful property, a resting place for strangers, would hardly have merited a second glance. But if he could have seen the future—the future names inscribed on simple stones above the future graves—a quiet voice within would surely have instructed him to turn around. Collect your things, your fragile bride, go home to Nutley. Forget Seibert and his scheme. Forget St. Lawrence, Newfoundland, and all the people you are yet to know here.

  22.

  RENNIE Slaney would in the future become one of Donald Poynter’s in-laws and a boss in Seibert’s mining venture in St. Lawrence. He would, more memorably, become the voice for local outrage, a whistle-blower. But in 1935, Rennie Slaney was just another Black Duck miner, facing what they all faced, sustained by the same sense of optimism and trust that, in the early years, kept everybody going, including Donald Poynter and Doc Smith.

  Rennie Slaney was twenty-nine, married with five kids, the youngest nine months old. He’d been at Black Duck almost from the beginning. Gone were the days of ships and fishing boats. Now life was all about the rocks and rocky places, the brutal machinery to break the rock and, in doing so, often break the man who used it. He’d gone from the open air—an environment that was familiar, the sea, often a cruel place but integral to the culture he’d grown up in, the traditions he’d inherited—to this new and, in some ways, brutalizing struggle.

  As the Black Duck pit became a mine, he and his fellow miners faced impenetrable darkness. Extremes of heat and cold. The recurring dread that crawls up from behind in an environment that all your senses tell you is unnatural, causing limbs and organs to protest. The lungs heaving. The heart racing. The legs stumbling in darkness. Wading through incessant water. Water running down your neck. Inside your boots. Dry one minute, soaking wet the next. Wet work clothes freezing rock hard on your body as you walk home hungry on a winter evening. The infernal drills, bone-jarring, deafening, hammering through granite, turning rock to dust, choking dust, plugging nostrils, infiltrating lungs.

  These were conditions that they willingly put up with—Rennie Slaney and his brother, Arcule; Patrick Rennie; and in time, hundreds like them from communities all along the south end of the Burin. Men with long memories of worse: tragedy at sea, on battlefields. The fresh memory of a horrifying night in November 1929. Men still struggling to feed families, arriving at this hard workplace often hungry. They willingly accepted hardship for a greater benefit—the eventual autonomy that comes from honest work and steady pay.

  That autonomy, in optimistic moments of reflection in 1935, was the better future they foresaw. It was what they had to see because there really wasn’t an alternative anyone could realistically imagine.

  IT WAS, in some ways, better in the beginning. The work was always hard, but in the early days they worked in daylight, breathing relatively fresh air. The weather was a problem, especially in the winters, and they might have looked forward to the day when the mining would go underground, unaware of the larger problems waiting there. None of them had ever worked in mining.

  To know what really lay ahead would have been discouraging, but the anomalies and hardships of working in the St. Lawrence mines evolved in increments. Daylight diminished gradually. The dust became a greater problem as the men dug deeper; flooding increased below the water table. As a species, we adapt to incremental growth in hardship.

  They bought relief from flooding by hand-digging a deep ditch, a thousand feet long, to drain Black Duck Pond, which was close to where they worked.7 And for a while, it helped. But soon they needed high-volume pumps. The water came from everywhere, it seemed—from the skies, the surrounding bogs, the ponds. The rock itself oozed water.

  Incrementally, the job became more difficult physically. They were manhandling awkward steel-wheeled barrows, loaded with a hundred pounds of rock, up a sharp incline. And when the slope became too long and too steep, they sank a shaft the way you’d dig any deep hole in the ground—picking and shovelling straight down, jackhammering, drilling, blasting. Rudimentary timbering to keep the walls intact. Their first hoist was a hand-cranked log and a long rope. Barrels once used for shipping pork, now used for lifting ore.

  The company provided the bare necessities, the drills and jackhammers to break the rock when the men got past the relatively easy digging. A second-hand air compressor ran the drills. There was a rough road to Black Duck by the end of 1934. A couple of antique trucks. Beyond that, they were on their own.

  They walked to Black Duck in their ordinary clothes, in whatever workwear they could find at home—being fishermen, they probably would have had rubber boots, sou’westers, whatever rain gear they’d used in boats. There wasn’t a lot of choice. The company offered nothing but the opportunity to work. No frills like safety boots, hard hats, eye or ear protection. Most of the men working in those rough-and-ready early days would not have known such things existed.

  When they were working near the surface, in 1933 and 1934, the wind would help to dissipate the dust and grit. They could see what they were doing, at least on day shift. But as the mine went deeper down, the workplace grew progressively darker and more confined, and the dust and blasting smoke became a problem that, for the first time, made a young man think about his health.8

  Working in the woods or on the sea, you were constantly aware of danger, but it wouldn’t have occurred to a sailor, fisherman or woodsman that he could get seriously and permanently sick just from being in the workplace. But this dust was overwhelming. The men tried covering their faces with cheesecloth to keep it out of their nostrils and their mouths. But exhalation carries moisture and the moisture captured dust, so within minutes, the cheesecloth would be clogged, the equipment operator gasping.

  The drills were slung from the shoulder in such a way that the operator’s face was unavoidably close to the drill hole in the rock. There was no way to avoid the dust. And there was no way that the miners could know what damage it would do. There was no hospital or clinic, no nurse or doctor, anywhere near St. Lawrence.

  Sanitation at Black Duck was primitive. There were two privies on the surface, nothing underground. There was no place to wash. The miners ate where they were working. For drinking water, they’d slurp what seeped through fissures in the rock. In the winters, before the mining moved deep underground, they would huddle in a storage shed with their lunch cans while the wind and snow blew through the walls.

  And there were more subtle costs, fundamental changes in lifestyle, the loss of a personal flexibility that once gave them time to plant a little garden, build a house or barn, hunt or fish for food. Time for the camaraderie that develops on the sea, between a father and a son, between brothers, friends and partners, working for each other, working for themselves.

  Now they had invested time and sweat in growing a new industry, in work that left them emptied out at the end of a gruelling shift at Black Duck, or eventually, Iron Springs, Blue Beach, Tarefare, Director. It was a physical and ultimately cultural expenditure that would become quantifiable only at a future time, a bitter time when they would fully understand the price they’d unconsciously paid for this new industrial reality.

  FINALLY, in 1935,
the real mining started at Black Duck—when the shaft reached a depth of about a hundred feet, they began driving a long drift, essentially a tunnel, and large underground caverns called stopes into the belly of the ore body. Early access to the workplace was by ladders.

  The Black Duck men were now real miners—but with none of the equipment, the protective gear, the lighting, the modern drills that suppressed dust and were commonplace in other mining operations. A five-horsepower blower helped control the dust, but minimally.

  There were other open diggings now—Iron Springs, Blue Beach. There was widespread speculation circulating that there was a new mining venture on the horizon, a real mining company, perhaps, with real capital to spend on a modern operation. But in 1935, it was just speculation. For now, and the foreseeable future, “the cooperation” and Walter Seibert were the only game in town.

  Rennie Slaney, writing about his experience at Black Duck years later, was vivid in describing those early days underground: “The further the drifts advanced, the dust and smoke became worse. Men were constantly vomiting. Those conditions were made all the tougher because of lack of suitable equipment with which to do the work. In the first days, since wages depended on production, there was never a thought of quitting. The men considered the mine as their own property.”9

  For Ed Stapleton of Little St. Lawrence, the job at Black Duck would have been an incentive to start a family near a place where he had roots, to avoid the out-migration and the loneliness of distant places that were large and alien. New York. Boston. Montreal. Families are happiest where there are blood and cultural connections. This was how many of the miners saw it. So many hard-rock mines were in the wilderness, where workers lived in rowdy camps. Seibert’s mining “empire” was near the communities the men all knew well, where they had family. Hard though the workdays were, each man had a home to go to when the day was done.