This information is rather startling when communicated at a depth of four hundred and twenty feet under ground. We should decidedly have preferred to receive it in the counting-house! It makes us pause for an instant, to the miner's infinite amusement, in the very act of knocking away about an inch of ore from the rock, as a memento of Botallack. Having, however, ventured, on reflection, to assume the responsibility of weakening our defense against the sea by the length and breadth of an inch, we secure our piece of copper, and next proceed to discuss the propriety of descending two hundred and forty feet more of ladders, for the sake of visiting that part of the mine where the men are at work.
Two or three causes concur to make us doubt the wisdom of going lower. There is a hot, moist, sickly vapor floating about us, which becomes more oppressive every moment; we are already perspiring at every pore, as we were told we should, and our hands, faces, jackets, and trowsers, are all more or less covered with a mixture of mud, tallow, and iron-drippings, which we can feel and smell much more accurately than is exactly desirable. We ask the miner what there is to see lower down. He replies, nothing but men breaking ore with pickaxes; the galleries of the mine are alike, however deep they may go: when you have seen one, you have seen all.
The answer decides us—we determine to get back to the surface.
We returned along the gallery, just as we had advanced, with the same large allowance of scrambling, creeping, and stumbling on our way. I was charitably carried along and down the platform over the pit by my trowsers, as before: our order of procession only changed when we gained the ladders again. Then, our friend the miner went last instead of first, upon the same principle of being ready to catch us if we fell, which led him to precede us on our descent. Except that one of the rounds cracked under his weight as we went up, we ascended without casualties of any kind. As we neared the mouth of the shaft, the daylight atmosphere looked dazzlingly white, after the darkness in which we had been groping so long; and when we once more stood out on the cliff, we felt a cold, health-giving purity in the sea-breeze, and, at the same time, a sense of recovered freedom in the power that we now enjoyed of running, jumping, and stretching our limbs in perfect security and with full space for action, which it was almost a new sensation to experience. Habit teaches us to think little of the light and air that we live and breathe in, or, at most, to view them only as the ordinary conditions of our being. To find out that they are more than this, that they are a luxury as well as a necessity of life, go down into a mine, and compare what you can exist in there, with what you do exist in, on upper earth!
On re-entering the counting-house, we were greeted by the welcome appearance of two large tubs of water, with soap and flannel placed invitingly by their sides. Copious ablutions and clean clothes, are potent restorers of muscular energy. These, and a half hour of repose, enabled us to resume our knapsacks as briskly as ever, and walk on fifteen miles to the town of St. Ives—our resting-place for the night.
Serious accidents are rare in the mines of Cornwall. From the horrors of such explosions as take place in coal-mines, they are by their nature entirely free. The casualties that oftenest occur are serious falls, generally produced by the carelessness of inexperienced, or foolhardy people. Of these, and of extraordinary escapes from death with which they are associated, many anecdotes are told in mining districts, which would appear to the reader exaggerated, or positively untrue, if I related them on mere hearsay evidence. There was, however, one instance of a fall down the shaft of a mine, unattended with fatal consequences, which occurred while I was in Cornwall; and which I may safely adduce, for I can state some of the facts connected with the affair, as an eye-witness. I attended an examination of the sufferer by a medical man, and heard the story of the accident from the parents of the patient.
On the 7th of August last, a boy fourteen years of age, the son of a miner, slipped into the shaft of Boscaswell Down Mine, in the neighborhood of Penzance. He fell to the depth of thirteen fathoms, or seventy-eight feet. Fifty-eight feet down, he struck his left side against a board placed across the shaft, snapped it in two, and then falling twenty feet more, pitched on his head. He was of course taken up insensible; the doctor was sent for; and, on examining him, found, to his amazement, that there was actually a chance of the boy's recovery after his tremendous fall!
Not a bone in his body was broken. He was bruised and scratched all over, and there were three cuts—none of them serious—on his head. The board stretched across the shaft, twenty feet from the bottom, had saved him from being dashed to pieces; but had inflicted, at the same time, where his left side had struck it, the only injury that appeared dangerous to the medical man—a large, hard lump that could be felt under the bruised skin. The boy showed no symptoms of fever; his pulse, day after day, was found never varying from eighty-two to the minute; his appetite was voracious; and the internal functions of his body only required a little ordinary medicine to keep them properly at work. In short, nothing was to be dreaded but the chance of the formation of an abscess in his left side, between the hip and ribs. He had been under medical care exactly one week, when I accompanied the doctor on a visit to him.
The cottage where he lived with his parents, though small, was neat and comfortable. We found him lying in bed, awake. He looked sleepy and lethargic; but his skin was moist and cool; his face displayed neither paleness, nor injury of any kind. He had just eaten a good dinner of rabbit-pie; and was anxious to be allowed to sit up in a chair, and amuse himself by looking out of the window. His left side was first examined. A great circular bruise discolored the skin, over the whole space between the hip and ribs; but on touching it, the doctor discovered that the lump beneath had considerably decreased in size, and was much less hard than it had felt during previous visits. Next, we looked at his back and arms—they were scratched and bruised all over; but nowhere seriously. Lastly, the dressings were taken off his head, and three cuts were disclosed, which even a non-medical eye could easily perceive to be of no great importance. Such were all the results of a fall of seventy-eight feet!
The boy's father reiterated to me the account of the accident, just as I had already heard it from the doctor. How it happened, he said, could only be guessed, for his son had completely forgotten all the circumstances immediately preceding the fall; neither could he communicate any of the sensations which must have attended it. Most probably, he had been sitting dangling his legs idly over the mouth of the shaft, and had so slipped in. But, however the accident really happened, there the sufferer was before us—less seriously hurt than many a lad who has trodden on a piece of orange peel as he was walking along the street.