“Newcastle is quite as much devoted to the coal business as the English city from which it was named. More than two million tons of coal are shipped from this port every year, and the engineers who have carefully examined the coal seams say that there is enough coal under Newcastle to keep up the supply at the present rate for more than five hundred years.
“We were first taken to the harbor where the shipments are made. There we found admirable facilities for loading vessels with the products of the mines. They claim that they can handle twenty-five thousand tons of coal daily, and that a good-sized coal steamer can leave port with her cargo six hours after entering. I’m not an expert in such matters, and therefore don’t know, but from what I saw it seems to me that there is no difficulty about it.
“The harbor of Newcastle was not a very good one originally, but they have made it so by extending into the sea a breakwater, which shelters it from the gales that formerly swept it. It is not a large harbor, but an excellent one for its purpose.
“We visited some of the coal sheds and coal breakers, and went into one of the mines. They would gladly have taken us through all the mines in the place, but as one mine is very much like another, we declined to make the rounds of all of them. The one that we entered was about four hundred feet underground. We were lowered in a cage to the bottom of the mine, and then walked through a tunnel to where the men were at work, dodging on our way several loaded cars that were going towards the shaft, as well as empty ones coming from it. The cars were pushed along by men, each of them carrying a little lantern on the front of his hat; in fact, every man whom we saw working underground had one of these lights for his guidance. The tunnel itself was lit up with electric lights, extending from the shaft to the front of the working; and in addition to these, each of us carried a lantern, which was of material assistance in showing us where to place our feet. We had a few stumbles on the way, but nobody experienced a fall.
“When we reached the front of the working, the sight was a curious one. A dozen men—I think there must have been that number at least—were attacking the coal seam, most of them lying on their sides and digging away with picks at the lower part of it. Some of them had worked their way in two or three feet, and were almost out of sight, and I shuddered to think of the possibility that the mass above might fall upon and crush them. I asked our guide if this did not happen sometimes.
“‘Unfortunately, yes,’ he replied. ‘It does happen now and then, and the men on whom the coal falls are more or less severely injured, and perhaps killed. We have to watch the miners constantly, to see that they do not run too great a risk. If we let them have their own way, accidents would be much more frequent than they are.’
“‘Why do they burrow under the coal in that way?’ I asked. ‘Couldn’t they get it out in some manner less dangerous than that?’
“‘That is the way to which they have been accustomed,’ the guide answered, ‘and it is difficult to get them to change. Most of these people come from the coal-mining districts of England, and they are very conservative. Machines have been invented for doing this kind of work, and they are in use in some of the mines, but the men are opposed to them, and in some instances they have disabled or destroyed the machines.’
“Then he went on to explain that the miner makes an opening below the mass of coal in the manner that we saw, and then drills a hole some distance above it, in which to explode a charge of powder. This brings down all the coal below the locality of the explosion. Sometimes it is broken up into lumps that a man can handle, and sometimes it comes down in a single block, which requires another blast to break it up, and then the cars are brought up as near as possible. The coal is loaded into them, and pushed away to the shaft. Each man is paid according to the amount of coal he gets out, and some of them receive large wages. There are about five thousand people employed in the coal mines here, and the probabilities are that the business will be extended, and the coal product of Newcastle increased within a year or two from the present time.”
From Newcastle our friends continued their journey northward to Brisbane, the capital of Queensland. They traveled all the way by rail, changing trains at Stanthorpe, on the frontier. During the delay subsequent upon the change of trains, Harry made the following memorandum in his notebook:—