Chapter I: Dawn of Mining Days  (continued)

A grimmer side existed to the bleak and isolated aspect of Tilt Cove. On 6 December 1867, the Queen of Swansea left St. John's for Tilt Cove with fifteen people, including two of the mine manager's children and a druggist, Felix Downsley, who was to have become a Tilt Cover doctor. Twelve miles from Tilt Cove, the ship ran aground off Gull Island. The survivors lit a fire and waited in vain for help to arrive. In desperation, they resorted to systematic cannibalism, the unlucky victims being chosen by drawn straws. These measures only postponed the death of all hands, and when fishermen visited Gull Island a year later they found little but bones and Felix Downsley's diary.⁽³¹⁾ Today, a monument to the Queen of Swansea sits atop the east cliffs of Tilt Cove.

During its first 16 years, the Tilt Cove mine owed much of its success to the energies of Smith McKay, who supervised the mine and oversaw the community at large. He spent most of his time in Tilt Cove, a fact which contributed to his being elected as the district's Member of the House of Assembly in 1869, 1873, 1882 and 1885. Charles Bennett, however, did not share the general enthusiasm for his partner. Early in 1877, differences arose between the two men regarding the fact that Messrs. C.F. Bennett and Company had charged a 5 per cent commission for handling the mercantile affairs of the Union Mining Company.⁽³²⁾ The partnership dissolved, and Bennett filed a suit claiming that McKay owed him nearly £20,000. The aghast MaKay denied the debt and maintained, furthermore, that he had never received his annual managerial salary. His pleas went unheard. Bennett won the court case and in July 1880 bought the Tilt Cove mine and assets for £45,000 at a public auction.

Thus did the discoverer of the Tilt Cove copper deposits unwillingly relinquish his hold on those same deposits. People looking back at the McKay years came to regard them as the golden age of early Tilt Cove; for after his banishment, major problems started to infect the mining operation.

The first hint of impending trouble came in 1882 when miners began to have increasing difficulty in excavating large quantities of the high-grade ore demanded by the Swansea smelters. A considerable tonnage of low-grade ore still remained underground, but existing copper prices made it uneconomic to mine such ore from a deposit the size of the West mine. Charles Fox Bennett died in 1883 at the age of 90 without proposing a solution to the problem. He also left his business affairs in chaos for his spectrum of British relatives, none of whom relished the prospect of managing an ailing copper mine in Newfoundland.

By 1886, miners at Tilt Cove were hard put to remove additional high-grade ore without jeopardizing the soundness of the mine, a situation that finally compelled the mine captain to open up a large orebody in the east side of Tilt Cove in 1886. The East mine ore averaged only 3 to 4 per cent copper and was highly pyritic*. On the other hand, it was plentiful and accessible enough to be quarried or 'glory-holed' more cheaply and safely than was the West mine ore. Bennett's trustees, however, felt uneasy as they witnessed fluctuating world copper prices immobilize one British copper mine after another. They did not rest until they had found a company willing to lease the Tilt Cove property. The interested party, the Tilt Cove Copper Company Limited from London, issued Bennett's trustees a trust deed of 800 mortgage debentures worth £100 each on 29 November 1888, and in exchange took over the Tilt Cover mines.

If the McKay years were the best ones of early Tilt Cover, the Tilt Cover Copper Company years were the worst. Upon assuming control of the property, the directors decided to smelt the pyritic ore on site rather than ship it to Swansea. The decision very nearly destroyed the entire Tilt Cove operation.

Costly blast furnaces were erected in 1889 and, from the moment of their installation, seemed destined to failure and disfavour. They drained financial resources of the company by consuming coal that had to be imported from Britain. Sulphurous fumes from the smelting works both literally and figuratively tainted the Tilt Cove atmosphere. Miners especially hated the smelter for its insidious hazards: a man once slipped into a frothing iron smelting pot, necessitating burial of the pot and contents. Another complaint about the smelting works involved disposal of molten waste or slag. Usually it went into a slag heap on land, but occasionally mine manager W.R. Thoms ordered the material to be dumped into the salt water. The practice prompted serious repercussions between management and townspeople when red-hot slag exploded on contact with the cold water and scattered glowing embers on nearby roofs, setting them afire.

The company had its own problems with fire, for in 1890 a giant conflagration obliterated most of the East mine surface facilities. The accident coincided with a large drop in copper prices and aggravated the company's already alarming debt of £100,000 caused by inefficient smelting methods. Simply in order to pay miners' wages and ordinary operating costs the company had to mortgage its copper stocks and equipment to a principal director, John Taylor.

It was Taylor who finally saved the Tilt Cove Copper Company from complete ruin. He arranged in 1890 that the company sublease the mine to the Cape Copper Company Limited, a firm that he had formed in 1862. It owned copper mines in Africa and India, and smelters in Swansea, and was reportedly one of the most financially stable mining concerns in the business. The two firms agreed that the Cape Copper Company would pay a £4000 annual rent and that profits would be shared after the Tilt Cover Copper Company's debts had been nullified.⁽³³⁾

For all its reputation, it is debatable that the Cape Copper Company could have saved the Tilt Cove Copper Company, had not dramatic changes happened simultaneously in the Swansea smelting industry. In the early 1890s, Swansea chemists began smelting pyritic ores for their sulphur content, and the Briton Ferry Chemical Works started manufacturing sulphuric acid and allied sulphates. In the course of testing the East mine ore, metallurgists found that it contained not only 35 per cent sulphur, but also 2 ounces of gold and silver each per ton of copper metal. The East mine ore became sought-after, the Tilt Cove smelters closed down and Tilt Cove ore left again in its raw state for Swansea, where it was now to be smelted for sulphur, gold and silver as well as for copper.

Just as Tilt Cove received this new lease upon its mining life, the United States abolished all tariffs on metallic ores in 1894, making it economically feasible for the Cape Copper Company to send ore to American markets. The waived duty enabled the company to rework the idle West mine dumps and to reopen the West mine itself. With the two mines in production, the Tilt Cove Copper Company's debts vanished and annual profits surpassed £500,000.

Tilt Cove thereafter entered a prosperous period in which its population of 1000 people was serviced by a doctor, telegraph operator, policeman, tailor, blacksmith and teacher. Mail arrived in summer by the fortnightly steamer Plover and in winter by dogteam from Badger. Affixed to some of that mail was a 5¢ stamp depicting miners at work underground in the Tilt Cove mine. The stamp, issued in 1897 and entitled "Mining: One of the Colony's Resources", was the first mine-motif stamp issued in the world.⁽³⁴⁾