Sulfur Pits of Tescary

"You go to any spot in the isles, dig down four meters, and you have yourself a sulfur mine." Noora El-Sahli, Condominium overseer.

The sulfur-rich soil of the Tescaries makes these deposits some of the easiest to exploit on a commercial scale in the Great Bay. As the demand for sulfur has increased, particularly in Exodus, the Condominium has sought to exploit more and more deposits in the Tescaries. For the most part, these deposits do not require extensive shafts to mine as the Tescaries have rich sulfur deposits fairly close to the surface, though the oldest mines still in operation have begun to dig deeper and deeper.
Most of these mines are in lowland Grand Tescary, generally dug near rivers to facilitate transport out into the open sea. This further fouls the already sparse farmland in Grand Tescary, and while a few of these pits are owned by clans, most are not, and the enterprise in general is unpopular in the region. The natives do not value the industry, as they do not natively need its products in anything even close to the quantities produced, and many regard the mines as the source of their oppression. In a mythological sense, sulfur is considered by the Tescarana to be rejected by Cel, which is why it is toxic to the earth and to many living beings. However, many other cultures burn it for religious purposes, or use it as insecticide.
The largest sulfur mines employ hundreds of miners, most of whom live on the premises. Some are effectively prison camps, guarded by the Red Sails. Others are worked by at least nominally free Tescarana laborers, though that does not make the work any less backbreaking. The laborers mine the mineral sulfur from the ground by spade and pole and carry it out in large baskets. Condominium officers oversee and coordinate the work, though in the rare cases where the mine is clan-owned, the clan operates the mine and merely sells the product to the Condominium. 

History

Despite relative ease of extraction, the clans have historically not exported very much sulfur. With murex dye being more profitable and most of the clans not having the numbers or the desire to dig sulfur pits. As a result, many of the current sulfur pits in existence have been established in recent decades by the Condominium, often using convict or slave labor. Sulfur has increasingly edged out both murex dye and fish as the primary product of the South-Fahrig Trade Company, and the increasing proliferation of gunpowder in particular has fueled the expansion of the sulfur industry in the Tescaries.

Location under

Fahrig