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

Willis leased the Chrome Point mine in 1902. To avoid French interference, he arranged to build a railway for carrying the ore from the mine site to the Bay of Islands, where the French seldom ventured. About $48,000 of the Humber company's money went into laying a railroad bed to the Newfoundland Railway, buying locomotives and ore cars and erecting storage sheds and loading facilities at Petries Point in the Bay of Islands. However, as miners prepared the first shipment of chromite, Willis changed his plans. He informed the men that the Humber company was quitting Chrome Point to concentrate upon the most promising of its possessions: the York Harbour copper mine.

York Harbour Mine

The story of the York Harbour copper mine began a decade before the Humber company leased the York Harbour claim in 1902. Around 1892, a 62-year old prospector named Daniel Henderson explored the district. He had moved from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland in the mid-1850s and had worked as a soapmaker, mine promoter and prospector. His one success in the latter field came in 1893; in that summer he located the York Harbour copper deposit in a gulch 1000 feet up Blomidown Mountain.

Henderson had little ready cash and in November 1893 wrote to John R. Stewart of Messrs. Matheson and Company in Little Bay asking if the company would like to lease his find. Stewart forwarded the letter to Matheson, whose terse reply was: "We're obliged for your perusal of Henderson's York Harbour claim letter of November 23 ...but we're not interested."⁽¹⁰⁾ More amenable was St. John's merchant A.J. Harvey, who offered Henderson financial support in return for part-ownership of the property. Henderson agreed and in 1897 mining began.

The first people to arrive at York Harbour in the spring of 1897 were mine manager Hedley Smythe and mine captain Charles Rendell. The former became popular with all his associates, but the latter proved ineffectual. Rendell sank four random shafts without doing proper geological assessment work and built a precarious chute and pulley contraption to transport pork barrels of ore down the cliff to the coast. He could make neither miners nor machinery operate efficiently, and by 1899 the mine's total output of 500 tons of ore lay unsold on the shores of the Bay of Islands.

In 1900, Harvey fired the unfortunate Rendell and leased the property to the York Harbour Copper Company of Manchester, England. The transaction happened so rapidly that the 26 miners had barely recovered from bidding Rendell farewell before the new mine captain, James Hooper, appeared in May 1900.

Hooper evolved complicated schemes to renovate the York Harbour operation. Under his supervision, miners deepened one of the four shafts and above it installed a gasoline engine to raise the ore. According to Hedley Smythe, however, Hooper's actual mining skills left something to be desired:

"In this case our local methods of mining were not adhered to, the material result being that although a large body of ore was opened up the workings were in depth gradually going away from instead of toward the regular or main lode. Consequently, the conclusion arrived at was that the bottom of the ore was reached and that it had cut out completely. Having been connected with this property since its first working ...I had every confidence that such was not so..."⁽¹¹⁾

Bad luck compounded Hooper's inadequacies. Sparks from the cookhouse started a fire at the mine in June and forced everyone to flee with their possessions down to the beach. A brief visit from the French navy squelched plans to build a new pier and tramway; and a summer dysentery epidemic struck the settlement, rendering many of the miners helpless for days.

What with misfortune and mismanagement, Hooper raised and exported only 100 tons of ore before the York Harbour Copper Company's lease expired. Harvey refused to renew it. He formed The Western Copper Company Limited in 1902 with, among others, Charles Willis of the Humber Consolidated Mining and Manufacturing Company, and Daniel Henderson. The Western company leased the York Harbour mine to Willis in October 1902, and he in turn leased it to the Humber company.⁽¹²⁾

Willis retained Hedley Smythe as mine manager and put 200 men at his disposal. Smythe made the most of the opportunity and before long had transformed the York Harbour mine into the most sophisticated Newfoundland mine outside of Notre Dame Bay. The men sank the shaft to 300 feet, drove out six levels and laid an underground railway between the levels and the shaft. Using lumber from Goose Arm on the north side of the Bay of Islands,⁽¹³⁾ they erected secondary tramways and chutes to convey the cobbed and sorted ore to a mile-long overhead tramway leading down to the beach. There the cars dumped ore into a V-shaped ore pocket that funnelled it through into smaller orecars that moved by rail to the end of a pier.⁽¹⁴⁾ Between 1902 and 1905, about 15,000 tons of ore left York Harbour for the United States.

With all the modern equipment and ready market, the York Harbour mining operation should have swollen with profits and rivalled Little Bay. However, financial problems caused by mismanagement and misappropriation of funds undermined the company's stability and on 19 January 1905 forced it to mortgage the mine and chattels. By doing so, the Humber company blatantly violated a crucial clause in its 1902 contract with The Western Copper Company.

A.J. Harvey's reaction to the mortgage deal was predictable: he sued the Humber company for breach of contract. The company failed to show up for the court case, in which Harvey accused Willis of skulduggery and of operating the mine in an "unworkmanlike manner".⁽¹⁵⁾ The judge awarded the property to the Western company on 12 May 1906. The Humber company retired from Newfoundland and wound up its affairs.