One day—it might have been night as far as our gloomy surroundings indicated—Captain Jan and I were stumbling along one of the levels of Botallack, I know not how many fathoms down. We wore miners’ hats with a candle stuck in front of each by means of a piece of clay. The hats were thicker than a fireman’s helmet, though by no means as elegant. You might have plunged upon them head first without causing a dint.
Captain Jan stopped beside some fallen rocks. We had been walking for more than an hour in these subterranean labyrinths and felt inclined to rest.
“You were asking about the word wheal,” said the captain, sticking his candle against the wall of the level and sitting down on a ledge, “it do signify a mine, as Wheal Frances, Wheal Owles, Wheal Edwards, and the like. When Cornishmen do see a London Company start a mine on a grand scale, with a deal of fuss and superficial show, and an imposing staff of directors, etcetera, while, down in the mine itself, where the real work ought to be done, perhaps only two men and a boy are known to be at work, they shake their heads and button up their pockets; perhaps they call the affair wheal Do-em, and when that mine stops, (becomes what we call a ‘knacked bal’) it may be styled wheal Donem!”
A traveller chanced to pass a water-wheel not long ago, near Saint Just.
“What’s that?” he said to a miner who sat smoking his pipe beside it.
“That, sur? why, that’s a pump, that is.”
“What does it pump?” asked the traveller.
“Pump, sur?” replied the man with a grim smile, “why, et do pump gold out o’ the Londoners!”
There have been too many wheal Do-ems in Cornwall.
Botallack mine is not, I need scarcely say, a wheal Do-em. It is a grand old mine—grand because its beginning is enveloped in the mists of antiquity; because it affords now, and has afforded for ages back, sustenance to hundreds of miners and their families, besides enriching the country; because its situation on the wild cliffs is unusually picturesque, and because its dark shafts and levels not only descend to an immense depth below the surface, but extend far out under the bottom of the sea. Its engine-houses and machinery are perched upon the edge of a steep cliff, and scattered over its face and down among its dark chasms in places where one would imagine that only a sea-gull would dare to venture.