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found small pieces in the igneous trap rocks in the Bay of Fundyand some “trifling deposits” in the harder sand stones on the shores of the Northumberland Strait—never enough, though, to be worth the expense and bother of extraction. His message for the bosses back in London was clear: forget about copper. Focus on coal. Coal, by God, that was the future.

CHAPTER THREE
A Ponderous Pyramid of Ruins
    L oaded to the gunwales with mining machinery, supplies and equipment, the brig
Margaret Pilkington
entered Pictou Harbour on June 4, 1822. Her deck was a sea of dark wool greatcoats and pale whiskered faces. Among the hundred colliers and their family members arriving from the north of England one man, by dress and demeanour, would have stood out from the others. A painting presumably done during Richard Smith’s thirteen-year tenure as “general mine superintendent for Messrs. Rundell, Bridge, and Rundell of Ludgate Hill, in the City of London” shows a balding man with a fringe of white hair fashioned into a whirling comb-over. Thin lips, an elegantly formed nose festooned with a spiderweb of broken blood vessels, an old man’s sunken cheeks even though he was at most in his early fifties. The eyes get you: slightly bored, condescending maybe—as if it’s all beneath him—which seems about right for the scion of a prominent Staffordshire coal-steel family with something still to prove. Smith, who could trace his ancestry to a courtier in William of Normandy’s entourage, said he knew about coal “from my youthupwards.” That didn’t stop him from going broke when the coal and iron boom collapsed at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Smith rebuilt his reputation by managing mines in Wales and Portugal. At forty-four, he still had enough fire in his belly to accept when the GMA asked him to help establish their coal-mining operations in Nova Scotia.
    There, he supervised the assembly of Nova Scotia’s first steam engine—with pump, hoisting drum and chain and a boiler—at John MacKay’s blacksmith shop in Pictou. Once complete, it was thrown into the harbour, where, to the astonishment of all, it floated rather than sank. From there it was towed seven miles up the East River, an apparition on the black waters, until it reached the spot where the GMA would create the colony of Albion Mines—named, Cameron writes, after the ancient name for Great Britain, Allbyn.
    Smith had hardly arrived before petitioning Lieutenant Governor James Kempt for the eviction of settlers who lived on land atop or adjacent to the outcrop of coal. Within days of the
Margaret Pilkington’s
arrival his men were sinking a new pit, the Storr, into the Foord seam; three months later the GMA had its first shipment of coal. Smith described the gas he discovered in the seams as “abundant, almost beyond precedent” and the water as “exceedingly troublesome.” With his employers’ blessing, he forged ahead anyway, using the steam engine instead of the usual horses to pump water out of the mine and to hoist coal to the surface. Under Smith’s direction the men built the first steamship in Nova Scotia, using an engine built in the GMA’s own foundry. They built coke ovens, brickworks, mills, carpenter’s shops and a foundry, run by imported British foundry men. They made wharves, railways and roads. They erected houses for the workingmen, barns and stables for the horses.
    Smith was bringing the same forces that were transforming England to the backwaters of Nova Scotia. In that way, the coming of the GMA was rather like the arrival of the banana company in Macondo, the jungle town in Gabriel Garcìa Márquez’s
One Hundred Years of Solitude:
“Endowed with means that had been preserved for Divine Providence in former times they [the company] changed the pattern of the rains, accelerated the cycle of harvests and moved the river from where it had always been.” In time, coal provided cargo for the wooden ships built in Pictou County.