Some Notes on Coal Mining on the T’sable River
by Graham Brazier
[It is important to note that there is nothing in the public record to indicate that the aboriginal inhabitants of the area adjacent to the mine site were considered before the events recorded below were initiated, and even today, the lands remain unceded.]
“The islands of Denman and Hornby and the Vancouver Island Coast opposite got their first impetus in settlement from the opening of the now forsaken Baynes Sound Coal Mine. That enterprise failed through lack of capital to thoroughly prosecute the work; but good coal is known to exist in the vicinity.” The British Columbia Directory 1887 E. Mallandaine & R.T. Williams, Publishers, p. 169.
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Before the first ton of coal was extracted from the banks of the Tsable River on Vancouver Island in November of 1876 the rights to that ton had passed through the hands of countless coalitions and alliances of entrepreneurs from Victoria, San Francisco and London and had been bought, sold, traded and squabbled over for more than a decade. Ultimately, however, it was the Baynes Sound Colliery Company Limited of Victoria (a collection of small local businessmen) that was caught holding the bag when things fell apart less than one year after the mine began production. Financiers from the U.S. and U.K., it seems, bought and sold artfully, and were long gone by then.
Though the saga of the short-lived coal mine on the Tsable River undoubtedly began with the discovery of coal on the shores of Baynes Sound in the 1860s – when it was hoped coal might replace wind as a source of energy for moving Her Majesty’s war ships through water – most of the resource development activity for the following decade took place on paper in offices far removed from the site of the outcropping. Much of this activity was conducted by the small but energetic business community in Victoria and was set in motion by a request received by the Colonial Secretary of The Colony of Vancouver Island in June of 1865 to record the discovery of a seam of coal ‘at a distance as near as can be determined, 40 miles from Nanaimo’.
Following a flurry of interest amongst several instantly formed coalitions of local businessmen, the Colonial Government, on November 14, 1865, awarded a six month lease for a tract of land amounting to 7,040 acres to a group calling itself the Baynes Sound Coal Company. The land included much of the main channel of the, largely unknown, Tsable River and extended five miles inland from the mouth. The fee was $55. No assessment of the quality or quantity of the coal was reported until March of the following year when Victoria’s daily newspaper, The British Colonist,reported that the samples of coal brought to Victoria were ‘good and the veins are said to be extensive’.
In April the Company was granted a three month extension, but that was the end of what might have been a simple straight-forward story with a predictable trajectory. The Company failed to pay the undisclosed fee (presumably, something less than $55) for the extension of the lease, and it lapsed amid accusations that the group had no capital and was only interested in selling rights to ‘Capitalists from San Francisco’.
Almost immediately, a lease was granted to The Black Diamond Coal Company of San Francisco and the area reduced to 6,400 acres. The British Colonist, however,reported that the Government had ‘sold’ the property to the American company andpredicted trouble at the site as the Baynes Sound Coal Company claimed ‘that they were legally in possession [of the lands] at the time of such sale’. It was therefore, amid some controversy that the San Francisco company hired a Victoria-based Civil Mining Engineer by the name of John Landale, to locate and evaluate the coal seams on the banks of the Tsable River. Accordingly, Landale, and a party of four ‘practical miners’ from San Francisco landed at the site on September 22, 1866. No violence was reported as the party spent a number of months in the vicinity and, in January of 1867, filed an optimistic assessment. Landale noted the first outcroppings were found at a distance of 3 ¼ miles from the shore and “the general nature of the strata is strongly indicative of a valuable coalfield…this is without question the best coalfield yet discovered on Vancouver [Island].” He identified three seams with a potential of 8,000,000 tons per annum. As they were easily accessible and could command a higher price than Nanaimo, he thought they could be rapidly brought into production. He concluded with a detailed list of expenditures required to construct the appropriate infrastructure. These totaled $40,100.
The response of the Black Diamond Coal Company to Landale’s extensive and positive report seems to indicate that $40,100 was prohibitive. They allowed their lease (the one erroneously reported as a ‘sale’) to lapse in the summer of 1867 and Landale’s assessment never reached the public. Almost immediately, in July of 1867, the lease was returned to the Baynes Sound Coal Company and this time the Chief Commissioner of Lands and Works laid out several specific conditions. Under the terms of a Local Mining License the company was required to hire and equip six men to begin the search for coal on the land and it was given three months (from September 21) to submit a survey and a plan for 5,000 of the 6,400 acres. In other words, the work of Landale had to be duplicated by the Baynes Sound Coal Company. The company must have found this too demanding for nothing further seems to have been done.
And so it went. For another nine years: alliances were formed, dissolved and reformed while leases were granted and lapsed. Throughout this period the press periodically reported activity at Baynes Sound and invariably ended with a prediction that the opening of a mine was imminent. Then in May of 1869 it was announced that the rights had been purchased by ‘a rich firm in San Francisco which intends to open [it] forthwith and work it on an extensive scale’. Two years later, with no further activity at the site, The British Colonist reported that the sale of the ‘mine’ (though none yet existed) ‘has been effected to an English Company for $60,000’.
Presumably the English company was bought-out sometime before the fall of 1875 when The Baynes Sound Coal Mining Company Limited (previously; the Baynes Sound Coal Company) became the Baynes Sound Colliery Company Limited and The British Colonist announced “that R. Finlayson Esq., of Victoria, and others are about to commence opening up the Baynes Sound Coal Mine, and the work will be pushed forward to a speedy completion.”
This time, it seems, they were correct, for it was April of 1876, almost eleven years after the first lease had been granted, when a work-party of 30 men under the direction of A.J. Mclellan arrived on the shores of Baynes Sound equipped to build a tramway to the mine site. Mclellan, was apparently a doer, for a mere two months later it was reported that:
“Mr. A. J. McLellan and party returned from Baynes Sound…having successfully completed the contract for constructing a railroad from the water’s edge to the new coal mine and a wharf. Everything has been left in perfect readiness to receive the rails, etc;…the work including side track, is over four miles in length and has 23 bridges, from 24 to 200 feet in length. Some heavy cutting through rock had to be done to reach the mine, and in the course of their operation the workmen struck a new seam of coal, seven feet in thickness of as good quality as the original seam. The new wharf is a T 500 feet long and 86 feet broad, with 24 feet at the end at extreme low water, where two large ships may load at once. The work has been executed two months and seven days within the contract time! The contract price was $16,500.”
The buoyant news continued to flow and by November, the rails, locomotive and rolling stock were in place and the narrow gauge tramway was ready to deliver coal to the wharf for shipment to Victoria and San Francisco. The rolling stock consisted of 1Baldwin 8-ton locomotive and 21 4-ton cars which could deliver 300 tons of coal to the wharf per day. Finally, after more than a decade of capitalist paper maneuvers, on November 1st 1876, fifty-five men employed by the Baynes Sound Colliery Company Limited commenced mining from three tunnels. Forty-two ‘Whites’ were paid $2 per day and thirteen ‘Chinese’ were paid $1 per day. Optimism was such that a town was built at the water’s edge. A sawmill capable of cutting 10,000 feet of lumber a day provided material for the construction of the town called ‘Quadra’. In January of 1877 it contained ‘a dozen settlers, post office, hotel, store, saloon…and was fast becoming a center for the districts of Denman and Hornby Islands.’ In the company’s first two months of operation, miners extracted 600 tons of coal. And that was the end of the good news: the company sold only 98 of those tons.
By October of 1877 the mine employed only seven men and the stock of unsold coal grew to 700 tons. This surplus has been attributed to depressed coal prices in San Francisco; however, as other mines on Vancouver Island increased production between 1876 and 1877, it seems there may have been other reasons for the mine failure. Insufficient capital and high costs of extraction seem likely possibilities. In any case, by the end of 1880, all the machinery had all been removed from the Baynes Sound Mine. While the closure of the mine meant financial disaster for the shareholders of Baynes Sound Colliery Company Limited, for Denman Island, the closing of the mine resulted in its first recorded population growth spurt. Along with a number of ex-mine-workers, including Andrew McDonald, Robert Swan, John McCutcheon, David Pickles and Tom Pickard the ‘Quadra’ post-office moved from the eastern shores of Baynes Sound to the western shore of Denman Island and for a number of years – well into the 1880s – continued to operate under the name of ‘Quadra’.
Read more: Part II: The T’sable River Mine (1946-1966)
Denman Opposes Coal 