#cover s-a-seaweed-and-ron-sakolsky-in-search-of-the-mast-1.jpg
#title In Search of the Masterless Men of Newfoundland
#author Seaweed and Ron Sakolsky
#date 2017
#lang en
#authors Seaweed, Ron Sakolsky
#topics Green Anarchy #24, green anarchism, Little Black Cart, Ardent Press
#notes “The Society of Masterless Men” is a slightly revised version of the
essay of the same name in the Land and Freedom anthology and
that originally appeared in *Green Anarchy #24* (Spring/ Summer,2007).
#rights This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. [[https://creativecommons.org][]]
#publisher Ardent Press, 2017 [[https://ardentpress.com][]] an imprint of LBC Books. PO Box 3920 Berkeley CA 94703
** In Search of the Masterless Men: An Introduction
I first became aware of the inspiring story of the Masterless Men of
Newfoundland from an essay by Seaweed that originally appeared in *Green
Anarchy* #24 (Spring/Summer, 2007) and which can
now be found in his book, *Land and Freedom* (Black Powder Press, 2013).
In the closing paragraph of that anthology’s introduction, he offers the
following “open invitation” to all comers: *It is my hope that these
articles contribute some original thought, but I would be most pleased
if they helped foster a new spirit.*
With this invitation in mind, when I decided to visit Newfoundland in
the summer of 2017, I looked forward to exploring further the story of
the Masterless Men in the spirit of anarchic revolt with which Seaweed
had endowed it.
Shortly after returning from my Newfoundland ramble with lots of new
information about the Masterless Men, I ran into Seaweed at the 2017
Victoria Anarchist Book Fair, which is held annually on Coast Salish territory in
British Columbia. When I told him about what I had discovered and my
desire to engage directly with the mythic qualities of the Masterless
Men; he seemed pleased that I had taken up his invitation.
As a result of that book fair conversation, we decided to jointly
collaborate on a book to consist of two essays. As his part in this publishing project, he has now slightly
revised his original Masterless Men essay, and I have written a
responding essay. In his piece, he mentions that “some refer to the
Masterless Men as lore or a traditionally told story, one for which
there is little documentary evidence. But there are a fair number of
facts that are known about the Masterless Men.” In my anarcho-surrealist
response, I have sought to include poetic facts alongside
historically-documented ones because I view both as potentially
inspirational to anarchists and surrealists.
In further clarification, though we use the historical term Masterless
Men throughout our book, we are quite aware that the quest for “masterlessness” has no gender.
The usage of the name Masterless Men refers to a particular group of
18th centuy rebels who fled conditions of servitude and set out to live
a life of liberty in the Butter Pot Barrens of Newfoundland. As
anarchists, we do not seek to be slaves or masters. Instead of
relationships of servitude, we desire ones of individual freedom and
mutual aid. The Masterless Men have been an inspiration to us in that
quest. However, a rebel group of Masterless Women, or a group of mixed
gender outlaws, would also no doubt be inspiring and perhaps even more
provocative in some ways. It is our fervent hope that this book on the
Masterless Men will encourage future historical researchers to uncover
an ever-expanding diversity of anti-authoritarian stories that connect us
to all of our masterless ancestors.
For a World Without Masters!
Ron Sakolsky
** The Society of Masterless Men
Seaweed
*When I began thinking about outlaws and outlaw history I realized that
if outlaw just means one who breaks the law, then I could write about
the lives of nearly every citizen. So, I define outlaw as one who not
only breaks the law, but who survives by breaking the law or
consistently lives outside of it. And the more I delve into Canada’s
past, the more outlaws I discover, many of them worthy of our attention.
As an introduction to Canadian outlaw history, here is the story of a
group of Newfoundland rebels who survived without masters for half a
century.*
The story of the Society of Masterless Men (which included women and
children), began in the 18th-century settlement of Ferryland, in the
eastern Canadian province of Newfoundland. Newfoundland was part of the
traditional territory of the Beothuk—a Mi’kmaq-related, hunter-gatherer
people who no longer exist as a distinct group, resulting from the
invasion and occupation of their lands by the British Empire.
In order to colonize Newfoundland, the British Empire created
plantations. These were settlements of indentured servants, primarily
Irish, many of them very young—thus their name: the Irish Youngsters—abducted from Ireland by
either force or guile and brought to the south shore of Newfoundland
where they were literally sold to fishing masters. The price: $50 a
head.
In 1700s Newfoundland, the British Navy wielded authority over its
seamen with zero compassion, nothing but discipline enforced by abuse
and violence. Because there wasn’t a local police force, they also
helped reinforce the authority of the local fishing masters. These
masters were essentially the Lords and Ladies of the villages, living in
luxury and security while surrounded by dozens, even hundreds, of
indentured servants who fished and labored in the camps processing the
catch. These village plantations were primarily set up by consortiums of
wealthy merchants in England. British frigates were stationed in the
harbors and marines patrolled the town.
The workers in these fishing villages were essentially in bondage.
Corporal punishment was routine and everyday life was harsh and brutal.
In the small settlement of Ferryland, for instance, there were three
whipping posts and a gallows located in separate regions of the town.
When a man was sentenced to be flogged for stealing a jug of rum or
refusing to work for one of the fishing masters, he was taken to all
three posts and whipped at each, so the whole town would have an
opportunity to witness the punishment as a warning.
The settlement of Ferryland was founded by Sir George Calvert around
1620, and was also partly intended as a “refuge for …Catholics.” I’m not
sure if this meant strictly for Catholic servants or if there were any
“free” Catholics as well. This was a time of penal law and repression of
Catholicism in Britain and at least some Irish Catholics voluntarily
came to the New World to escape persecution. Unfortunately, the laws in
Newfoundland were the same as in the Old World. The orders given to the governor from
1729 to 1776 were: “You are to permit a liberty of conscience to all, except Papists, so they be contented
with a quiet and peaceable enjoyment of the same, not giving offense or
scandal to the government.”
This order wasn’t always strictly followed but around the mid 1700s
there was a crackdown on Catholicism. In 1743 the governor of the time,
Smith, wrote to the magistrate in Ferryland, John Benger, instructing
him to be mindful of the “Irish papists” in the area. William Keen, the
chief magistrate of St. John’s, was killed by a group of Irishmen in
1752. Following this assassination, penal laws were strictly enforced
for the next thirty or forty years.
Court documents from the Renews area (the nearest settlement) show the
authorities were increasingly fearful of an insurrection. In fact, about fifty years earlier the
French war ship Profond attacked Renews, where there were seven
“residents” and one hundred twenty servant fishermen, many of whom were Irish. These servantserfs were
recorded as not caring who owned the place— that is, they didn’t jump up
to protect their masters from the attack.
Life wasn’t much better for those in the British Navy patrolling the
area. Food rations were slim and flogging was common. For instance,
keelhauling—dragging a seaman on ropes under the keel of a ship, thereby
shredding his flesh on the sharp-edged barnacles—was still a legal
punishment even though it frequently resulted in death.
Some like to refer to the Society of Masterless Men as lore or a
traditionally-told story, one for which there is little documentary
evidence. But there do seem to be a fair number of facts known about the
Masterless Men. And, as a matter of context, we know a lot about the
injustice of the British Empire and the cruelty of many of its
enforcers. We know that indentured servants were brought to Newfoundland and treated brutally, as were the seamen in
the Royal Navy. We also know that one Irish-born Peter Kerrivan was
among those young indentured servants and abused seamen. Some say he was
a reluctant seaman, having been pressed into service.
Sometime in 1750, while Kerrivan’s ship was docked in Ferryland, he
escaped (historians usually choose the word, “deserted”). Together with
two or three escaped fishermen, he helped establish a lookout and base
for outlaws to hide in the Butter Pot Barrens, a wild area of the Avalon
Peninsula. This was the beginning of The Society of the Masterless Men.
Hunted by the authorities, the Masterless Men soon established a way of
life based on subsistence skills and sharing. Apparently, they came into
contact with Newfoundland’s aboriginal peoples, the Beothuk, who taught
the rebels survival skills. They learned how to hunt for food primarily
based on the caribou herd on the Peninsula.
At the time, one could be hanged for running away, but nevertheless many
young men escaped from the plantations and took up as outlaws. In 1774 a
petition written by Bonavista merchants, justices of the peace, and others, was
sent to Governor Shuldham, complaining of a number of “masterless”
Irishmen who had gone to live in a secluded cove and “were there
building fishing rooms.” Kerrivan’s band of young companions were among
the luckiest and best organized.
Naturally word of the well-organized free men spread and fresh runaways
from coastal settlements came to join them. Eventually their numbers
swelled to between twenty and fifty men. There were also women, but
their numbers are unknown. The literature I found mention the women
simply as “wives,” although I imagine them as rebellious women sickened
by the misery and cruelty that surrounded them who also yearned for a
freer and better way of life and joined their outlaw husbands
voluntarily.
After a while the group of comrades began trading caribou meat and hides
with allies in the remote villages, receiving supplies such as flour, tea, and of course bullets.
They also organized stealthy raids against the fishery plantations.
By this time the British authorities, without a police force or militia
of their own, were beginning to fear that this group of anarchic rebels
would inspire too many others to desertion, so they ordered the navy to
track the freedom-loving band down and make examples of them.
However, some years passed before the first expedition against the
Masterless Men was organized and by then the rebels had become skilled
wilderness inhabitants. Anticipating the first attack or perhaps somehow
being forewarned, Kerrivan and his comrades cut a series of blind trails
that confounded their pursuers. The party of marines sent to capture
them often found themselves lost or led into bogs and impenetrable thick
bush.
Eventually the navy did manage to close in on the rebels’ camp near
their lookout, but they found the log cabins deserted, “with every rag
and chattel removed.” Taking advantage of their pursuers’ confusion,
Kerrivan and his friends had moved off north and west. The navy set fire
to their little village but had to return to their base without any
prisoners. The Masterless group rebuilt their cabins and the navy burned
them down again. The navy burned down their cabins three times and each
time they were rebuilt.
Two, possibly four, of the rebels were captured and hanged, but the
state never did succeed in destroying the Society. In fact, the young
runaways who were captured had joined the band only a few weeks earlier
and were taken by surprise away from the main body of the rebels. They were
hanged with great dispatch from the yard-arm of the English frigate in Ferryland. No other Masterless Men
were ever captured after this incident, presumably because this only
made the outlaws more cautious.
Some of the tracks that had been carved partly to support their wilderness ways and partly as subterfuge became
Newfoundland’s first inland roads. In fact, their road system eventually
connected most of the small settlements of the Avalon Peninsula.
For more than a generation, the Masterless Men roamed free over the
barrens! Over time, perhaps as military rule began to relax or for
reasons unknown to this author, their ranks began to dwindle. In 1789,
thirty nine years after escaping, four men gave themselves up on
condition that their only punishment would be deportation to Ireland,
which was agreed upon. Many of the other rebels settled in remote parts
of Newfoundland’s coast and survived as independent fishermen. Kerrivan, who was never captured, is said to have had a partner, four sons, and several daughters, and is believed to have remained on
the barrens well into old age, never returning to civilization.
The children of the Masterless Men gradually drifted out to the coast
and settled down in small coves never visited by the navy. They married
the children of other outlaws who had settled there generations earlier
and together they raised families.
The Society of the Masterless Men is exceptionally inspiring because
they succeeded. A group of people voluntarily joined together in common cause and broke free from their
masters, most never to be captured nor return to their work prisons.
There is still a lot of land out there. It isn’t nearly as overflowing
with abundant wild life as it was precolonialism, thanks to the ecocides
and environmental devastation wrought by industrialism, but a group of
people with a similar world view could perhaps leave the brutal, empty
world of the civilized behind and try to live their lives according to
principles of voluntary association and mutual aid, supported by
subsistence ways. If you live in the Americas, Australia, or New
Zealand, keep in mind that much of the land has historic claims to it by
their traditional occupants—peoples you could be consulting with, and
joining, in their re-occupation efforts and resistance.
**Sources:**
Butler, Paul. “The Unshackled Society” *Saltscapes* *Magazine*
(May-Je,2004, pp. 15–16).
Horwood, Harold. Newfoundland (New York: MacMillan,1969).
Lawlor, Tammy. “Secret Masses at Midnight: The Legend of the Grotto in
Renews, Newfoundland,“ *Culture and Tradition* (Feb./May,1999, pp.1–7).
Reid, Alexina (Harold Horwood excerpt). “Peter Kerrivan and the
Masterless Men (Fairly Lengthy Tale)” *Roots Web/The Newfoundland and
Labrador Archives*, 1–3.
*The Canadian Encyclopedia* (Edmonton, Alberta: Hurtig Publishers).
** The Saga of the Masterless Men and the Emancipatory Myth of Revolt
Ron Sakolsky
*It is poetry that gives form to the emancipatory myth. Its spectre
haunts the poverty of reality.*
Guy Girard
Upon entering Memorial University’s Centre for Newfoundland Studies
which is located in St. Johns, I eagerly inquired about obtaining any of
the Masterless Men references of which I had become aware during my
recent Newfoundland travels. Not only did the reference librarian
graciously supply me with copies of all these materials but she in turn
suggested others on the same subject that might be of interest to me.
Though she was extremely helpful in making these poems, articles, books,
and songs available, there was a decidedly cautionary tone in her voice
as she confidentially whispered to me, “Of course, you know that the
Masterless Men were a legend rather than an historical reality.”
While bearing her caveat in mind, my analysis here is not based on a
dualistic understanding about myth and reality. Rather than seeking to
objectively disentangle myth and legend from documented reality as a way
of convincing the reader of the historical accuracy of the Masterless
Men story, I will focus my attention upon the ways in which historical
and poetic facts can interact in a mutually reinforcing manner to create an inspirational
anti-authoritarian saga. In tandem, they can foster an intellectual and
emotional climate that sparks rebellion by providing fresh inspiration
rather than by referencing tired ideological belief systems. Moreover,
such subversive sagas as that of the Masterless Men, even if not
conclusively verifiable in every detail, can serve to illuminate the
underlying human desires and aspirations that animate the myth of revolt
even in the bleakest of times.
During the dark days leading up to the Second World War, surrealist poet and theorist André Breton was preoccupied
with the creation of “new collective myths” of revolt that might be
inspirational in mounting a counter-attack on what was rapidly proving
to be the all too seductive collective dream world of fascist mythology.
Today, the neo-fascist political climate of the twenty-first century is
similarly being contested both in the streets and within the mythic
realms of the imagination. In his seminal effort to explain the
dimension of the Marvelous as revealed in myth, surrealist Pierre
Mabille has noted,
“*More or less mythical accounts represent in poetic language some basic
explanations of the world; they express real history and social life as
it has existed, but beyond that, they reflect the permanent passionate
needs of the human species*” (Mabille,1998, p.18).
Building on Mabille’s insights, contemporary surrealist
Paul Hammond has called for a “mythic negation” in which the myth of
inevitable servitude is negated by the oppositional myth of eternal
rebellion (Hammond, 2017). It is with reference to the latter
oppositional myth that I approach the saga of the Masterless Men.
In keeping with the inspirational potential of collective myths of
revolt, the story of the Masterless Men can be understood as an outlaw
history involving not only a remembrance of mutual aid among anarchic
rebels, but one which especially prizes those who survive by breaking
the law or cunningly living outside of it as Seaweed suggests. In this
regard, the saga of the Masterless Men, though it may not be based
entirely on provable historical fact, reminds us that the poetic truths
associated with myths of revolt can act as an antidote to despair even in times characterized by great pessimism. Michael Löwy explains the
important distinction between pessimism and despair in a surrealist
sense, “*Pessimism is not despair: it is a call to resistance, to
action, to liberating revolt, before it is too late, before the
pessimism is realized*” (Löwy, 2017, p. 143). Despair, on the other
hand, implies the death of the radical imagination.
*** Imagining A World Without Masters
By Peter Kerrivan, we are the Masterless Men,
We have no lord to serve, we live by wile and nerve,
No more I’ll serve my liege, for I’ve jumped ship you see,
I’ll take my liberty
And roam these shores.
Fine Crowd (Hugh Scott)
“By Peter Kerrivan”
What then has proven to be so enduring about the storied exploits of the
Masterless Men of the eighteenth century that at least two contemporary folk songs have been written
about them (Fine Crowd’s “By Peter Kerrivan” and the Masterless Men’s “Breakin’ New Ground”)? In the case of the
latter song, the Irish folk group who sing it has even taken on the
legendary outlaws’ name as their own. In addition to music about the
Masterless Men, there have been stage plays, an unfinished movie
project, a poem by David Benson, and a problematic biographical novel by
Eldon Drodge, entitled *Kerrivan* (Drodge, 2001), which attempts to
rewrite the myth in reactionary terms. In essence, the saga of the
Masterless Men still speaks to the present because it represents a
mythic counterpunch to the prevailing miserabilist malaise of our own
times, when misery is considered to be the only possible reality and mutual acquiescence reigns supreme.
In an historical sense, the emancipatory myth of the Masterless Men
stands in direct contrast to the physical suffering, social humiliation,
and psychological indignities that accompanied the historical
institution of indentured servitude, the involuntary naval conscription
fostered by the military press gang, and the British Crown’s practice of
making political prisoners of those who might challenge their authority
at home and shipping them off to such overseas outposts of empire as
Newfoundland. Moreover, a good part of the Masterless Men’s ongoing
appeal has always been based upon their identification not only with
rebellion against such concrete oppressive circumstances, but with the
emotional resonance of their association with radically utopian dreams
of land and freedom. As such, they became legendary as rebels against
the cruelties that were meted out by the British Empire’s naval
governors, the economic stranglehold of the West Country merchants, and
the conditions of semi-slavery imposed by the fishing masters and admirals.
Ultimately, however, it has been their contagious example of an outlaw
life of self-determination and mutual aid that has continued to fan the
flames of revolutionary desire.
The history of the term “masterless men” is inscribed in English law. As
venerable Newfoundland historian Harold Horwood has explained its
origins:
The term “masterless men” goes back at least to the reign of King
Henry VIII of England, who signed into law Acts of Parliament dealing with beggars and vagrants. In
Newfoundland a “masterless man” was a fishing apprentice or seasonal
laborer who had run away from a planter or English fishing master or
else a deserter from the Royal Navy who had escaped from the floggings,
starvation and scurvy that were still the lot of men serving before the
mast—‘scum of the ports’ as their officers called them—swept up by press
gangs, shanghaied, and working as slaves in all but name on His
Majesty’s ships of war (Horwood, 2011, pp. 142–3).
While the original legal designation of “masterless men“ was used to
identify a life of vagrancy outside the social order, such a pejorative
label was mythically transformed by the Masterless Men into a positive
identification with the desirable life of the rebel outlaw. Having
chosen vagabondage rather than succumbing to the bondage that they had
so narrowly escaped, the Masterless Men are celebrated as romantic
deserters from civilization whose flight to the liberty of the
wilderness involved a refusal to accept the harshness of a life of
institutionalized misery on the Ferryland Plantation or to tolerate the
brutalities of shipboard confinement.
Every British ship owner or captain who brought desperate and
impoverished men from Ireland to serve in the fishery was expected to
maintain shipboard discipline by any means necessary. The punishment
measures that could be mercilessly meted out to offenders by these
masters included the use of the dreaded cat-o-nine-tails, repeated
dunking into the icy sea while lashed to the yard arm, or even the horrors of keelhauling. Moreover, masters had to see that they took the same number of men back with them
when they returned across the sea. The object of the latter law was to
prevent “masterless men” who had finished their indenture from “running
loose in the colony” (Horwood, 2011, pp. 142–4). Keeping this legal
stipulation in mind, it must have been especially threatening to the
Crown for an unvanquished band of Masterless Men to be freely living in
the wilds of the Butter Pot Barrens beyond the civilized boundaries of
law and order.
For those escaped indentured servants who had worked on the plantations,
the duress of the life that they had fled had consisted of a constant litany of trials and tribulations.
According to B.D. Fardy, “Their life was a harsh and spartan one.
Most found accommodations in the lofts of fish stores, or under fish
[drying] flakes and stages, or built their own shacks or tilts. The
lucky ones found lodging houses which cost them most of their pay by the
end of the season. These star boarders were referred to as dieters. For most of them it
was a lean diet indeed” (Fardy, 2005, p. 148). The autocratic power of
the fishing masters was absolute and their punitive exercises of
authority were backed up by the force of the British Navy. But the Navy
had its deserters too. One of them, the Irish-born Peter Kerrivan, who
is said to have been shanghaied or involuntarily pressed into service,
would become a celebrated folk hero remembered as a catalytic agent for
the anarchic rebellion of the Masterless Men when he and a few
companions jumped ship in 1750 and escaped to the desolate barren lands
of the Avalon Peninsula where they would freely roam for the next fifty
to one hundred years.
*Breakin’ New Ground*
*We’ll take our freedom back*
*And come home once again.*
*Breakin’ new ground*
Masterless Men
“Breakin’ New Ground”
The above lyrical excerpt from a song by the contemporary singing group
known as the Masterless Men is built upon a collective mythology that
posits seizing one’s freedom as a form of “coming home.” In this ballad,
“home” is not so much one’s place of birth since Kerrivan was not originally from Newfoundland when he jumped ship, but a mythical
place. In one sense, the poetic idea of “home” is about returning to that besieged enclave within ourselves
where the resilient spirit of resistance dwells. Over time, however, as
the actual rebel encampment grew, the liberty embodied by the Society of
Masterless Men became physically rooted in the land itself as both a
place of refuge and a place to defend. It was the wild and unconquered
interior of Newfoundland that was their home, and it was the freedom of
that lawless barren land that called out to the exploited of colonial
Newfoundland to reject the hierarchical ways of civilization.
While the Butter Pots are situated inland from the Southern Shore of the
Avalon Peninsula, the coastal outports have always played a similar role
as the barrens in Newfoundland popular culture in that they are likewise
seen as falling outside of the grasp of domesticated society.
For that reason, during my recent Newfoundland travels, I visited a few
of the outports that still exist. Originally only accessible by water,
many isolated outports have now increasingly been either joined by
rudimentary overland roads or their populations have been “resettled”
elsewhere at the impetus of the government after the cod fishery went
belly up at the end of last century. One of the many unanswered
questions about the Masterless Men is where did they go when they disbanded sometime in the eighteen hundreds.
The consensus seems to be that many melted into the safe harbors
provided by those scattered outport communities where they could remain
invisible from the prying eyes of law and liege. With this in mind, the
continuing allure of the Masterless Men can be seen as being directly
related to the recurring folkloric myth of “comin’ home,” in this case
to the more autonomous communitarian life that the outports still
continue to symbolize today in the Newfoundland cultural imaginary despite concerted government efforts to eradicate them in practice.
As Farley Mowat, who lived in Newfoundland for a time, noted in regard to the historical dissolution of indentured
servitude there, “*Some served out the full indenture period and then
slipped away to take up the outport way of life. A great many others
drew the breath of freedom early and ran off to hide themselves in bays
and inlets where they became ‘livyers’ (people who ‘live here’)*”
(Mowat, 1989, p. 64). Mowat himself was certainly aware of the history
of the Masterless Men. During a visit to Ferryland, he was able to
persuade local resident historian Howard Morry to share the oral history
of the village with him. Then, in the company of the Morry children,
Mowat walked the rugged tolts, rocky hills, and forests of the caribou
barrens, rambling over traces of the trails that the Masterless Men had
originally built, and hiked up the 1,000 feet high lookout peak on
Butter Pot Mountain located in the general vicinity where their camp had
once been located.
Mowat has described the Masterless Men as “*a loose-knit outlaw society
somewhat in the romantic tradition of Robin Hood. The Masterless Men
were never subjugated. Gradually, they melded with coastal fishermen
settlers, and to this day their blood runs strongly in the veins of the
people of the Southern Shore*.” (Mowat, 2016, p. 31). His pointed
mention that the Masterless Men were “never subjugated” represents an
important touchstone for understanding their mythic appeal in relation
to Newfoundland’s proud culture of resistance. After all, Newfoundland
only joined Canada (or, as Newfoundlanders say, Canada joined them) in 1949. It was
a close vote that was won by the forces of confederation under strained
economic circumstances rather than because of any strong nationalistic
allegiance to the Canadian state on the part of Newfoundlanders. The
history of Newfoundland’s Grand Banks cod fishery was one of being
subjected to international exploitation by competing countries for
hundreds of years before Canada even existed as a nation state. In
conjunction with its lucrative fishery, colonial Newfoundland had an
economic history of predatory merchant elites that systematically
mandated the near enslavement of those termed “apprentices” to the Fishing Admirals. In contrast, the history of the
Masterless Men celebrates the rebellious lives of those transplanted
seasonal laborers who escaped their indenture, or refused to return to
Ireland when it was up, and instead ran off to join the outlaws in the
wilderness.
*** Tales of Robin Hood
*Mythical Robin Hoods are never captured because their cause must live
on, even if it fades out for generations and must be reborn in popular
sentiment rather than real life.*
Paul Buhle
Of interest to us here is Mowatt’s previously cited comparison of the
eighteenth century Masterless Men to the mythic and beloved twelfth
century folkloric outlaws Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Though Robin
Hood’s actual existence has never been proven by hard facts, it is
indisputable that the folk-memory of his associated myth has retained
its inspirational power as a poetic tale of rebellion from medieval
times into the twenty-first century. However, in the Disneyfied version
of Robin Hood that is most widely encountered these days, he is said to
have been of noble blood and that the object of his rebellion was to restore peace and justice in the land through returning the
“good” King Richard the Lionhearted to the throne that had been usurped
by the “bad” Prince John while the former was away righteously slaying heathen
Muslims in the grisly Holy Wars known as the Great Crusades. The
Masterless Men were decidedly not blueblooded or monarchistically-inclined. Having themselves been victimized by British
colonialism, their mission was not to restore the royal order, but to
evade, taunt, and subvert it. As David Tighe has put it in decrying the sanitization of the
Robin Hood legend, “*The early tales of Robin Hood were better; more
violent and anti-clerical. Less about the supposed good King, and not
about King Richard and Prince John at all.*” (Tighe, 2011, p.2).
Historically-speaking, the royalist version of the Robin Hood legend is
actually a view of Robin Hood that only first gained currency in the
sixteenth century. It is not supported by the earliest Robin Hood
ballads, such as “A Gest of Robyn Hode,” in which Robin accepts the
king’s pardons only to later repudiate them and return to the forest.
All told, of the many Childe ballads that were assembled near the end of
the nineteenth century, thirty-eight were Robin Hood-centered. In fact,
the oldest surviving ballad from the thirteenth century,
“Robin Hood and the Monk,” gives even less support to the picture of
Robin Hood as noble partisan on behalf of the “true king.” In these
early ballads, Robin is a yeoman, that is a commoner (neither knight nor
peasant). If he is noble, it is because his deeds are noble rather than his ancestral lineage. Nor was there, until the sixteenth century, a
mythical noblewoman named Maid Marian whose role was to serve as the genteel love interest of the attractive
renegade. Prior to that era, a “Marian” and a “Robin” character had both
been associated with the pagan May Day celebrations of the fifteenth
century in which she was crowned as the “Queen of May” to his “Lord of
Misrule.” Before then, the “Marian” of the May Games had been derived
from a French folktale about a shepherdess named “Marian” and her
shepherd lover, “Robin.” Even earlier, the “Marian” figure was more
closely linked to the land as a fertility goddess with “Robin” as a sort
of Green Man consort.
Even though the Newfoundland legend obviously implies a gendered myth of
freedom given the male-defined name of the rebel band itself; often
included in the mythology is the subtext that in the course of their
friendly trading interactions with the settlers, the outlaws found
female partners who provided links to the outside world for their
kinsmen, husbands, and lovers. In that case, maybe there were many
“Marians” rather than one. Dawe has even gone so far as to say:
“*Because of the gang’s status amongst the Irish population, some of the
relationships were likely approved by the parents of these young women*”
(Dawe, 2011, p.11). As to offspring, there is no mention of the
existence of children in the outlaw camp. However, it has been
speculated that their imminent arrival might have been the impetus for
an outlaw to leave the barrens for some secluded outport fishing village
where he and his mate could raise a family.
Moreover, though it cannot be factually verified,
it is possible that a certain number of women who were also desirous of
liberating themselves from the settled way of life of the villages might
have picked up stakes and lighted out for the barrens to join their
outlaw lovers or even might have arrived by themselves to seek their own
fortunes independently as full-fledged outlaws rather than as mere
appendages to their husbands and lovers. The latter would most likely
have been adventurous runaways from the miseries of poverty, the tedious
work of drying and salting the cod for shipment abroad, and the
household drudgery associated with the large families of the
settlements. Given their oppressive circumstances, we can assume that
some of these women were probably quite ready to jettison their
subservient connection to the British royal enterprise and embrace the
freedom of the outlaw life. Though not typical, historical instances of
rebellious women running off to share the outlaw life with men in
mixed-gender bands are not unknown.
Whatever may have been their gender politics, Robin’s Merry Men and the
Masterless Men were both legendary for establishing communities of
evasion and resistance outside the boundaries of civilization, whether
in the wilds of Sherwood Forest or in the unmapped reaches of the Butter
Pot Barrens, and whether resisting the Sheriff of Nottingham and his men
or the Royal Navy’s Marine Police patrols. As to the latter, like Robin
Hood’s merry band, the Masterless Men no doubt enjoyed playing deceiving
pranks on their naval police pursuers by constructing false and
misleading trails into the uncharted interior of the Avalon Peninsula.
These blind diversionary paths led to nowhere in the maze of thousands
of narrow lakes (some deep enough for canoes and others not), ponds,
brooks, and bogs, and amongst the ubiquitous goowithy shrubs and the
daunting three to four feet deep underlay of matted dwarf spruce that
would have surrounded the outlaws’ camp in the Butter Pot Barrens.
The rebellious laughter that had once resounded through the mythic
greenwoods of Robin Hood’s England, now echoed in the tuckamore of
Newfoundland, adding to the frustration of the tricked, befuddled, and
bewildered enforcers of sovereign authority. When Newfoundland-based
film director Linda Conway was contemplating making a film on the
Masterless Men, she stated in an interview that she too had the Robin Hood storyline in
mind. Moreover, as she explained the importance of legend to the
historical relevance of her ultimately unrealized film project: “*When someone from the outside
says, that’s a great story but it’s only a legend, for someone in Renews
(just south of Ferryland) the legend is their story, they are telling
you who they are, with metaphors and symbols. When I first heard the
legend of Kerrivan the appeal of it spoke to challenging the
establishment and finding your own place*” (Conway, 2010, p. 23). While
this legend involves the storied resilience of the Masterless Men in
upending His Majesty’s colonial authority, those particularly irreverent
stories that made their English overlords look foolish were undoubtedly the favorite fare of many Irish colonial subjects in
Newfoundland who liked nothing better than a good joke at British
expense.
*** Troubling Colonial Rule
*The British Navy, they come in search of we, Our trails through bog we
lead, We disappear.*
Fine Crowd (Hugh Scott)
“By Peter Kerrivan”
With their wilderness outlaw camp located in a stateless autonomous
zone, the Masterless Men were able to occasionally swoop down from their
mountain stronghold to raid the stored wealth being guarded by the
British naval authorities and in effect to challenge the colonial
economics of the encroaching Newfoundland state-information. In this
regard, the outlaws’ nomadic mobility was also a useful survival tool in case of retaliatory attacks by
colonial naval detachments acting to protect the immensely profitable
exploitation of the Newfoundland cod fishery. For such defensive
reasons, mobility was actually built-in to the Butter Pot housing stock.
The Masterless Men’s legendary shack town consisted of rude makeshift
dwellings (using spruce poles and bark) so that nothing of value would
be lost if the inhabitants needed to leave on short notice or if their
primitive houses were set aflame by the civilized forces of law and
order. Only once, over a period of fifty years or more, did the Naval
police manage to capture any of the ever so fleet and nimble Masterless
Men. On that one occasion, the Navy patrols were able to take as
prisoners anywhere from two to four luckless lads (depending on which
account you favor) who are said to have been disoriented green recruits who had just
arrived at the rebel camp from Ferryland and Caplin Bay.
These so-called “Irish Youngsters” were taken prisoner near the Masterless Men’s hastily abandoned hideout after
having been cut off from the main band. For their newly-minted
association with the Butter Pot outlaws, they were subjected to the
cruel punishment of being strung up by the yardarm of a British naval
ship in the Ferryland harbor. The hanging of the captive rebels was
meant to be a public spectacle that would serve both as a warning and a
moral example to “evil doers” who might be tempted to challenge royal authority in the future. The
powers-that-be notably used the same moralistic language of good and
evil that contemporary governments use against those who they deem to be
“terrorists” today. Oral history provides us with an eyewitness
remembrance of that momentous execution day by Howard Morry’s
grandmother, Chris, who was but a child of five when her mother took her
from Aquaforte to Ferryland so as to witness in person the gruesome
hanging of the “Irish youngsters” (whose limp bodies she tells us
remained hung up to rot all day in the sun) for the antiauthoritarian
crimes of “sedition” and “civil disobedience.”
In regard to the ethnicity of the hanged men,
David Dawe makes the argument that in order to fully understand the
wrath of the colonial government towards the Masterless Men and vice versa, it is necessary to address not
only their refusal of bondage, deportation, or debtor’s prison, but
their ethnicity as Irishmen. Ethnic controversies about the Irish
presence in Newfoundland, go back to the invasion of the Newfoundland
colony by France in 1762. At that time, some Irish dissidents who were
rebelling against their own colonization by the British, had joined the
Catholic French in their bid to take the colony away from Protestant
England. Later, during the time of the Masterless Men, what might have
been weighing heavily on the minds of the British colonial authorities was the infamous murder of prominent English merchant and
magistrate William Keen of St. Johns in 1754. Keen had a long history of using his judicial office to harass the
Irish, and his death set off a wave of antiPapist hysteria that swept
over the colony when it was discerned that nine Irishmen and one Irish
woman had committed the homicide in the course of a robbery. As a
result, the British governor severely curtailed the religious freedoms
of Irish Catholics to harass them as representing what he considered to be a growing menace to (Protestant) society.
Nevertheless, Irish Catholics continued to practice their religion
underground in communities like Renews where, as legend has it, secret
midnight masses were regularly celebrated at the “Mass Rock” though it
was a penal offense to do so.
While the myth of the Masterless Men is a secular one, it has been most
widely embraced by Newfoundlanders of Irish descent as being their story
of rebellion against not only indenture and naval press gangs but in
opposition to the anti-Irish policies and practices of the British
colonial authorities. In relation to this Irish cultural context, some
have speculated that such harsh treatment by British colonial rulers may
have had unintended consequences in relation to the increased influence
of the Society of Masterless Men, which appeared in some accounts to
have the trappings of an Irish secret society more than an outlaw band.
In any case, as David Dawe has put it, the resulting “*anti-Catholic
campaign certainly contributed to the rapid growth of Kerrivan’s little
band which was quickly gaining a reputation for its bold raids upon
merchants of the Southern Shore*” (Dawe, June 20, 1998, p. 104). In the
charismatic figure of Kerrivan, the myth of the Masterless Men spanned
the ocean to encompass both the barren lands of Newfoundland and the
“old sod” of Ireland, where he had been born.
In 1788–89, a spate of religious riots erupted that shook the
foundations of Ferryland and its nearby outports and reverberated beyond
to the Butter Pot Barrens where the inexperienced “Irish Youngsters”
would soon be ensnared in the course of events. These were not
anti-Catholic riots per se, but colonial power struggles between rival
Catholic factions, which came to a head
when Father James O’Donel was formally recognized by the British
authorities as the officially-approved Catholic prelate to preside over
the Irish flock in Newfoundland. His appointment did not sit well with
supporters of his rival, Father Patrick Power, one of several “rogue
priests” who were more inclined to revolt against the British authorities than to seek official recognition from them.
As to whether the Masterless Men played any role in this fracas,
according to local historian B.D. Fardy, “*Just how much contact or how
much influence the Masterless Men had with the settlements of the Shore
is not known for certain, but the authorities were convinced that they
had too much. Apparently, it was not the only donnybrook throughout the
winter and colonial officials had their suspicions that Kerrivan’s
Society of Masterless Men had more than a little to do with the
disturbances, if not instigating them, then at least encouraging them,
given their dislike of the British authorities*” (Fardy, 2005, pp. 157–160).
Enter Captain Edward Pellew of the Royal Navy, who as Surrogate Judge of
the Colonial Court for the Ferryland area, was reputed to be “a most bitter enemy to Roman
Catholics” (Fardy 2005, pp. 158–160).Acting on his prejudices, Pellew
persuaded the colonial Governor, Admiral Sir Mark Milbanke, to send him
to Ferryland in the HMS Winchelsea to quell the ethnic disturbances, warn the rogue priests that they faced expulsion if the disturbances did
not cease, and hunt down the Masterless Men—whose contagious example of
lawless rebellion had to be surpressed for law and order to prevail. In
1791, the one hundred thirty one men thought to be involved in the riots
were tried by Pellew himself as Surrogate Judge. He sentenced all of
them to fines, and some to the lash, for the crimes of “aiding and
harboring rioters” or “riotous and unlawful assembly” in relation to the 1788 disturbances.
Most who were so sentenced were deported to Ireland or else shipped off
to some desolate penal colony. Fardy speculates that many of these might
otherwise have become Masterless Men, and that those who stayed were
forewarned about the consequences of doing so which acted as a “great
deterrent” to any of them who might have been entertaining the idea of
joining up with the outlaws (Fardy, 2005, p. 152). The records show that
one of those convicted in 1791 was a Thomas Kerrivan, who was fined, sentenced to thirty nine lashes, and sent “home” to Ireland.
Dawe speculates that he might have been related to Peter Kerrivan of the
Masterless Men (Dawe, 2011, pp 7–13). Or perhaps he simply was
expeditiously rounded up with little evidence against him in the
first-place other than that he shared the Kerrivan name. Of the two
hundred men convicted in absentia, some included those legally
designated as “Run Aways,” who were threatened with having their “sentences executed if they return.” By widely
publicizing their pending sentences, the British authorities were not
only seeking to threaten any deserters who had already escaped from
bondage with retroactive punishment, but were pre-emptively trying to
discourage any lower case “masterless men” that might be contemplating
escape from actually becoming uppercase Masterless Men in the future.
To end the colonial troubles, Pellew employed what today would be called
a bad cop/good cop strategy. It consisted of combining the recent memory
of his harsh crackdown on the rioters with a new guarantee of religious
freedom for Catholics brokered by Father O’Donel in 1791 in return for
the latter’s assurances of loyalty to the Crown. If his strategy worked,
Pellew could then turn his attention to concertedly pursuing the
Masterless Men. According to Fardy’s speculation on the success of
Pellew’s plan to use the Masterless Men’s supposed involvement in the
riots to discredit them enough in the eyes of the local loyalist
population to facilitate their aforementioned capture and subsequent
hanging:
“Perhaps because of the ill feelings that had surfaced as a result of the recent riots, he (Pellew) learned the identities of
several of the members of the Society and determined to capture them.
Over the next year, he was successful in capturing four Society members
near the Butterpots. They may have been stragglers cut off from the main
band or even escaped convicts from St. John’s but Pellew was determined
to have his examples” (Fardy, 1005, p. 16).
However, rather than accepting such a speculative scenario of betrayal
and treachery as the conclusion to the story of those unlucky captives
who were hung by Pellew; poet David Benson has contributed his own
ending of solidarity and poetic justice to the legendary tale.
In Benson’s poem, “The Masterless Men of the Southern Shore,” he
describes a post-hanging scenario in which the outlaws obtain revenge
for the judicial murder of their fallen comrades. In this scenario, he
says of the uncaptured outlaws:
They came to the coast before dawning
The frigate at anchor was moored.
And stealthily cutting her cables,
She drifted and wrecked on the shore.
(Benson, *Tickle Ace*, 1997, p.9)
While some, like Fardy, place the date of the hangings as “soon after
the riots” of 1788–89; Chris Morry, in her *Oral History of Ferryland*
entry, recalls the date of the hangings as not being until 1810 or
thereabouts, which seems to be a very long time after the initial capture of those hanged. Her remembrance, if accurate, would add another decade or more to the usually allotted fifty-year longevity of the Masterless Men as a rebellious force with which to be
reckoned. Whatever the actual date of the hangings, most historians
contend that the numbers of the Masterless Men were already in decline
as 1800 approached. Nevertheless, one story contends that not long after
the 1810 date that Morry remembers, some of the Masterless Men were
offered the chance of making a shift from being “land pirates,” who
raided the storehouses of the wealthy merchants and the lucrative
colonial reserves of the Southern Coast, to becoming seafaring privateers during the War of 1812 between the British and the
Americans. As such, they were licensed as pirates by the British
government, which turned a blind eye to their criminal records, allowing
them to be legally forgiven in return for their willingness to prey upon
enemy American ships. In return they could keep any captured loot that
they might find on board.
Conceiving of the Masterless Men as transitioning from the role of land
pirate to seagoing one is not such a stretch of the imagination when one
remembers the trenchant words of pirate captain Charles Bellamy, which are applicable to both: “They vilify us, the Scoundrels do,
when there is only this Difference, they rob the Poor under the Cover of
Law, forsooth, and we plunder the Rich under the Protection of our own Courage” (Bellamy in Iskashato, 2017
p.80). While these remarks are reputed to have been made by Bellamy to
the defeated captain of a rich merchant vessel in 1720 (thirty years before the origins of the Masterless Men),
others have claimed that they came from the mouth of pirate captain Sam
“Black Sam” Bellamy instead. However, since both pirates plied the
Western Atlantic, including Newfoundland waters, it hardly matters
mythically as to which pirate is being quoted. Alternately, some have
even speculated that neither pirate said these words, but that they came
from the pen of pirate chronicler Daniel Defoe. Regardless of their
source, the class analysis which informs the words rings true even in
the twenty first century in regard to Somali pirates, many of whom were
formerly fishermen as had been the case with the Masterless Men.
Accordingly, Somali pirates have stated in their defense against state
charges of “terrorism” that they were only “pillaging the pillagers.” (Iskashato, 2017, pp. lX and 80).
In any case, by the 1820s and 1830s, Newfoundland’s civil laws on
property ownership had become somewhat less onerous in their impact. Not
coincidentally, some local historians place 1820 as the date by which
the last of the outlaws left the Butter Pots or died off (Dawes, 2011,
p. 12). In a scenario much loved by reformists, the disappearance of the
outlaws is attributed to the fact that by that time it had become
possible for a poor man without land title to make an independent living without having to become an indentured servant subject to the autocratic command of the planters or the fishing masters in order to survive. He could even legally become a smallholder rather than
a transient laborer forced to return to Ireland when his indenture was
up. He could dream of building his own small house, raising a family,
and living off the sea with his dory docked in some nearly stateless
outport with no meddling magistrates or naval police patrols to trouble
him much. Squatters could even build houses on unoccupied crown land and
claim it as their own after a generation or so had passed. While being
an independent fisherman was still a hard life, it was by that point less constrained, and, as such, might have appealed to
at least some of the outlaws.
Long before the cod fishery went belly up due to industrial overfishing
in the twentieth century, many former Masterless Men had simply faded
into the fog of some remote outport cove without leaving a trace of
themselves behind, other than their descendants who are still around
today with names like Kerrivan, Kervin, Caravan, and Kier. Perhaps even
John and Wilf Curran, the brothers who were both founding members of the
contemporary Newfoundland folk group called the Masterless Men, are
distant kin, especially since they were both born in Ferryland. And
maybe this explains why these musicians have been the most generous
assessors of the historical longevity of the Masterless Men by listing
in the liner notes to their Breakin’ New Ground recording that
their rebellion had a one hundred year history of resistance to the
state from their wilderness perch in the Butter Pot Barrens that lasted
from 1750 to 1850.
*** Beyond Domestication
*They were men without masters*
*Deserters who scoffed at the law*
*The worst kind of rebels of all*
David Benson
Of course, not all of the Masterless Men dreamed of living a settled
life. It is speculated that those Masterless Men who didn’t choose to
melt into the outport life decided instead to remain in the Butter Pots.
In any case, none were ever captured again. Much to the dismay of the
colonial authorities, Kerrivan was never reputed to have been caught and
was said to have continued to live to a ripe old age in the wild
sanctuary of the interior that had been his home for over half a
century. At his death, he was said to have left four sons, several
daughters, and an unmarked grave. By leaving behind the life of a
British naval seaman that had been forced upon him, to take refuge on
land, Kerrivan had in a certain sense “gone native” as a fugitive from
the authoritarian reach of European civilization. While the evidence of
the involvement of the Masterless Men with the indigenous peoples of
Newfoundland is sparse, their direct contact with any indigenous peoples living in the interior would have been very
likely. In this regard, the mythic story of the Masterless Men’s
reputedly harmonious relationship with their outcast counterparts among native peoples in wilderness
climes offers a much more emancipatory model for European-Indigenous
encounter than the all too familiar British colonial drill of invasion,
conquest, theft, and settlement.
According to *Oral History of Ferryland*, during the late 1700s, Robert Carter, an English planter who was the most prominent
landowner in the Ferryland settlement, reportedly shot and killed
anywhere from one to three “Indians” (the exact number being dependent
on which account is accepted) who appeared by surprise one day on the Western hills above the town. As Dawe notes,
“If this report is true, it may prove that natives were still living on
the Avalon Peninsula during the years of the Masterless Men and so there
might well have been contact between the two groups*” (Dawe, 2011, pp.
11–12). If so, this still leaves the question of whether Carter’s
murderous encounter was with the Beothuk. As Dawe puts it, “*Should it be true that there was a
friendly exchange between the Beothuks and the Masterless Men, it may
well be the only prolonged example of such in Newfoundland history”
(Dawe, 1998, p. 106).
However, such historians as Dawe, Horwood, and Fardy all agree that
Carter’s encounter was highly unlikely to have been with a Beothuk. In
their estimation, those shot were most likely Mi’kmaq, since by that
late date the Beothuk were probably extinct (as a direct result of
genocide). However, local folk tales persist in imagining a sort of
kinship between indigenous peoples and the masterless defectors from
European civilization, and some of these stories even suggest that a few
Beothuk might have remained on the Avalon Peninsula. It has been
speculated that some Beothuk might have joined forces with the
Masterless Men as a means of mutual survival since both groups were
hiding from those hostile colonial forces that doggedly sought to
exterminate them in the interests of bringing law and order to the
colony.
In any case, whether or not the Beothuks were already extinct by the
time of the Masterless Men, or in the final stages of decline,
indigenous people in contact with the Masterless Men were probably either predominantly or
exclusively the Mi’kmaq. The Mi’kmaq were originally from Nova Scotia,
but had been repopulated by the Acadian French when the latter
established a Newfoundland colonial presence at Placentia. During the
war between the French and the English at the turn of the eighteenth
century, the Mi’kmaq had allied themselves with the French. However, once the war was over and the French
governor’s need for the Mi’kmaq warriors was ended, he officially condemned what he now retrospectively
considered to be their “savage brutality” and ordered them to be expelled immediately. The Mi’kmaq ignored the order
and refused to leave the area. In geographical terms, Placentia’s
location in relation to the Butter Pots would have certainly put them
within range of the Masterless Men by an overland route through the
barrens, and so probably it was through contact with them that the
Masterless Men would have learned many of their wilderness survival
skills in unfamiliar terrain.
As David Benson poetically recreates the relationship between the
Masterless Men, indigenous peoples, and the largely autonomous coastal
outport communities:
*They learned from the Bush-Born Indians,
Took food from the barrens and trees,
They ate of the ducks and the partridge,
The caribou, beaver, and geese.*
*They came in the night to the outports
and traded their furs and their meat,
receiving the things that they needed
musket balls, powder, and tea.*
(Benson, 1997, p. 90)
This poetic excerpt presents us with a picture of a thriving
black-market economy, and so offers a very different picture of the
Masterless Men than the official colonial accounts in which they are
depicted as a criminal gang of ne’er do wells who callously stole from
the poor and terrorized the local settlements to the point that the
much-preyed-upon settlers would petition Mother England for protection.
While Dawe makes no Robin Hoodesque allusion to “stealing from the rich to give to the poor,” neither does he
frame the Masterless Men as the simple plunderers of Newfoundland that
the merchants and fishing masters repeatedly complained about to the
colonial authorities. As Horwood explains the alternative economics of
evading colonial authority, “The Masterless Men traded surreptitiously with settlers in out-of-the-way
fishing villages, exchanging meat and hides, and probably furs as well, for such supposed essentials as flour, molasses, and rum. If
they couldn’t get these essentials in any other way, they stole them
from the fishing rooms where they also took nets, cordage, guns, and
ammunition—things that they found difficult to obtain by trade”
(Horwood, 2011, pp. 145–146). Unlike the colonial elites whose wealth
they freely re-appropriated for themselves, the Masterless Men did not
seek to do the same with the other financially less-well-off residents
of the coastal communities but preferred to cultivate trade
relationships instead.
According to a description of the Masterless Men taken from the
remembrances of Howard Morry of Ferryland and John Hawkins of nearby
Cape Broyle, as has been quoted in *The Oral History of Ferryland*,
“They were ‘country-men,’ who had learned to live and hunt like aboriginals.
The caribou herd was their staff of life. They lived mainly on meat and
learned to dress deerskins, and used them for clothing almost
exclusively. They were semi-nomadic, following the deer” (Morry and Hawkins in Horwood, 2011, p. 145). In addressing their
social interactions with the settlers, Fardy points to the nexus between
this type of “country-men” economy of self-sufficiency and the mutuality
of the trade economy:
They hunted, trapped, and fished in the interior and traded with the
nearby settlements for other staples. In exchange for fresh country meat, caribou and their hides, they bartered with the
settlers for salt pork and mutton, flour and vegetables like potatoes,
cabbage and turnips which would keep over winter, and tea and molasses.
They also got their supplies of powder and shot from the settlers which
allowed them to continue their hinterland lifeway. When trade was not
possible it is said, they resorted to stealthy raids when they took what
they wanted or needed. But it is said they never took from the poorer
fishermen or planters. This gained them a reputation as a sort of band
of Robin Hoods although it cannot be said with the same certainty that
they gave to the poor (Fardy, 2005, p. 155).
Like Fardy, most historians agree that the relationships between the
Masterless Men and their peers who lived a more settled life in the coastal villages were
predominantly ones of mutual aid.
*** Clashing Myths
Those navvy boys we rob and tease.
We steal their flour and beans, they’d take our liberty!
Fine Crowd (Hugh Scott)
“By Peter Kerrivan”
Enter Eldon Drodge. Without any substantial evidence to back up his
claims, Drodge, whether consciously or unconsciously, shifts the
emancipatory myth of the Masterless Men in a reactionary direction in
the pages of his biographical novel, *Kerrivan*. Contrary to their
mythologized place in Newfoundland history as formidable
anti-authoritarian outlaws, he depicts the Masterless Men as a small
group of about a dozen or so petty pilferers and thieves, good-hearted
brutes, despicable informers, and wanton pillagers, who treacherously
preyed upon the downtrodden for a few short years in the middle of the
eighteenth century until order was thankfully restored by the
authorities. However, the real treachery in the story is its sacrificing
of the emancipatory myth of the Masterless Men on the altar of a
ludicrously unlikely alliance “made in heaven” between Drodge’s
plastic–saint-of-aKerrivan and the humble Father Fabian O’Donnell, who,
as a beloved Renews priest, secretly supplies the wanted outlaws with
benevolent “packages of kindness” to help them get through the harsh
Newfoundland winters. Either the author has invented the character of
O’Donnell out of whole cloth or perhaps he might have been partially
modeled on the historical priest, James O’Donel, previously mentioned
here for his collaborationist loyalty to the crown.
In any case, Drodge has opted to make the priest into a sympathetic
character in order to remake the story of the Masterless Men into a
conservative morality tale. His novel features the titular Kerrivan,
enshrined in hierarchical terms as the “undisputed leader.” Drodge’s
Kerrivan character is an individual hero whose moral fortitude is head
and shoulders above that of his ragtag gang of inept misfits and
psychopathic scoundrels. No other recounting of the legend of the
Masterless Men identifies any of the group by name other than Kerrivan,
who was documented in the historical record as a result of having had a
price put on his head for jumping ship. Unlike the story of Robin Hood’s
merry men, there is no mythic equivalent to Little John and Friar Tuck
in the Butter Pot-based camp of the Masterless Men. Undaunted, Drodge
has simply invented a hackneyed cast of characters to populate his
equally-clichéed novel in a failed attempt to give it some dramatic
weight.
For starters, he quickly dispenses with the anarchic qualities of the
Robin Hood myth of “stealing from the rich and giving to the poor” by
having the Masterless Men stealing from the poor instead.
Simultaneously, he scuttles the qualities of self-sufficiency and
solidarity nwith the oppressed that have always animated the myth of the Masterless
Men, and replaces them with a reformist emphasis on “good works” and the
pastey kind of charity for the poor displayed ad nauseum by the devoted
Father Fabian. Here Drodge essentially has attempted a hostile takeover
of the Masterless Men myth by championing the benevolent authority of
the humble parish priest, whose vows of poverty make him the true arbiter of morality. Perhaps the most
absurd aspect of the novel is Drodge’s conceit that the Masterless Men
could have ever survived as rebel outlaws for very long if their
relationship to the settlers depended upon surreptitiously receiving
priestly charity on the one hand, and, on the other, conducting pitiless raids
designed to scrape the crumbs from the tables of the poor rather than
building relationships of mutual aid with them.
As a whole, Drodge’s book raises an important dilemma for those
interested in the subversive power of emancipatory mythology. Because
legends cannot ever be fully documented by facts, even the most
emancipatory of myths, like that of the Masterless Men, can be robbed of
their radical attributes and appropriated for more conservative ends. In
this case, Drodge has essentially converted the profanely illuminating
poetic imagery that constitutes the iconic myth of the Masterless Men
into the prosaic tawdriness of a religious soap opera. In his clumsy
attempt at redefining the metaphoric, symbolic, and analogic power of
the dethroning myth of masterlessness, he replaces it with his own
lusterless parable of reformist acquiescence to church and state.
However, in spite of Drodge’s effort to push the mythology of the
Masterless Men in a reactionary direction, his novel has not succeeded
in challenging what continues to be the emancipatory nature of their
mythic status in Newfoundland culture. Nor are his fabrications taken
seriously in either historical or folkloric circles. In the epilogue,
Drodge actually admits that the revisionist story which he has just told
within the book’s covers is a “fictional account” that is only loosely
based on more representative accounts of the Masterless Men that are
available in *The Oral History of Ferryland* or have been published by
such historians as Harold Horwood and Farley Mowat. While it is
certainly true that over time there has been much conjecture about the
legend of the Masterless Men, there is a fine line to be drawn between
historical investigation, elaboration, and outright distortion. In his
melodramatic morality play of a novel, Drodge unconvincingly attempts to
turn an inspiring myth of revolt against authority into a twisted and
misleading account of predatory bandits rescued from their sins by the
redemptive intercession of a dedicated Catholic priest.
In Drodge’s revised version of the Masterless Men myth, Kerrivan is
idealized as a sort of Christ-like figure whose nobler aspirations are
not reflected in the larcenous behavior of his backwoods disciples. In
keeping with Drodge’s fictionalized account, rather than raiding the merchant
larders and government warehouses of the rich, the Masterless Men turn
from engaging in occasional instances of petty theft to repeatedly
stealing the meager possessions of the poor coastal villagers in predawn
raids that eventually become sadistic, even murderous, onslaughts
necessitating the intervention of the colonial authorities at the
settlers’ urgent request. Within Drodge’s alternate universe, the
Masterless Men prey upon those at the bottom of the social ladder. In a
weak attempt at creating dramatic tension, Drodge gives us the devilish
Nate Johnson character, invented to be Kerrivan’s arch rival within the
outlaw band. Much to Kerrivan’s dismay, Johnson leads the outlaws even
further astray in victimizing the hapless poor until the good Father Fabian finally comes
to the rescue. Of course, it would be an exaggeration to characterize
the Masterless Men as innocent choir boys or to contend that the
destructiveness of their actions might not sometimes have exceeded or
violated the social justice ideals of their myth. However, even in
practical terms, it is extremely doubtful that they could have survived
the British search and destroy parties for so long without having had a
solid relationship of mutual respect with the local villagers whose
trade and protection they needed in order to survive, and who would have
been more likely to betray them if they had been victimized by them.
Rather than dealing with the systemic abuses of colonial justice, Drodge
has created contrasting colonial officials that can be played off
against one another in much the same way that he does with Kerrivan and
Johnson. Accordingly, he inserts a newly-appointed colonial official as a character towards the end of the book: Naval Governor
Myles Grimes, presented as a paternalistic and wise statesman. He is in
contrast to the cruel and selfcentered preceding governor, Lieutenant
Stanford, who had previously hung six of the Masterless Men (including
two teenage boys) in the book’s concocted version of events. Grimes is
yet another benevolent authority figure, while Stanford is employed by Drodge as a villainous foil to buttress
the more liberal brand of colonialism represented by his successor. At
the conclusion of the book, as a result of Father Fabian’s instigation,
the Grimes character brings law and order back to the colony, and, in so
doing, legitimizes colonial rule. Grimes strikes a deal in which he promises not to hunt down the Masterless Men if Kerrivan in
turn promises to end the outlaw band’s dishonorable raids on the
cruelly-treated villagers, which the repenting outlaw is quite willing
to do.
Bearing in mind that these odious raids against the poor had been
artificially created by Drodge in the first place, his contrived
resolution of the raiding issue allows him to close his novelistic
sermon on a cloying note of domesticity. Accordingly, at the end of the
novel, Drodge attempts to counter the nomadic myth of the Masterless Men
by promulgating instead a redemptive myth of domestication in which
Kerrivan finds domestic bliss with the only female character in the book
whom Dodge has conveniently created for just this purpose. She is the
long-suffering Hannah Martin, whom the outlaw marries in a wedding
ceremony presided over by none other than the good Father Fabian.
Kerrivan’s legal and religiously-sanctified marriage marks the end of
his outlaw life in the wilds of Butter Pot Mountain amongst the
Masterless Men. In Drodge’s attempted normalization of Kerrivan, the
saga of the Masterless Men ends when the outlaw disowns and abandons
what had by that point in the novel sadly degenerated into a reign of
terror on the settlements in return for a settled family life of his own
in a cabin on the edge of the town of Renews. We are told by Drodge that
Kerrivan gave up his rowdy ways and lived there contentedly, with his
grandchildren close by, until his natural death many years later. In no
other mythic accounts of the Masterless Men does Kerrivan ever leave his
stateless Butter Pot Barrens refuge to live a domesticated life in the
settlements.
In her research on the Masterless Men, Andrea Genevieve Johnston soundly
refutes this distorted picture of the Masterless Men as “terrorists at
large” that was originally promulgated by the colonial power brokers and
then uncritically parroted by Drodge in sycophantic fashion as part of
his blatant attempt to rewrite their outlaw myth. As she explains, “*I
have not come across a single other source that says the Masterless Men
ever ‘terrorized’ the surrounding settlements. In fact, the majority of
the sources state that the Masterless Men had contacts and friends in
the settlement with whom they would frequently trade*” (Johnston, 2016,
p. 92). As we have seen, stories about the Masterless Men (and others) can be skewed based upon who is doing the telling. If
we simplistically rely on official records, which consist mainly of orders given by the British navy to capture the
outlaws, we are getting only the viewpoint of the colonial authorities.
Referring back to Dawe’s previous comments on the Robin Hood myth, it
should be remembered that he only questioned whether the Masterless Men
“gave to the poor” not whether they “stole from the rich.” As he has
further explained the reciprocal terms of the relationship between the
Masterless Men and their allies amongst the villagers: “*There is little evidence that Peter [Kerrivan] robbed from
the rich and gave to the poor, but there is plenty of evidence that
local sympathizers aided the Masterless Men, not only by illegal
trading, but also by acting as spies who would show their solidarity by
tipping them off whenever there was a plan to apprehend them*” (Dawe,
2011, p. 11).That kind of solidarity would have been impossible to
obtain if it were poor folks who were the ones being subjected to the
raiding parties. Bearing in mind the elite targets of their raids, the
Masterless Men received grassroots support because of their raids not in
spite of them.
While many details of the story of the Masterless Men are as misty as
the rolling fog of Newfoundland and as elusive as the Masterless Men
themselves, we do know that not only did they learn to live off the land
by hunting game, gathering wild berries and plants, and fishing for
brook trout, but that sometimes they resorted to stealthy raids upon
rich merchants and planters. In flipping Drodge’s revisionist script
back over, his narrative of the Masterless Men as stealing from the
long-suffering coastal villagers can be re-conceptualized as one in
which it is the more adventurous men and women from among the poor who
might have stolen themselves away from the miseries of colonial
civilization to steal their lives back again in the freedom of the
wilderness environs. Accordingly, they cast off their servitude to
colonial masters to cast in their lot with the Masterless Men. In
leaving their settled ways behind, they charted an autonomous course
through the barren wastelands carving a path toward the inland
lighthouse at the peak of Butter Pot Mountain.
*** Communique from the Stateless Zones
Attempts to abandon states or evade state power are universal; they
have probably affected every state in the history of the world.
Peter Gelderloos
While the Masterless Men have typically been considered rebels, the
outcomes of their rebellion are often perceived by historians as being
reformist in that they were rebelling against the injustices of the
system rather than the system itself and so were quite willing to be
placated by the granting of legal rights that served to restore the necessary
degree of social peace required for the smooth functioning of society.
From a liberal perspective, such a reformist result is seen in a
positive light. On the other hand, from the Marxist point of view of
someone like Eric Hobsbawm, the inevitable trap of reformism laid for
such groups as the Masterless Men is in effect attributed to their being
“social bandits” rather than “real” revolutionaries who must by
necessity concern themselves with seizing state power. Alternatively, from an anti-authoritarian
perspective, the Masterless Men would not be understood as “social
bandits” in the Marxian sense, but rather as anarchic rebels, closer to
what James C. Scott has positively identified as “barbarians,” and their
Butter Pot Barrens camp would be seen in that context as a “barbarian
zone.”
Historically, as Scott explains, barbarians are “*uncaptured at the very
least and, at worst, represent a nuisance and threat that must be
exterminated*” (Scott, 2017, p.221). Since barbarians seek to evade
capture by civilization, they have often dwelled in what Scott has
called “barbarian zones” which “*most often refer to mountains or steppes. In fact, almost any
area that was difficult to access, illegible and trackless, and
unsuitable for intensive farming might qualify as a barbarian zone. Thus
uncleared dense forest, swamps, marshes, river deltas, fens, moors,
deserts, heath, arid wastes, and even the sea itself have been cast into
this category by state discourse*” (Scott, 2017, p.228). A complmentary
anarchist analysis of early state formation has been provided by Peter
Gelderloos in which he examines those rebels who seek to elude or resist
statehood. Accordingly, their aim is not to seize state power as
Hobsbawm mandates but to abolish it by seizing power over their own
lives.
In Hobsbawm’s staunch Marxist analysis, the social bandit represents a
“primitive” or “archaic” form of social agitation rather than revolutionary action. For Hobsbawm,
“*Social banditry, though a protest, is a modest and unrevolutionary
protest. It protests not against the fact that peasants are poor and
oppressed, but against the fact that they are sometimes excessively poor
and oppressed. Bandit heroes are not expected to make a world of
equality. They can only right wrongs and prove that sometimes oppression
can be turned upside down*” (Hobsbawm, 1959, p. 24). He has further
explained his concept of the social bandit in terms of his Marxist
reading of the legend of Robin Hood. As Hobsbawm says of Robin, “He
seeks to establish or to re-establish justice or ‘the old ways,’ that is
to say, fair dealing in a society of oppression. That is why Robin Hood
cannot die, and why he is invented when he does not really exist. Poor
men have need of him, for he represents justice. That is why they need
him most, perhaps, when they cannot hope to overthrow oppression but
merely seek its alleviation because he represents a higher form of
society which is powerless to be born” (Hobsbawm, 2000, pp.60–61). Hobsbawm, though clearly fascinated
with social banditry enough to write an entire volume about it, never
allowed himself to get swept up in what he considered to be the romantic
myth of “personal insurgence.” The latter, no matter how combative its
means, he opposed to more serious forms of revolutionary struggle toward
Marxist goals.
For Hobsbawm, “the social bandit is an individual
who refuses to bend his back, that is all” (Hobsbawm, 200, p.61). But to
turn his Marxist edict into a question, is that all? “Refusing to bend
your back” is not necessarily a finite act. Such a refusal can provoke a
wide range of anarchist forms of rebellion ranging from assertions of
individual autonomy to the fomentation of social revolution. It can be
the key that one uses to open the door to anarchy rather than allowing
oneself to get trapped in the revolving door of state socialism a la
Hobsbawm. Moreover, while his use of the term “social bandit” sounds
neutral in theory, in historical practice it has not been neutral at
all. During the early years of the Russian Revolution, “social bandit”
was used to designate those considered to be counter-revolutionaries. It
was wielded like a club by the Bolsheviks in order to consolidate their
hold over state power by vilifying and purging both individualist
anarchists who “refused to bend their backs” to the Soviet commissars
and such “unbending” social revolutionaries as those who associated
themselves with Nestor Mahkno in the Ukraine. In the bloody history
of authoritarian state socialism, to label someone a social bandit has
not just been a way of dismissing their revolutionary intentions, but of
landing them in the gulag or the morgue.
Moreover, Hobsbawm’s remarks are particularly
telling in relation to his dismissal of the inspirational power imbedded
in the myth of revolt. Though the subversive potency of such myths is
not measurable in the purely material terms prized by Marxists, it has
been a baseline contention of this essay that such a myth can act as an
inspiration in fomenting and keeping alive the spirit of revolt.
However, for Hobsbawm, inspirational ideals are dismissed as
illusionary: they cannot be efficiently translated into concrete
revolutionary change. In this regard, he mockingly says of those who he
considers to be misguided idealists, “Only the ideals for which they
fought, and for which men and women made up songs about them, survive,
and round the fireside these still maintain the vision of the just
society, whose champions are brave and noble as eagles, fleet as stags,
the sons of the mountains and the deep forests” (Hobsbawm, 1959, p.28).
From his perspective, not only are such ideals to be differentiated from
material accomplishments, but they are seen as diversionary substitutes
that prevent us from attaining revolutionary change by lulling us into
confusing romantic myth with revolutionary reality. From such a
perspective, he considered anarchists as prone to romanticize social
banditry, when what really counts to him is the overthrowing of the
capitalist state by means of a Marxist revolution that installs a
communist state in its place. With this statist goal in mind, any
opposition to or disparagement of the state by those anarchists who
romanticize the social bandit is based upon a foolhardy rejection of the
pressing necessities of revolutionary struggle.
He is particularly critical of the classical
anarchist Mikhail Bakunin for idealizing the social bandit as a “social
revolutionary without fine phrases.” To Hobsbawm, such a bandit figure
is merely a crude “expropriator” who is resistant to the disciplined
form of Marxist political organization necessary to seize state power.
Even someone like the insurgent Catalonian guerilla/bankrobber, Sabaté, well known for his inspirational role in the anti-fascist
resistance to Franco, is ridiculed by Hobsbawm as being merely an
“ideological gunfighter” whose anarchism was based on a “totally
uncompromising and lunatic dream” a la Don Quixote (Hobsbawm, 2000, p.121–138). However, as history has
clearly shown, it is the Marxist idea of seizing state power to
facilitate a future transition toward stateless communism that is truly
the lunatic dream.
Rather than conceptualizing the Masterless Men in the baggage-laden
Marxist terminology of social banditry, it is my contention here that
they are better understood in relation to what James C. Scott has called
“the art of not being governed” (Scott, 2009). The men and women who are
the denizens of what Scott refers to as “extra-state spaces” are not
concerned with seizing state power, but rather with evading it. As he
further explains: “*It is crucial to understand that what is being
evaded is not a relationship per se with the state, but an evasion of
subject status. For some groups, state evasion is coupled with practices
that might be termed the prevention of internal state-making. Relatively
acephalous [headless] groups with strong traditions of equality and
sanctions against permanent hierarchy seem to belong to this category*”
(Scott, 2009, pp. 330–331). Accordingly, Scott’s primary focus is on
anarchic practices among “non-subject peoples.” Moreover, the purview of his approach to the
study of those “refugees” who are fleeing from state power includes many
who were once state subjects themselves. As he has explained in terms
that call to mind the Masterless Men, “Over time an increasingly
large proportion of nonstate peoples were not ‘pristine primitives’ who
stubbornly refused the domus, but ex-state subjects who had chosen,
albeit under desperate circumstances, to keep the state at arm’s length” (Scott, 2017, p.232).
What Scott calls “secondary primitivism” can assume a process of
“voluntary self-nomadization” on the part of those who refuse to be
domesticated state subjects. Since such a process can involve moving to
“shatter zones” located on the unstable frontiers and hinterlands of
state systems, it can be seen as “barbaric.” For Scott, the terms
“barbaric” and “barbarian” are not used in the derogatory way that they
are employed in mainstream discourse.
As he elaborates, “Precisely because this practice of going over to
the barbarians flies directly in the face of civilization’s ‘just so’
story, it is not a story one will find in the court chronicles and
official histories. It is subversive in the most profound sense. Without romanticizing life on the barbarian fringe, leaving state space
for the periphery was experienced less as a consignment to outer
darkness than an easing of conditions, if not an emancipation” (Scott,
2017, pp.233 and 234). Certainly, such a subversively emancipatory
barbarism is embedded in the mythic story of the Masterless Men.
With Scott’s approach in mind, we can compare the
stateless history of the Masterless Men, of whom he was probably unaware, to that of the maroons (enslaved Africans who
escaped bondage), which he examines in some detail. Maroons dwell in
remote communities outside the authoritarian grasp of the white
supremacist slave state. While one cannot simplistically compare the
holocaust of slavery to the horrors of indentured servitude or forced
military impressment, there are striking similarities. Accordingly,
Scott has described life in maroon communities in terms that resonate
with the circumstances of the Masterless Men:
Runaway slaves clustered in precisely those out-of-theway places
where they could not easily be found. They chose, when possible,
defensible locations accessible by only a single pass or trail that
could be blocked with thorns and traps and observed easily. Like
bandits, they prepared escape routes in case they were found and their
defenses failed. Shifting cultivation, supplemented by foraging, trade
and theft, was the commonest maroon practice. Outside the law by
definition, many maroon communities lived in part by raiding nearby
settlements and plantations. None it seems were self-sufficient. Occupying a
distinctive agro-ecological zone with valued products, many maroon
settlements were closely integrated into the larger economy by
clandestine and open trade (Scott, 2009, p.190).
Aside from any similarities between the Masterless Men and the maroons
based upon the former’s remote location in the barrens and the trade
relationships with the settlers that helped to sustain them, the Butter Pot outlaws
were rebelling against a Newfoundland colonial environment that in a
related manner had its own plantation system of indenture to the fishing
masters, in which British attitudes toward their colonial subjects of
Irish heritage often went so far as to exclude the latter from the
“white race.”
Interestingly, in terms of our previous discussion of social bandits, we
can contrast Scott’s positive reference to bandits in his description of
the maroons as rebels who have successfully avoided the incursion of the
state with Hobsbawm’s assumption that bandits are not truly successful
revolutionaries because they fail to seize state power. In this regard,
it is important to note that a refusal to seize state power does not
imply quiescence on the part of oppressed groups. Precisely because of
its remote and stateless location on the Virginia-North Carolina border, the maroon community residing in the Great Dismal Swamp
was able to become a hub for slave insurrection and rebellion across the
Tidewater region of the American South. As Neal Shirley and Saralee
Stafford have explained the crucial significance of the Great Dismal
Swamp to the sustenance of that maroon community: “*The impassibility of
the Great Dismal Swamp and the mythology that surrounded it provided
protection to those early maroons, making their recapture
cost-prohibitive and dangerous. In providing a commons beyond the
boundaries of capitalist life, the role of wilderness was fundamental to
the resistance of the swamp maroons*” (Shirley and Stafford, 2015, pp.
24 and 46). As a site of this resistance, the Great Dismal Swamp served
as a wilderness base from which insurrectionary raids on surrounding
plantations to free other enslaved Africans could be launched.
In mythic terms, those autonomous guerrilla enclaves engaging in evasion
and resistance to the slavocracy are what Kevin Van Meter lauds as
vibrant "counter-communities” about which “guerrillas of desire" can create
“stories that set fire to the imagination” (Van Meter, 2017, p.56). One
of my favorite of such stories, “The Legend of the Great Dismal Maroons,” comes from James Koehnline. Written and illustrated by him in the form of an epic
poem, it can be found in the book, *Gone To Croatan: Origins of Drop-Out
Culture in North America*, of which he and I are the co-editors. When I
first read Seaweed’s article on the Masterless Men, my initial reaction
was to think that it would have fit perfectly in the *Croatan* book. In
that volume, Koehnline poetically illuminated the anarchist implications
of the “mysterious” disappearance of the “Lost” Roanoke Colony, located
in what is today called North Carolina:
*The white colonists had deserted.*
*Raleigh’s agents could find no trace of them on the mainland and the Indians just shrugged their shoulders.*
*Perhaps they were hiding out in the nearly impenetrable*
*Great Dismal Swamp nearby.*
*Perhaps four hundred years ago,*
*these Maroons of four continents*
*held a big pow-wow,*
*dedicating themselves to the fight against slavery*
*Even then.*
(Koehnline in Sakolsky/Koehnline, 1993, P.83)
*** Conclusion
*The real tradition of humanity is not one of acceptance but revolt.*
Pierre Mabille
In searching for the “truth” about the Masterless Men, it is not wise to
either naively claim that such myths and legends are entirely based upon
objective fact nor to cynically claim the opposite. Instead, the poetic
truths that are revealed in mythic stories reflect the unbridled dreams
and desires of those who tell them. Those truths that encourage
individuals and groups toward spirited resistance to enslavement and
inspire anarchic practices of freedom are always made up of more than
just the officially recorded facts. As Johnston has conjectured, “*It is
no wonder then that the Legend of the Masterless Men has survived for so
long because not only are the paths the men cut still visible to this
day, but some of their ghosts still haunt the shores reminding everyone
of a time when a group of men stood up against injustice and tyranny and
escaped a life of slavery*” (Johnson, 2016, p. 95).
The anarchist potential of the emancipatory myth of the Masterless Men
lies in its inspiring combination of refusal, evasion, disappearance,
insurrection, selfdetermination, mutual aid, and a hearty comradery.
Such a myth challenges the miserabilist resignation that is at the
paralytic core of both individual despair and mutual acquiescence.
Rather than placing itself within the straitjacket of an impoverished
reality, the immanent quality of the emancipatory myth portends a
continuously more radical expansion of the presently confining
parameters of the possible. Accordingly, our mythic recounting of the
saga of the Masterless Men herein is not meant to be a static and
sentimental exercise in historical nostalgia, but rather is put forward
as a fluid and impassioned call for an emancipatory re-imagining and
poetic transformation of reality in the anarchic context of land and
freedom.
*** References Consulted
Beier, A.L. *Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640*
(London: Methuen Publishers, 1985).
Benson, David L. “The Masterless Men of the Southern Shore,” Tickle
Ace (Spring-Summer, 1997, pp. 90–91).
Buhle, Paul. *Robin Hood: People’s Outlaw and Forest Hero* (Oakland,
Ca.: PM Press,2011).
Butler, Paul and Moira Hanrahan. Rogues and Heroes (St. John’s:
Flanker Press Ltd, 2015).
Butler, Paul. “The Unshackled Society,” Saltscapes (May/June,
2004, pp. 15–16).
Conway, Linda and Gerald Squires. “The Legend of the Masterless Men,”
The Newfoundland Quarterly (Fall, 2010, pp. 22–23).
Dawe, David. Riots and Religion in Newfoundland (St. John’s:
Flanker Press Ltd, 2011).
Dawe, David. “Peter Kerrivan and His Masterless Men,” The
Newfoundland Herald (June 20, 1998, pp. 104–106).
Drodge, Eldon. Kerrivan (St. John’s: Jesperson Publishing
2001).
Fardy, B.D. Ferryland: The Colony of Avalonia (St. John’s:
Flanker Press Ltd, 2005).
Fine Crowd. “By Peter Kerrivan,” Poverty’s Arse (DD007 CD,
1995).
Gelderloos, Peter. *Worshipping Power: An Anarchist view of Early State*
Formation (Chico, Ca.: AK Press,2016).
Girard, Guy. “Passage of the Golden Hand,” *Peculiar Mormyrid*
(#5, pp. 207–212).
Hammond, Paul. “Response to Surrealist Encyclopedia Enquiry,”
(unpublished, 2017).
Hobsbawm, Eric. Primitive Rebels (New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 1959).
Hobsbawm, Eric. *Bandits* (New York: The New Press, 1969/2000).
Horwood, Harold. Plunder and Pillage (Halifax: Formac
Publishing, 2011).
Horwood, Harold and Butts, Ed. Pirates and Outlaws of Canada
(Toronto: Dell/Doubleday, Ltd,1984)
Horwood, Harold. Newfoundland (New York: Macmillan, 1969).
Horwood, Harold. “The Masterless Men of the Butter Pot Barrens,” The
Newfoundland Quarterly (vol LXV #1, 1966, pp.
4–5).
Iskashato. Brethren of the Coast (Berkeley: LBC, 2017).
Johnston, Andrea Genevieve. “Walking With The
Archives: Mapping Newfoundland Identity Through Ghost Stories and
Folklore,” (unpublished masters thesis, University of Alberta, 2016).
Lawler, Tammy. “Secret Masses at Midnight: The Legend of the Grotto in
Renews, Newfoundland,” Culture and Tradition (Feb/May, 1999, pp
1–7).
Lepetit, Patrick. *The Esoteric Secrets of Surrealism* (Rochester,
Vermont: Inner Traditions, 2014).
Löwy, Michael. “Surrealism and Freedom,” *Peculiar Mormyrid*
(#5, 2017, pp. 141–143).
Löwy, Michael and Robert Sayre. *Romanticism Against the Tide of
Modernity* (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).
Mabille, Pierre. *Mirror of the Marvelous* (Rochester, Vermont: Inner
Traditions, 1998).
Masterless Men. “Breakin’ New Ground,” Breakin’ New Ground (CD
02–50402, 1995).
Morry, Howard and John Hawkins, Oral History of Ferryland: 1763–1832
(Ferryland Museum Archives).
Mowat, Farley. *Bay of Spirits* (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Ltd,
2006).
Rockwood, Art. “Society of Masterless Men,” *Downhomer Magazine* (Sept.
1997, p. 67).
Sakolsky, Ron and Koehnline, James. Gone To Croatan: Origins of
Drop-Out Culture in North America (New York: Autonomedia, 1993).
Scott, James C. The Art of Not Being Governed (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2009).
Scott, James. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the
*Earliest States* ((New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).
Seaweed. Land and Freedom: An Open Invitation (Santa Cruz, Ca:
Black Powder Press, 2013).
Shirley, Neal and Stafford, Saralee. Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South (Oakland: AK Press, 2015).----
Solheim, Svale. “Historical Legend-Historical Function,” *Acta
Ethnographica* (#19, 1970, pp 341–346).
Tighe, David. “Robin Hood Songs,” No Quarter
#6 (2011).
Van Meter, Kevin. Guerrillas of Desire (Chico, Ca: AK Press,
2017).
*I also wish to thank the reference librarians at the Centre for
Newfoundland Studies at Memorial University, St. John’s, Newfoundland
for their invaluable assistance in my research for this article.*