Venturing back in time and deep underground
Alice Kennedy was well into her 70s before she ever saw the black, cold depths of the iron ore mine that sustained her family for generations.
She took a public tour of the rocky labyrinth deep underground on Bell Island, off Portugal Cove, N.L., about 15 years ago.
“She was crying at the top of the mine,” recalled her daughter, Teresita (Teddy) McCarthy, now manager of the popular tourism draw.
“She said: ‘You know women are not allowed in the mine.’ ”
Women and girls were considered bad luck and therefore banned as men and boys as young as nine dug out almost 80 million tonnes of iron ore hauled up into daylight between 1895 and 1966 when the last of six Bell Island mines closed.
McCarthy’s mother was overcome when she finally saw the winding tunnels of blasted and hand-chipped rock that go on for almost five kilometres, at one point reaching almost 540 metres below Conception Bay.
“She said: ‘I never knew. I never knew that’s where my father went and your father went so we could live.’ ”
Many of those tunnels are now flooded. But the No. 2 mine and museum attract about 13,000 visitors each year, McCarthy said.
Iron ore once shipped from the scenic island a 20-minute ferry ride from Portugal Cove, northwest of St. John’s, helped build Germany’s combat arsenals in both the First World War and the Second World War.
It was used “against us,” said tour guide Ed Fitzgerald.
Bell Island ore also helped rebuild Europe as peace was restored after 1945, he added.
As McCarthy likes to say, there is a sense of the sacred as you walk down into the damp darkness that was lit over time with candles, seal oil lamps and finally electricity. Old shovels, bottles and wheels of the carts that men filled over and over are now artifacts that sit against the rock walls.
“To me, it’s like walking into a church because you sense the fact that people worked, lived and some died in that mine,” McCarthy said. The Canadian Press