Map showing the
COAL FIELDS
and
MINERAL DISTRICTS
of
AMERICA
[Larger view]

Nowhere in the world, perhaps, does human activity display a more restless energy than on the site of the Newcastle Coal-field, where, night and day, successive trains heaped with the black diamonds of England speed along far-stretching railways, and hurry down to river and ocean, until they are unloaded and their contents shipped by machinery. Steam-engines are unceasingly at work drawing coals and pumping out water. Thousands of men are underneath our feet cutting down the coal by severe and peculiar labour, while thousands above are receiving the loads and speeding them forwards.

‘Go where you will, there is a network of small railways, leading from pit to pit in hopeless intricacy, but all having a common terminus on the river’s bank or the ocean’s shore. Go where you will, tall chimneys rise up before you, and here and there a low line of black sheds, flanked by chimneys of aspiring altitude, indicates that you are arriving at a colliery. As you draw nearer, men and boys of blackest hue pass you and peer at you with inquiring glances. Now trains of coal-waggons rush by more frequently, noises of the most discordant character increase, and you know that you are at the pit’s mouth, when you behold two gigantic wooden arms slanting upwards, upon which are mounted the pulleys and wheels that carry the huge flat wire ropes of the shaft. For a moment the wheels do not revolve—no load is ascending or descending—but the next minute they turn rapidly, and up comes the load of coals or human beings to the surface. Perhaps the most impressive sight is a large colliery fully engaged at nightwork, with burning crates of coal suspended all around; and after this a view from some neighbouring eminence of all the far-flaming waste coal-heaps, burning up the accumulation of waste and small coal not worth carriage, ever added to the ever-consuming mound, until the whole district appears like the active crater of some enormous volcano.’[[65]]

The banks of the Tyne are in many places very high and precipitous, and consequently render peculiar contrivances necessary for the shipping of the coals. The means used for this purpose are various: sometimes inclined tunnels, through which the train of waggons is lowered in chains to the water; sometimes slopes, along which the coals are shovelled into the ship, or still better, the ingenious mechanism of which William Howitt gives us the following description:—

‘As you advance over the plain you see a whole train of waggons loaded with coal, careering by themselves without horse, without steam-engine, without man, except that there sits one behind, who, instead of endeavouring to propel these mad waggons on their way, seems labouring hopelessly by his weight to detain them.

‘But what is your amazement when you come in sight of the river Tyne, and see these waggons still careering on to the very brink of the water!—to see a railway carried from the high bank, and supported on tall piles, horizontally, above the surface of the river, and to some distance into it, as if to allow those vagabond trains of waggons to run right off, and dash themselves down into the river!

SHIPPING COAL.

‘There they go, all mad together! Another moment, and they will shoot over the end of the lofty railway, and go headlong into the Tyne, helter-skelter. But behold! these creatures are not so mad as you imagine them. They are instinct with sense; they have a principle of self-preservation, as well as of speed, in them. See, as they draw near the river they pause, they stop! one by one they detach themselves; and as one devoted waggon runs on, like a victim given up for the salvation of the rest, to perform a wild summersault into the water below, what do we see? It is caught! A pair of gigantic arms separate themselves from the end of the railway. They catch the waggon, they hold it suspended in the air, they let it softly and gently descend—and whither? Into the water? No; we see now that a ship already lies below the end of the railway. The waggon descends to it; a man standing there strikes a bolt, the bottom falls, and the coals which it contains are nicely deposited in the hold of the vessel. Up, again, soars the empty waggon in that pair of gigantic arms. It reaches the railway; it glides like a black swan into its native lake upon it; and away it goes, as of its own accord, to a distance, to await its brethren, who successively perform the same exploit, and then joining it, all scamper back again as hard as they can over the plain to the distant pit.’