From Job to Job around the World

by Alfred C. B. Fletcher

The First Load for Shore

Advent Bay, on whose shores the camp of the company is situated, is a small body of water and is on the northeastern side of Ice Fjord, of which it is a part. The company has a wharf with coal bunkers which is not accessible for steamers until the ice breaks and flows out—about the first of July each year. The camp consists of a store, a mess pavilion, a power plant, four warehouses, the manager's cottage and about a dozen bunk-houses for the men. This little settlement is called Longyear City, being named after the president of the company, and its inhabitants proudly boast that it is the most northerly city in the world, thus cold-heartedly snatching this distinction from Hammerfest, on the northern coast of Norway. Hammerfest is a town of five thousand people and is described in tourist literature as being the nearest municipality to the North Pole. Longyear City is seven hundred and twenty-five miles from the Pole, and therefore has Hammerfest beaten for the honour by nearly a thousand miles!

Twenty small frame buildings comprised the total number of dwellings that the little snow-clad village could muster, and these were all the property of the Arctic Coal Company. On the sides of the small houses were nailed the hides of polar bears, killed by the miners during the winter, and the walls inside were decorated with the skins of the white fox, an animal whose fur is as white as snow and as soft as a baby's cheek. The mine was about fifteen hundred feet above the camp on the side of a hill and was connected from below by a zig-zag trail. The coal was conveyed to the stock pile on the shore of the bay by means of an aerial tramway about one mile in length. Supplies were transported from the store to the mine by an incline. The mine was simply a horizontal hole in the ground, about two thousand seven hundred feet long, and an elevator was an unknown device to this dark tunnel. The roofs of the drifts were frozen and numerous icicles hung down in such a manner that the huge cavern looked like a grotto in fairy land.

On the arrival of the summer crew the winter superintendent turned the direction of the camp over to Manager Turner. The one hundred men who had spent the eight months of the winter at the mine immediately started across the ice to the Munroe, which, the following day, was to take them back to Norway. There was no end of work to be done. I organised the office, instructed the German bookkeeper to open a set of accounts and started the "Mulligan" to feed the two hundred and fifty men. My biggest job was taking an inventory of all supplies in the camp. The stock in the store had to be listed first, and this task was begun and completed the night of my arrival; in the morning we were open for business. This little mercantile establishment was a grocery store, hardware store, butcher shop, dry goods store, boot shop and haberdashery all in one. Everything was displayed on its shelves, from a needle to a miner's drill. Hairpins and cheese, socks and salmon, nails and raisins, boots and bacon, leather vests and condensed milk, shovels and cold storage eggs, were all piled together like an assortment in an American junk shop. The morning its doors opened nearly the whole camp of two hundred and fifty men made a run on the place, crowding before its counter and scrambling to be waited on by the two Norwegian clerks. Each man wanted to outfit himself so that he could go to work the next day. Much confusion resulted because of the many duplications of names, and many accounts were charged to the wrong man. There were a score of Ole Olesens, a dozen Johan Jensens, a half-dozen Johan Johnsens and several each of Johnsons, Johannesens and what not. We finally had to rename each man whose customary designation caused confusion with those of his fellow workers.

The inventory of the supplies in the four warehouses was the big task. Before we could even get possession of the articles to tabulate and price them we were compelled to dig them out of the ice with picks and shovels. I had a crew working for nearly a week excavating dynamos, engines, barrels of oil, mine implements and so forth, before it was possible to know what we had in stock. Then there were supplies in the mine, transformer houses with electrical appliances, powder sheds and three dynamite houses, which all had to be listed and priced. The new supplies, as they arrived from Tromso, had to be inventoried and placed away. With the fresh fish and meat which the company's boats brought from Norway, the fifty mine cars from America, the hundreds of steel rails for new tracks about the camp, the thousands of feet of lumber for construction of buildings, the fixtures for the wireless plant the company was to install, the hundreds of packages of cheese, sacks of flour, beans, potatoes, canned goods and other provisions—my assistants and I were kept busy from six o'clock in the morning until eleven each evening. We were installing a new warehouse card system, and each article in the camp had to be entered and priced. We took no time off at noon except to eat; we worked Sundays, and only laid off for a half hour on the Fourth of July to play baseball.

The miners were paid six kroner a day, and from this amount a krone and a half was deducted for their board. One krone is equal to twenty-seven cents of American money. These wages were nearly double what they were accustomed to receiving in Norway for the same sort of work. However, this comparatively generous pay did not satisfy them, and at the end of the first week they all went on a strike. A walk-out was a serious thing. The company was under contract to deliver coal to several concerns in Norway, and it was paying one hundred and twenty-five dollars a day rental for each of its seven ships and could not afford to permit any of them to be idle. Advent Bay was now clear of ice, and there were three chartered steamers at anchor taking on coal for transportation to Norwegian ports.

The miners demanded that they be paid six kroner a day and free board. After a day's conference with two representatives from the men, the management agreed to the raise on the condition that they would be satisfied for the rest of the summer season. The men accepted these terms and returned to work.

The Munroe arrived on her second trip from Tromso, bringing the remainder of the summer crew. This lot of men consisted of about seventy-five Norwegians, several Russians, Laplanders and Finns. Among the Finns were three labour agitators. These men immediately set to work to stir up trouble and in a short time were successful in again causing dissatisfaction among the miners. The result was a second strike, in which the men demanded a raise of two kroner a day. This would bring their wages up to eight kroner and board. Such an advance was out of the question. The management absolutely refused the demands and discharged every striker in the camp. A complete walk-out followed.