Chapter II: Fever of the Copper Ore  (continued)

In the summer of 1876, George Hodder learned that villagers digging for peat behind the west side of the harbour had unearthed what they thought was galena or lead ore. Touched by curiosity, he investigated the site and there met Baron Francis von Ellershausen, who had been drawn from Betts Cove by the same news. Brief exploratory work satisfied Ellershausen that the ore was not galena, but the rarer mineral antimony, which at the time had few known uses. He left for Betts Cove without trying to discourage Hodder's interest in the deposit.

Time has since proven Ellershausen's astuteness in ignoring the Mortons Harbour property, for seldom in Newfoundland's history has so much money and litigation been expended upon so modest a mineral deposit.

George Hodder, Corbett Pittman and John Templeton staked the antimony showings in the early 1880s and made three tiny ore shipments before enticing two others, William Lethbridge and A.O. Hayward, to join them. Largely through Lethbridge's cunning - he originated from England and spread embellished rumours of the property's value among his British acquaintances - the New World Island Mining Syndicate Limited was organized in England and on 3 August 1892 bought the Mortons Harbour claim for about $75,000. Its directors were confident of success.

By 1897 the scene had changed. The syndicate had become hopelessly in debt, could not pay the full purchase price and had been issued a writ of fiera facias by Hodder et al. The mine appeared on public auction on 26 June 1897 where Hodder and the others reclaimed it for $500. That ended the reign of the New World Island Mining Syndicate.

History repeated itself in 1912, this time at the expense of the Newfoundland Antimony Company of New York. The company representative consented in 1905 to buy the mine for $50,000; seven years later Hodder and company took him to court for having paid only $13,000 of the stipulated sum. They won the case and again regained possession of the property.

With the submergence of the Newfoundland Antimony Company, the Mortons Harbour mine faded. Hodder and his associates lost interest in their ill-fated claim - which, after all, had yielded only 140 or so tons in 23 years - and abandoned its shaft and adit to the elements around 1916.

The Mortons Harbour arsenic deposit, located on the harbour's east side and discovered in 1896 by John R. Stewart of Little Bay, had a less dramatic history than did the antimony deposit. Four men hired by Stewart sank a shaft on the arsenic showing late in 1896 and in 1897 sent 125 tons of ore to Nova Scotia. Unfortunately the purchaser was declared insolvent shortly thereafter, and the money never arrived for the shipment.⁽⁴²⁾

One interesting feature of the two Mortons Harbour mines is that their ores contain over ½ ounce of gold per ton, a fact that might be worth exploring further in times of inflated gold prices.

Fortune Harbour is the site of an old iron mine and sits 20 miles west of Mortons Harbour on the tip of the Fortune Harbour Peninsula. For many years, Beothuck Indians living on the peninsula removed red ochre from the local iron deposits to cover themselves and their belongings. The Europeans who later moved into Fortune Harbour also used the red ochre by mixing it with linseed oil for paint.

William Cook, a St. John's butcher, first heard of the Fortune Harbour iron deposit in 1896 while managing a small copper mine at Tea Arm in the adjacent New Bay. Public interest in iron ore was then rampant, as the massive Bell Island iron mines had been opened a year earlier. When Cook's Tea Arm project failed in 1897, he staked the Fortune Harbour iron deposits and hired villagers to exploit it.

The first shipload of ore, 1500 tons of manganiferous iron ore, left Fortune Harbour in 1897 and fetched $18,000 from the Workington Iron and Steel Company in England. The next cargo, consisting of worthless red jasper and rotted stumps, was less favourably received. The Workington company pointedly refused further 'ore shipments' from Cook, and Fortune Harbour's mining days concluded as quickly as they had begun.

William Cook also owned shares in the Bear Cove lead mine in Green Bay along with three other men, including John R. Stewart. Apart from a few sporadic scratchings, however, the Bear Cove property lay unexplored until Stewart optioned it in 1907 to a novice mining engineer, James Campbell.

Campbell surveyed the lead showings cursorily - too much so to realize their character - and travelled to Boston in the fall of 1907 to float the Bear Cove Mines Company Limited. He returned in May 1908 and by June was in Bear Cove dewatering an old shaft sunk in 1905 by the Newfoundland Exploration Syndicate. His scale of mine development far exceeded the limitations of the deposit. Every month he paid out $1700 in wages to the management, 30 miners, a carpenter, blacksmith and foreman; in five months he squandered $16,525 of the company's money.

Although the Bear Cove mine deteriorated after Campbell's retreat in October 1908, its influence in the area remains: the nearby community of Silverdale is named after the trace silver content of the ore.

Decline of the Copper Boom

The uninspiring nature of the Bear Cove, Fortune Harbour and Mortons Harbour mines indicates why most speculators concentrated on copper ore. Yet despite this concentration and despite the approximately 1.53 million tons of copper ore, 78,200 tons of copper regulus and 5420 tons of copper ingots that left the Island between 1864 and 1918⁽⁴³⁾, the copper boom came to an undignified and premature end. It is impossible to give a single reason for its demise, for the causes were as varied as the mines themselves.

Prime culprits were the Betts Cove Mining Company and The Newfoundland Consolidated Copper Mining Company. They monopolized the Newfoundland copper industry almost from its inception and spread themselves across Notre Dame Bay without doing justice to any one mine. Had the companies been concerned as much with the longevity of the mines as with the size of their bank accounts, some of the operations - certainly the Betts Cove and Little Bay mines - might have lasted for decades. Instead, managers 'high-graded' the orebodies: they removed only the richest ore and left the lower-grade material strewed on the mine dumps or buried inaccessibly in collapsed shafts. These greedy practices disabled Newfoundland mines from competing with the huge American porphyry copper deposits that opened in the 1880s. Worse, they increased the mines' vulnerability to the fluctuating international copper market and allowed it to play havoc with the smaller mines, whose narrow profit margins disappeared with a minimal drop in copper prices.