Chapter I: Dawn of Mining Days  (continued)

As with other early Newfoundland mines, the first Tilt Cove miners came from Cornwall. The Cornishmen's trait of being able to smell out copper deposits over a sizeable distance was particularly useful in Tilt Cove, where ore lay in irregular 'pockets' rather than in veins. In the beginning miners removed ore from horizontal adits, but as surface ore became depleted they reached deeper into the heart of the hillside and worked by the light of candles stuck onto canvas hats with resin and pitch.

Tilt Cove, showing tramway from East Mine and part of townsite. (I/6.) (28Kb)

Mining techniques used in Tilt Cove closely resembled those of the Cornish mines and were practised in subsequent Notre Dame Bay copper mines. Three men drilled explosive holes: one held a steel bar or 'gam' while two others alternately hammered the gam. Explosives were then inserted and ignited to loosen the rock. After the blasted rock had been hauled to the surface, long lines of boys and young men 'cobbed' it by striking away barren rock from the ore-rich portions with a small hammer. Cable or 'Swansea' cars carried cobbed ore down from the mine site along an iron tramway to a two-storey pier, where vessels waited to take the ore to the Swansea copper smelters in Wales. The noise of ore dropping 30 feet into a ship's hold reverberated all over Tilt Cove.

Not only copper ore passed along the Tilt Cove tramway. Between 1869 and 1876, miners removed 416 tons of nickel ore from a small lens in the West mine; in 1870, Tilt Cove had the brief glory of providing 5 per cent of the world's then-minimal nickel production.⁽²⁸⁾

Freight rates in the 1870s allowed ore to travel more cheaply to Swansea by sea from Newfoundland than by rail from Cornwall. Even so, the sea voyage across the Atlantic Ocean had its dangers. On 25 September 1875, the brig Jura left Tilt Cove for Swansea with a load of copper ore and ran into a storm that broke open the main hatch and toppled the masts. As one of the ten sailors aboard related in a song called 'Loss of the Brig Jura':

"We worked to clear the wreck while the tempest loud did roar,
And we sadly thought of home and friends we never might see no more;
While some were lashed unto the pumps to keep the vessel free,
And more were heaving copper ore into the raging sea."

Their valiant efforts failed to save the brig, and at last crewmen had to climb upon a passing barque and leave the Jura to her doom:

"With four feet of water in her hold, her mast and booms just gone,
She would be at the bottom long before the day was done,
With a heavy load of copper ore the Jura she went down,
And she was bound from Tilt Cove across to Swansea town.⁽²⁹⁾"

Once mining began at Tilt Cove, it was as though all the latent and frustrated hopes left unsatisfied by previous mining ventures in Newfoundland focussed on the tiny cove. From being a haven of three families in 1863, Tilt Cove turned into Newfoundland's first mining town with scores of neat white cottages blanketing the bowl-shaped cliffs around Winser Lake. In 1869, the town's 300 miners supported its 768 inhabitants with salaries ranging from £10 to £21 per month. Although living conditions in the earliest years were spartan, life in Tilt Cove had its merits - witness this 1869 order form for the Union Mining Company: 174 gallons of rum, 24 cases of gin, 20 bobs of ale, 12 caskets of wine, 12 bottles of sherry, 5 gallons of brandy and 1 case of champagne.⁽³⁰⁾