When Watt arrived at Chacewater he found the materials for the Wheal Busy engine had come to hand, and that some progress had been made with its erection. The materials for the Tingtang engine, however, had not yet been received from Soho, and the owners of the mine were becoming very impatient for it. Watt wrote to his partner urging despatch, otherwise the engine might be thrown on their hands, especially if the Chacewater engine, now nearly ready for work, did not give satisfaction. From Watt’s account, it would appear that the Cornish mines were in a very bad way. “The Tingtang people,” he said, “are now fairly put out by water, and the works are quite at a stand.” The other mines in the neighbourhood were in no better plight. The pumping-engines could not keep down the water. “Poldice has grown worse than Wheal Virgin was: they have sunk 400_l._ a month for some months past, and 700_l._ the last month; they will probably soon give up. North Downs seems to be our next card.”[157] The owners of the Wheal Virgin mine, though drowned out, like many others, could not bring their minds to try Watt’s engine. They had no faith in it, and stuck by the old atmospheric of Newcomen. They accordingly erected an additional engine of this kind to enable them to go about eight fathoms deeper, “and they have bought,” wrote Watt, “an old boiler of monstrous size at the Briggin, which they have offered 50_l._ to get carried to its place.” [157] Watt to Boulton, 4th August, 1777. At Chacewater Watt first met Jonathan Hornblower, son of the Joseph Hornblower who had come into Cornwall from Staffordshire, some fifty years before, to erect one of the early Newcomen engines. The son had followed in his father’s steps, and become celebrated in the Chacewater district as an engineer. It was natural that he should regard with jealousy the patentees of the new engine; for if it proved a success, his vocation as a maker of atmospheric engines would be at an end. Watt thus referred to him in a letter to Boulton: “Hornblower seems a very pleasant sort of old Presbyterian: he carries himself very fair, though I hear that he is an unbelieving Thomas.” His unbelief strongly showed itself on the starting of the Wheal Busy engine shortly after, when he exclaimed, “Pshaw! it’s but a bauble: I wouldn’t give twopence halfpenny for her.” There were others beside Hornblower who disliked and resented what they regarded as the intrusion of Boulton and Watt in their district, and indeed never became wholly reconciled to the new engine, though they were compelled to admit the inefficiency of the old one. Among these was old Bonze, the engineer, a very clever mechanic, who positively refused to undertake the erection of the proposed new engine at Wheal Union if Boulton and Watt were to be in any way concerned with it. But the mine-owners had to study their own interest rather than the humour of their former engineers, and Watt secured the order for the Wheal Union engine.