An­ge­lo Bisses­sars­ingh

Port-of-Spain has one of the finest nat­ur­al har­bours in the world. Be­ing al­most com­plete­ly land­locked, it is not sus­cep­ti­ble to swells or pow­er­ful cur­rents which would make for a dan­ger­ous an­chor­age.Its on­ly fail­ing was that the wa­ter was not deep enough for ships to draw along­side the quay, a prob­lem which was not reme­died un­til the con­struc­tion of a deep wa­ter har­bour in 1931.

Nev­er­the­less, the port was a busy place for ships call­ing from all parts of the world, and coal­ing was a ma­jor eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty. With the com­ing of steamships in the 1820s, sail­ing ves­sels took a back seat, al­though they were not en­tire­ly ob­so­lete. Some steamships even boast­ed masts and sails in case the boil­ers burst (a not un­com­mon oc­cur­rence due to poor met­al cast­ings).

Steamships and coal

Trinidad was a great port of call for many large ship­ping lines, in­clud­ing the Roy­al Mail Steamship Pack­et Com­pa­ny and the White Star Line, own­ers of the in­fa­mous Ti­tan­ic. Lo­cal firms like Geo F Hug­gins and Trinidad Ship­ping and Trad­ing Com­pa­ny al­so pos­sessed their own steamships.With so many steam­ers around, an in­dis­pens­able ne­ces­si­ty was coal, and large quan­ti­ties there­of.

Lig­nite, a low-grade coal, oc­curs in Trinidad (San­gre Grande, Irois, Savonet­ta) and was iden­ti­fied in 1860 by ge­ol­o­gists Wall and Sawkins. These lig­nite de­posits, al­though sub­stan­tial, were nev­er ex­ploit­ed com­mer­cial­ly ow­ing to the low price of the com­mod­i­ty and high pro­duc­tion costs.Man­jack, a brit­tle form of graphite-ma­trix bi­tu­men, was mined prof­itably at Vista­bel­la and Williamsville in south Trinidad from the 1890s to the 1920s.De­spite these lo­cal sources, the bulk of the coal used in the colony was im­port­ed from Eng­land and the Unit­ed States.

Coal-fu­elled trains

Aside from use in steamships, coal was al­so in­dis­pens­able for the rail­ways of the is­land. The first lo­cal steam lo­co­mo­tive, the Fore­run­ner, tra­versed the rails of the Cipero Tram­road be­tween Princes Town and San Fer­nan­do as ear­ly as 1864. The Trinidad Gov­ern­ment Rail­way be­gan op­er­a­tions in 1876 and al­so need­ed coal, since oil-fu­elled lo­co­mo­tives would not ap­pear un­til the 1920s.Added to this, large sug­ar man­u­fac­tur­ing con­cerns had their own pri­vate rail­ways lead­ing to cen­tral fac­to­ries at Or­ange Grove, Usine Ste Madeleine, Re­form, Brechin Cas­tle, Wood­ford Lodge and For­res Park.

Archer's coal de­pot

The Eng­lish-cre­ole Archer fam­i­ly, and its pa­tri­arch, spec­u­la­tor Ju­lian H Archer, had been movers and shak­ers in the lo­cal econ­o­my for many years, be­ing founders of the Trinidad Build­ing and Loan As­so­ci­a­tion and the Trinidad Fire In­sur­ance Co.Es­tab­lished in 1872, the com­pa­ny did good busi­ness in the boom­ing Trinidad econ­o­my, which was rid­ing the tide of high co­coa prices and a spike in pro­duc­tion. William Sted­man Archer, a son of Ju­lian, di­ver­si­fied the fam­i­ly hold­ings to cater for the ever in­creas­ing need for coal. Al­though there were oth­er im­porters of the fu­el, Archer's Coal De­pot soon seized the li­on's share of the mar­ket.

This was so for sev­er­al rea­sons. First­ly, Archer's had a reg­u­lar sup­ply of the best qual­i­ty coal, be­ing a sub­sidiary of sorts of the Berwind White Coal Com­pa­ny which had its own mines in Penn­syl­va­nia, sup­ply­ing a bi­tu­mi­nous, high grade of coal which did not pro­duce as much residue and smog as low­er-grade stuff. Orig­i­nal­ly stock­piled in the open air, the fu­el was even­tu­al­ly stored in a mas­sive ware­house, since stor­ing coal ex­posed to the weath­er re­duced its com­bustibil­i­ty.

Sec­ond­ly, the firm owned a fleet of tugs and barges which catered for the fact that larg­er ships could not dock along­side the St Vin­cent Street Jet­ty, so Archer's took the coal out to these clients. The busi­ness's of­fice was on Broad­way and its ware­house at South Quay. The com­pa­ny was man­aged from 1912 by A Cory Davies, an Eng­lish­man who had come out to the colony as a clerk in the Colo­nial Bank in 1895.

The com­ing of oil

The ad­vent of the oil age in 1912 posed a not in­con­sid­er­able threat to the coal busi­ness, al­though whole­sale dis­place­ment of steam en­gines by diesel en­gines was still at least three decades away.In 1913-14, Trinidad Lease­holds Ltd be­gan oil pro­duc­tion at Bar­rack­pore near Pe­nal, and For­est Re­serve near Fyz­abad, with the crude be­ing pumped to its re­fin­ery at Pointe-a-Pierre for con­ver­sion in­to gaso­line. Re­gent Petrol, the brand pro­duced by TLL, was al­so sold by Archer's, which se­cured the dis­trib­u­tor­ship for Port-of-Spain, where the mo­tor car was be­com­ing a pop­u­lar sight on the road. The petrol was sold in large drums to mo­torists since there were no gas sta­tions un­til around 1918.Archer's coal de­pot was in busi­ness well in­to the 1930s un­til it closed for good.