15. Rum-runners and Masterless Men

Ferryland — six miles away over the Cape Broyle Barrens -consi= sts of a little bay, a remarkable peninsula and a series of islands, an outer harbour, and a tiny inner harbour called The Pool, the whole presenting a h= auntingly beautiful seascape, especially when viewed from The Gaze, a grassy hill whe= re settlers once kept sentries posted to watch for attacking ships.<= /o:p>

Ferryland was used as a fishing station by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. Then it was settled by a few fishing families — mo= stly English, who, because of their habit of light-salting the fish, had to main= tain shore stations with a few permanent settlers to protect their property. The= se scattered families were living there in 1612 when the pirate admiral Peter Easton arrived with a fleet of armed ships, built his mansion on Fox Hill, fortified the town, and made it the capital of his maritime empire. He sail= ed away in 1614 to found a pirate kingdom in the Mediterranean, but his old fo= rts were rebuilt by the settlers and used against pirates, privateers, and the naval squadrons of France.

Lord Baltimore's settlers arrived with a Royal Patent in 1621 and evicted at least some of the original residents as squatters. Baltimore lat= er built a great house fronting the sea - a pretentious colonial plantati= on — and brought in hundreds of settlers from Britain. Ferryland then be= came the English capital of Newfoundland, first under Baltimore, then under Sir David Kirke. There were other royal plantations, too, but none of them succeeded in enriching their founders. The colonies were abandoned, and the fishermen returned. They have been there ever since, a permanent part of the land that the aristocrats tried, unsuccessfully, to coin into gold guineas = and sovereigns.

During the French-English struggle for Canada, Ferryland was repeate= dly attacked and on two occasions captured by the French, though never in an at= tack from the sea against fortified positions. Easton was right when he judged t= he harbour safe from any assault by ships.

Even today, Fren= ch cannon balls are frequently dug from Ferryland's potato patches. Occasional= ly other oddities are found there, too. At the mouth of a brook that runs thro= ugh Easton's old property, William Morry, who owns a fish business in the settlement, found a beautiful ring of the reign of Queen Anne, a ring that = his wife, Pat, wears today. There have been a number of reports of small treasu= re caches, probably family heirlooms and valuables buried during the French attacks and occupations. There is no reason to believe that Easton or any o= ther pirate left treasure there.

From Placentia, opposite Ferryland on the other side of the Avalon Peninsula, the French launched an offensive by sea in 1694, intending to capture or destroy all the English settlements. The offensive was stopped at Ferryland by a home guard of settlers who took guns from their ships and fortified the old earthworks that had been used by Easton eighty years befo= re. In the battle between the ships and the shore batteries the little settleme= nt lost ninety of its men, but they saved the English colony from conquest.

Two years later the French attacked again - this time by land as wel= l as by sea, their forces being commanded by the two d'Iberville brothers. They captured Ferryland from the rear, and took all the other English settlements too, but the d'Ibervilles had no troops for garrison duty, and were forced = to withdraw after burning the English plantations. The settlers simply ca= me out of the woods and rebuilt their homes. The Ferrylanders then successfully beat off two other French attacks.

In 1709 the Governor of New England, hearing that the settlement was once more under French siege, sent a ship to its relief, and offered to take the entire population to the safety of the American colonies. The sett= lers politely refused to go, declaring that they were willing and able to manage their own defence. Their letter, signed by thirty masters of fishing establishments, is preserved in the archives at St. John's.

Ferryland's most= famous battle was in 1762, almost a century after the original French assault. In = this battle the great-grandmother of Newfoundland's prime minister Sir Frederick Carter (who was a delegate to the original Confederation negotiat= ions of 1864) is credited by tradition with wrecking a French warship.

At that time Rob= ert Carter had a grant to Isle au Bois at the harbour entrance. With the help of the fishermen he had fortified the island against attack by pirates or foreign ships, and when the French made a determined effort to conquer Newf= oundland in 1762, it was successfully defended by two hundred fishermen under Carter's leadership. The men handled the guns while their wives brought up ammunition and swabbed down the guns to keep them cool. Mrs. Carter, howeve= r, was in charge of a gun crew herself, and a shot from her gun turned the tid= e of battle, bringing down the mainmast of the leading ship in the French squadr= on.

Though the French continued the attack throughout the day, they did = not succeed in landing a man or a gun or in silencing any of the settlers' batteries, and they abandoned their whole scheme for conquest by sea.<= /o:p>

Ferryland has been at peace for many years now, battling only the st= orms that roll in continually from the vast and brooding ocean. But the visitor = may still see the great guns that lie under water, the old earthworks at Isle au Bois, the remains of barracks and magazines, and the cannons that came= to rest in the crannies of the cliffs, when time accomplished what the brave French seamen could not and reduced the English forts to dust.

In the late eigh= teenth and part of the nineteenth centuries, Ferryland was more or less constantly under naval rule, with British frigates stationed in the harbour and marines patrolling the town. It was a brutal form of government. One night a fright= ened boy came to the door of the house on Ferryland beach now owned by Howard Mo= rry. Morry's great-grandmother answered the knock and gave shelter to the youngs= ter, who had deserted a warship to escape constant ill-treatment. When a naval detail came to search she hid the boy in the cellar and kept him there for = six months, letting him out only at night. But word leaked out, another search party was sent, and the boy was seized, taken on board ship, and flogged to death. The woman herself barely escaped banishment, and would, in fact, have been transported as a bond slave to a plantation except for the intercession of powerful friends who had the governor's ear.

The law on land was almost as harsh as at sea. Ferryland had a court house, a magistrate, and three whipping posts in three separate regions of = the town. Men sentenced to be flogged for such crimes as stealing a jug of rum = or refusing to work for the fishing masters were taken to all three places in = turn so the whole town could vie\v their punishment. In the circumstances, many young men simply ran away from the plantations and took up the lives of outlaws. They were known as the Masterless Men, and the best-organized band= of them lived near Ferryland at the Butter Pot Barrens.

Inland, and just south of the town, you can see a bold peak of red sandstone, standing almost a thousand feet above the low coastal plain. Thi= s is the Southern Butter Pot, an outlying buttress of the high caribou barr= ens. Here in the late eighteenth century the Masterless Men built a settlement of log tilts, declared their independence from the rest of the world, and defied the laws of England for a generation and a half.

The Butter Pot is nine miles inland from Ferryland in a wilderness of lakes, rivers, and forests where, even today, a herd of some five hundred caribou exists under government protection. In the days of the Masterless M= en the herd may have been ten times that size, and provided them with a ready source of meat. Small game and furs are also plentiful in this region.=

To this virgin wilderness, some time after 1750, came Peter Kerrivan= , a deserter from the English navy. Scarcely more than a boy, but a most resourceful one, he was already the leader of a band of young companions who had escaped from the intolerable life of the fleet, or the scarcely more tolerable life of the plantations, to take their chances like Indians = in the backwoods.

Kerrivan had been impressed into the navy, where he was half-starved, forced to work under deck officers who drove the men around with canes or quoits like cattle, and threatened with flogging, keel-hauling, or ducking = from the yard-arm for any show of insubordination.

The men who worked ashore for the fishing masters were mostly indent= ured servants - the so-called Irish Youngsters, who were abducted from Ireland either by force or guile and literally sold by the head to the owners of the Newfoundland fishing establishments. They could be hanged for running away,= but nevertheless many of them did, and during the French-English wars they deserted, wholesale, and joined the French army.

The Masterless Men built their tilts at the Butter Pot because it wa= s a first-class lookout in case of pursuit. Then they turned to hunting, to stealthy raids against the fishery plantations, and to surreptitious trading with the settlers in the more remote villages along the Southern Shore.

Their fame soon spread, and their numbers grew, as indentured m= en and apprentices deserted their ships or their fishing rooms and made their= way to the Butter Pot. Within a few years they were an acknowledged scandal in = an otherwise docile colony. Outraged officials with no police or militia of th= eir own called on the navy to capture them and make a public example of them.

Some years passed, however, before the first expedition against the Masterless Men was organized. By that time Kerrivan was no longer a callow youth, but an expert woodsman. Anticipating an attack, or perhaps havi= ng actual word of it in advance, he and his followers had constructed a number Of Mind trails, well cut and marked, but ending in bogs without exit= s, or petering out in thick bush.

As the marines advanced, the Masterless Men retired to the west and north, where they had roads leading all the way to St. Mary's and Trinity b= ays. After exploring the false trails for some days, the expedition finally reac= hed the Butter Pot only to find the settlement totally deserted, with every rag= and chattel removed. They set fire to the village, but had to retire witho= ut a single prisoner.

Several subsequent expeditions were sent over the hills toward = St. Mary's Bay in an effort to round up the Masterless Men. Three times they bu= rnt the tilts at the Butter Pot, and three times they were rebuilt. Only once d= id they succeed in capturing anybody - four young recruits from Ferryland who = had joined the band only a few weeks before. These luckless Irish Youngste= rs, taken by surprise away from the main body of outlaws, were seized and march= ed back to Ferryland. They were taken on board the English frigate, tried, sentenced, and hanged with great dispatch.

You can still he= ar an orally preserved account of this incident from Howard Morry in Ferryland, w= ho had a first-hand description of the hanging from his own great-grandmother. As a small child she lived in Aquaforte, a few miles to = the south, and was taken by her mother to visit Ferryland, there to see the out= laws hanging from the yard-arm of the frigate as an example to all who might be tempted to flout authority.

But the only result of the execution was to make the outlaws more cautious. None was ever captured after that. They remained as popular and successful as ever, and carried their road-building to the point where they= had a regular system connecting the various small settlements of the Avalon Peninsula. I have talked to old men who used those roads often in the nineteenth century. Later they were used by the government mail-carriers wh= o, in the early days of the mail service, travelled the length and breadth of = the Avalon Peninsula - distances of some hundreds of miles - on foot, their mail sacks on their backs. Some of the old roads exist as woods trails, even tod= ay.

The independent fishermen in the small settlements traded with the Masterless Men, and some of them, including Kerrivan himself, even married girls from the coastal villages. He never returned to civilization, but liv= ed to a ripe old age as the patriarch of the Butter Pot — a veritab= le Old Man of the Mountain and a legend in his own time, so well known that or= al accounts of his exploits are preserved in the fishing settlements today, a century and a half after his death.

Only the changing times brought an end to the society of Masterless = Men. During the nineteenth century the military forts in Newfoundland were abandoned, and the visits of the Royal Navy became fewer. Civil laws, though still harsh, were less brutal, and even indentured servants began to have l= egal rights. The right of small-holders, or even men without land titles, to live and work apart from the fishing masters was gradually sanctioned by tradition, and finally by law.

Kerrivan's sons and others of his followers then gradually drifted o= ut to the coast, settled down in small coves never visited by the navy, married the daughters of other outlaws who had settled there generations earlier, a= nd raised families who, in time, became perfectly solid citizens. There are hundreds of Kerrivans living in the small fishing settlements today. Some of them, at least, are proud to trace their ancestry to the Robin Hood of the Butter Pot who defied the King of England in the seventeenth century.<= /o:p>

16. A Land of the Prophets

From Ferryland the road climbs over a hill and drops down to the tidy little fjord of Aqua forte — another favourite haunt of Easton and of later adventurers. At least one scuttled ship #till lies sunken in the inner barachois, where it can be seen through the clear water at low tide. A peac= eful village, Aquaforte has a turbulent sea-trout river plunging into the end of= its fine harbour, and numerous little waterfalls trailing, lace-like, down= it; hills.

Long after the pirates vanished, Aquaforte became a whaling centre, = with a factory; the Windsor family, who were master whalers, built a fine house = that still stands on a small, steep peninsula, like a castle on a hill, commandi= ng the centre of the harbour. The people who live there today trace their fami= ly to the first Windsor, a tough and able fisherman who staked off a large tra= ct of fishing-grounds for the exclusive use of his clan, and defended it at gun point against all comers.

The family history, recorded in a huge old Bible, has a gap of twelve years during which the Windsor who then headed the clan sailed to Europe, fought Napoleon, and was taken prisoner. After Napoleon's defeat he was set free, returned to Aquaforte, and took up once more the begetting of sons and daughters by the woman who had kept his family together through the inter&s= hy;vening years.

The whalers have now followed the pirates into history, and the peac= e of old age has settled over Aquaforte. Even the fish flakes lie idle, for most= of the fish is sold fresh or in saltbulk. It would be an ideal 'summer place' except that it lies just a little too far from St. John's for convenient commuting.