The fourteen stories in this publication comprise a spectrum of characters and events that have helped forge an image of an island, its people, and its culture that is unique and compelling. Heroic deeds, great achievements, hardships and deprivation, disasters, superstitions and customs, as well as the Beothuk saga and the indomitable character of our ancestors, have all contributed to the making of the modern-day Newfoundland and Labrador. Many of these stories are based on actual events that have occurred over hundreds of years, while others are purely fictional yet truly reflective of the...

In the mid to late 1700's, a group of desperate men, mostly deserters and escaped prisoners, as well as indentured men and boys who had run away from their fishing masters, secluded themselves in the wilderness on the southern shore of Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula. Led by Peter Kerrivan, himself a deserter from the British Navy, these renegades, predominantly Irish, established their hideout on or near Butterpot, a small mountain about nine miles inland from Ferryland. Defying the law and evading all attempts made to capture them, they survived on the great caribou herds that roamed the...