Chapter III: Gold, Fools and Gambled Fortunes (continued)

The harsh treatment of the Lead Cove mine discouraged mineral exploration along the French Shore for the next 20 years. Improved diplomatic relations between France and England in the 1890s lured a few mining entrepreneurs to the forbidden coast, but the French navy continued to balk the fledgling mines at every turn.

The first target of interference in the 1890s wee two gypsum quarries, one worked in the Codroy Valley by a Mr. Scoles and the other at Romaines Brook by Charles Osman. Between 1890 and 1893 the men exported a total of about 900 tons of gypsum to the United States and Canada before French protection squadrons forced the operations to stop around 1894. *

Asbestos Mines

Mineral deposits situated far from the coast did not attract French attention, but because of their isolation were ignored by prospectors as well. One exception was an asbestos deposit that lay inland from Port au Port Bay and was acquired in 1887 by Robert Bond, then a Member of the House of Assembly.

It is highly unlikely that Bond ever visited his asbestos property. To do so he would have had to trudge 15 miles through the heavily wooded Lewis Hills; once there he would have seen an asbestos deposit of negligible value. The John's Asbestos Company of New York leased the property from Bond around 1889. After three years of exploration, it concluded that the difficulty of hauling supplies into the wilderness was matched only by the trials of transporting the ore back out to the shore - and that the ore's sporadic distribution warranted neither effort.

Although nothing came of the Bond asbestos prospect, its exploration caused a small staking rush in the Port au Port area and led indirectly to the opening of two mines at Bluff Head, 15 miles west of the Bond property.

Captain Philip Cleary; owned many Newfoundland mines, but profited from none. (III/1.) (20Kb)

The first of the two mines lay near the coast of Port au Port Bay, where for years fishermen had told tales of seeing boulders veined with 'cotton rock' strewing the beach beneath Bluff Head. "The tale and the 'cotton' passed from fisherman to fisherman, until a morsel of both got into the hands of a St. John's legislator, who pricked up his ears and opened his eyes and declared the stuff was asbestos."⁽⁵⁾ The legislator, Captain Philip Cleary, sent out a prospecting expedition to Port au Port Bay in 1891. The men searched farther up the Bluff Head cliffs and there located the original asbestos outcrops.

The Bluff Head asbestos deposit's extensive mineralization led Cleary to open a mine at the site and to ship 3218 tons of ore to Britain before the French navy brought mining to a halt in 1900.

The second Bluff Head mine arose primarily through the energies of a mining engineer from Halifax, Charles E. Willis, who was drawn to the district in 1892 by rumours of the Newfoundland asbestos fields. Within a few weeks of his arrival, Willis ascertained that valuable asbestos deposits lay in a deep gulch one mile from Port au Port Bay on claims belonging to a Sandy Point merchant, James R. Hayes. He discussed the matter with Hayes, returned to Halifax to incorporate the Halifax Asbestos Company Limited and on 13 January 1893 purchased Hayes' claims.⁽⁶⁾

The Halifax Asbestos Company began to explore its property in July 1893. The workers spent a year uncovering the asbestos deposits, after which time Willis hired a drill and drillers from Nova Scotia to probe the showings further. In June the drillers were boring through an asbestos vein when they suddenly intersected a zone of a dark and heavy mineral. Willis assumed that it was iron ore. Upon showing samples to a Québec mining engineer, however, he learned that it was the rare mineral chromite, or chromium ore.⁽⁷⁾ Willis discarded the idea of asbestos mining, organized the Halifax Chrome Company Limited and set out to extract chromite.

The miners first quarried a trial shipment of ore from an open pit dug into the Bluff Head deposits. They hand-cobbed the ore, placed it in ore cars that ran along a short tramway to a corduroy road and transferred it to horse-drawn carts that took the ore to the coast. Within months the company received a verdict from the ore's American purchasers that its chromium content was too inconsistent. Willis therefore installed a concentrator beside the mine to upgrade the ore, but in the process threw the company into debt. Food supplies fell to a bare minimum, the miners became uneasy and in mid-1898 the company went bankrupt.

The Halifax Chrome Company (although not Charles Willis) vanished from Newfoundland in June 1898 when Frederick Burnham of New Jersey bought the Bluff Head mine for $11,655 at an auction. What with the transferral and the fact that the concentrator broke down in 1898, little ore left the mine that year. The miners spent most of the time erecting a hoist on Bluff Head so as to tram the ore two miles south to the more sheltered port of Broad Cove.⁽⁸⁾ Unfortunately, the project drew complaints from the French navy; the British government chose to support French officers rather than Newfoundland miners, and in 1900 the Bluff Head mine closed down.⁽⁹⁾

The main significance of the Bluff Head mine lay, not in that it produced about 5700 tons of chromite, but in that it brought Charles Willis to Newfoundland. So impressed was he by the Island's mineral resources that after leaving Bluff Head he sought financial backing in the United States to exploit other Newfoundland mineral deposits. His efforts brought a number of New Jersey businessmen together to incorporate the Humber Consolidated Mining and Manufacturing Company Limited in September 1902. The company took on Willis as resident manager and subsequently worked three mines in western Newfoundland: a chromite mine at Chrome Point, a pyrite mine at Goose Arm and, most important, a copper mine in York Harbour.