Vivian’s works, the most important of the establishments of Swansea, are situated in a vale a couple of miles from the town. A maritime canal enables brigs to sail at high tide up to the smelting furnaces, whence a second canal leads to the coal-pits, ascending the hill by a succession of locks. Although in the building of this huge factory not a thought was given to grace or beauty of form, utility being the sole aim in view, still its vast extent leaves on the mind a certain impression of grandeur.
The whole smelting process is carried on in reverberatory furnaces.[[49]] In order to disengage the sulphur and other volatile impurities, the ore is first roasted in at least sixteen of these powerful ovens, each of which holds forty hundredweight, and performs its office in six hours. The smoke of all these furnaces collects in a huge chimney, which, after climbing the hill for about six hundred feet, ends in a mighty column two hundred feet high. The roasted ores are then mixed with a certain proportion of fluor spar, and smelted in twenty smaller reverberatory furnaces. A ton is introduced at a time, and in each oven seven tons can be smelted in twenty-four hours. It would lead me too far were I to enter into more minute details. I will therefore briefly state that the copper is still obliged to pass four times through differently constructed furnaces before it is sufficiently pure to be rolled into sheets or to be granulated, a condition in which it is used for the fabrication of brass, as it then presents more surface to the action of the zinc, and combines with it more readily. To produce this granulation, the metal is poured into a large ladle pierced with holes, and placed above a cistern filled with water, which must be hot or cold according to the form of the grains required. When it is hot, round grains are obtained, analogous to lead shot, and the copper in this state is called bean shot. When the melted copper falls into cold water perpetually renewed, the granulations are irregular, thin, and ramified, constituting feathered shot.
The process of preparing the copper does not present the bustle and activity nor the glare and brilliancy of an ironwork. The smoke and vapour disengaged from the ore are of the most noxious and disagreeable kind, and impart to the whole neighbourhood a singularly gloomy character. The stunted vegetation is so kept down by it that there are no trees, and, instead of grass, a dry, yellow, sickly growth of chamomile barely covers the ground. When viewed from a neighbouring eminence at night, the livid glare from the chimneys, the rolling white clouds of smoke which fill up the valley beneath, the desolate-looking heaps of slag, and the pungent sulphurous vapours remind the spectator of
‘The dismal situation, waste and wild,
The dungeon horrible on all sides round,’
where Satan lay weltering after his fall from heaven.
After England, Sweden, Germany, and Russia take the lead among the copper-producing countries of Europe.
The mines of Fahlun in Dalecarlia are no less remarkable for their picturesque appearance than the celebrated iron mines of Dannemora in the same province. A vast pit, 1,200 feet long, 600 feet broad, and above 180 feet deep, with precipitous, sometimes vertical, and occasionally even overhanging walls, opens before the spectator, who might fancy himself standing on the brink of an enormous crater. ‘The aspect of this deep chasm,’ says Professor Haussmann,[[50]] ‘affords a desolate picture of ruin caused by improvidence and waste, as it owes its origin to the successive fallings in of subterranean excavations carelessly widened and left without sufficient supports. From the vast mounds of rubbish accumulated at the bottom of the pit, remnants of ancient shafts, formed of thick beams of wood, are seen protruding, but these show only a part of the devastation produced by the great falling in which took place in the year 1678. On the northern side of the pit is a broad and convenient wooden staircase, by which not only the miners, but also the horses used for working the subterranean machinery, descend to the bottom. Thence it gradually winds underground to a depth of 177 fathoms.’
As is generally the case in Sweden, the ore of Fahlun forms considerable masses, the chief being a vast reniform lump 1,200 feet long and 600 broad at its upper surface, and gradually narrowing as it descends. Near this gigantic stock are situated similar deposits, which though of smaller dimensions are still very considerable. From the copper pyrites being deposited chiefly on the circumference or the outer shell of these reniform masses, which are themselves of extremely irregular outline, the mining operations are carried on with great difficulty, and exhibit a perfect labyrinth of crooked and winding galleries, situated at various depths, and supported by pillars or sometimes by walls—a peculiarity which explains the successive fallings in that have formed the enormous pit of Fahlun. The mine has been worked from time immemorial, and is said to have been known even before the Christian era. The oldest document extant bears the date of the year 1347, and contains the privileges granted to the proprietors of the mine by King Olaus Smek; but still more ancient documents are mentioned, among others a purchase-deed of the year 1200. As the ores are poor, their abundance alone renders the working of the mine profitable; but Fahlun has seen its best days and is doomed to a gradual decline. During its greatest prosperity it is said to have yielded 5,000 tons of copper annually, but in 1866 it furnished no more that 600 tons, or about one-third of the entire production of Sweden.
In 1719 a body, preserved from corruption by the vitriolic water with which it had been saturated, was found in an abandoned part of the Fahlun mines. When it had been brought up to the surface, the whole neighbourhood flocked together to see it; but nobody could recognise a lost friend or kinsman in its young and handsome features. At length an old woman, more than 80 years of age, approached with tottering steps, and casting a glance on the corpse, uttered a piercing shriek and fell senseless on the ground. She had instantly recognised her affianced lover, who had mysteriously disappeared more than sixty years previously, but whose image she still bore in her faithful memory. As he was not employed in the mines, no search had been made for him underground at the time. Most probably he had fallen, by some accident, into one of the numerous crevices by which the surface of the mines is traversed. Thus the tottering woman, weighed down with the double burden of infirmity and age, saw once more the face of her lover as she had looked upon it in the days of her youth.