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his eternal curiosity. Most of all I wanted to be like Dawson, but not when he was changing the world with Lyell. I preferred to imagine him, sketchbook in hand, prospector’s hammer in a bag slung over his shoulder, making his way from one end of Nova Scotia to the other, whether workingas a geologist or as the province’s first superintendent of education, which involved meticulously visiting every school in every district.
    Dawson was mad for rocks; he couldn’t help himself, even though it nearly killed him. A trip he made one April, while trying to get to the root of the province’s educational woes, was perhaps illustrative: travelling over the North Mountain in the Annapolis Valley in a light snowstorm, addressing an educational meeting in “that somewhat isolated locality,” then convincing local fishermen to take him at daybreak through heavy seas to see a large fall from a cliff a few miles down the coast. Amidst the debris he found “an amazing quantity of fine zeolites with which we loaded the boat and returned to Black Rock in time to pack the specimens before breakfast.” Then he left for Aylesford, twenty-five miles away, before continuing west to picturesque Digby Neck. He took the ferry to Long Island, “on which no conveyance was to be had.” There he walked the island’s entire ten-mile length, examining rocks as he went.
    Dawson travelled mostly by horse, whether riding or via stagecoach, sometimes by boat or on foot, and, as he put it, “my educational and geological journeys were therefore not only attended with much labour, but occasionally with some risk.” If you want to understand the extent of Nova Scotia’s coalfields, it’s instructive to see things through his eyes. To consider, for a moment, the awe he may have felt traversing the land near Sydney, on Cape Breton Island, where he was transfixed by fossilized rain marks—“the finest example yet known”—and by shales he declared “also much more rich than those at the Joggins in the leaves and other more delicate parts of plants.”
    Then there was the sheer immensity of the Sydney coalfield, within which thirty-four coal seams had by then been identified. At that point Dawson wouldn’t have precisely understood how slowly the transformation of ancient wetlands into energy sourceoccurred. Peat, we now know, accumulates gradually, growing only four millimetres a year in the modern tropics. A coal seam one metre thick was originally five to ten metres of peat, and took perhaps 2,500 years to accumulate; each of the coal beds of Joggins represents about 1,000 years of peat accumulation. By comparison, the coal seams of the Sydney coalfield, 4.3 metres at their thickest, were the product of roughly 10,000 years of natural history. Neither Dawson nor his guide, Richard Brown, the manager of the Sydney Mines, would have realized one key point about the formation. It would take deeper coal mines in the area, and the boreholes of offshore drill ships, to show that the coal-bearing rocks extend nearly to the south coast of Newfoundland. Fully 98 percent of the Sydney field is underwater.
    At some point Dawson made his way to the island’s southwest coast, where the coal seams spectacularly outcrop in the coastal cliffs. Near the Gaelic settlement of Mabou, the exposures rivalled the Joggins shore and the near-vertical position of the faults underscored the geological upheavals that had occurred there. Dawson explored the nearby Inverness field, where coal-bearing rocks occupy a land area of about nine square miles, along with the Mabou field, with its eight coal seams, just twenty-five kilometres away. In the seams near Port Hood he found sigillaria stumps that were almost as good as the ones found at Joggins.
    In fits and starts he made his way through the coalfields of the mainland, to Joggins, where the seams rarely exceeded a metre in thickness and the coal itself contained troublesome amounts of sulphur and ash. Then to “a