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A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs: The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861

by George McKinnon Wrong · English · Gutenberg #16747 · 477,965 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs: The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861

Author: George McKinnon Wrong


        
Release date: September 25, 2005 [eBook #16747]
                Most recently updated: December 12, 2020

Language: English

Original publication: Toronto: The Bryant Press, Limited, 1908

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A CANADIAN MANOR AND ITS SEIGNEURS: THE STORY OF A HUNDRED YEARS, 1761-1861 ***




Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Taavi Kalju and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net.
Produced from page scans provided by Internet
Archive/Toronto Collection.







[Illustration: COLONEL JOHN NAIRNE]




A CANADIAN MANOR
AND ITS SEIGNEURS

THE STORY OF A HUNDRED YEARS
1761-1861


BY

GEORGE M. WRONG, M.A.
PROFESSOR OF HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO


WITH ILLUSTRATIONS


TORONTO
THE BRYANT PRESS, LIMITED
1908


COPYRIGHT, CANADA, 1908
BY GEORGE M. WRONG




PREFACE


In spite of many pleasant summers spent at Murray Bay one had never
thought of it as having a history. The place and its people seemed
simple, untutored, new. Some of the other summer residents talked
complacently even of having discovered it. They had heard of Murray Bay
as beautiful and had gone to explore this unknown country. When this
bold feat was performed there was abundant recompense. Valley, mountain,
river and stream united to make Murray Bay delightful. The little summer
community grew. At first visitors lived in the few primitive hotels or
in cottages at Pointe au Pic, vacated for the time being by their
owners, who found temporary lodgings somewhere,--not infrequently in
their own out-buildings. The cottages left something to be desired, and,
gradually, the visitors bought land and built houses for themselves:
to-day dozens of them dot the western shore of Murray Bay. In due time
appeared tennis courts; then a golf links. Murray Bay had become, alas,
almost fashionable.

It still seemed to have no past. True, near the village church, a
fair-sized house stood, embowered in trees, with a fine view out over
the bay and the wide St. Lawrence. A high fence shut in a beautiful old
garden, with a few great trees: as one drove past one got a glimpse of
shady walks and old-fashioned flowers. The extensive out-buildings near
this manor house, stables, carriage-house, dairy, showed that the
establishment was fairly large. There were sleek cattle in the farm
yard. On one of the out-buildings was a small belfry, with a bell to
summon the work-people from afar to meals, and this seemed like the
olden times when the seigneur fed his labourers under his own roof. On
making a formal call at the manor house one noted that some of the rooms
were of fine proportions and that a good many old portraits and
miniatures hung on the walls. This all spoke of a past; and yet of it
one asked little and knew nothing.

Just across the bay stood another manor house; of stone, too, in this
case not concealed by a covering of wood. Thick walls crowned by a
mansard roof spoke of a respectable age. This manor house, also looked
out on the bay and across the St. Lawrence. One knew that it was named
Mount Murray Manor, while that on the right bank of the river Murray was
called Murray Bay Manor. It was said vaguely that a Colonel Fraser had
dwelt at Mount Murray and a Colonel Nairne at Murray Bay; but all that
one heard was loose tradition and there were no Nairnes or Frasers of
whom one might ask questions. One could see that, in both places,
something like an old world dignity of life had in the past been kept
up.

Making a call at the Murray Bay Manor House, I was told one day of a
manuscript volume in which the first seigneur had copied some of his
letters. I begged to be allowed to spend an afternoon or two in looking
through it. I went and went again. To me the book was absorbing. It told
the story of the first people of British origin who went to settle at
Malbaie, which they named Murray Bay, just after the British conquest;
of the career of a soldier brother of Colonel Nairne who died in India
not long after Plassey; of campaigns fought by Colonel Nairne during the
period of the American Revolution; of his plans and hopes as the ruler
of the little community where he settled. When I had read the book
through, I asked if there was not something more. Yes, there were some
old letters, preserved in a lumber room at the top of the house. These
I was allowed to see. This task, too, was of great interest and I spent
the better part of a summer holiday reading, analyzing, and copying
letters. Some of them told of the schoolboy days, in Edinburgh, of the
old Colonel's son and heir, the second seigneur, of this son's life at
Gibraltar at the time when Trafalgar was fought, of his return to
Canada, of campaigns in the war of 1812. Then there were touching
letters from others to tell how he fell at the battle of Crysler's Farm.
So intimate were the letters that one experienced again the hopes and
fears of more than a century ago. In time, out of the dimness in which
all had been shrouded, Murray Bay's history became clear. Of course one
had to seek some information elsewhere, especially in attempting an
analysis of French Canadian village life. But the story told in this
volume is based chiefly on the papers read during that holiday. Not only
did they enable one to reconstruct the story of a spot made almost
sacred by the joys of many a delightful summer; they furnished, besides,
an outline of the tragic history of a Canadian family. Here at Murray
Bay, a century and a half ago, a brave and distinguished British officer
secured a great estate and made his home. In his letters we read almost
from day to day of his plans. He had a strong heart and a deep faith. He
reared a large family and built not merely for himself but for his
posterity. And yet, just one hundred years after he began his work at
Murray Bay, the last of his descendants was laid in the grave and the
family became extinct. It is the fashion of our modern fiction to end
the tale in sorrow not in joy. Perhaps the fashion has a more real basis
in fact than we like to think. At any rate this true story of the
seigneur of Murray Bay ends with the closed record of his family history
on a granite monument in Quebec. There is no one living for whom the
tale has the special interest that attaches to one's ancestors.

I have received help from many but my deepest obligation is to Mr. E.J.
Duggan, the present seigneur of Murray Bay, for his great kindness in
permitting me to use the letters and papers in the Manor House. I owe
much to the Right Honourable Sir Charles Fitzpatrick, who has taught me,
in many holiday outings, most of what appreciation I have learned for
French Canadian village life, and has corrected errors into which I
should otherwise have fallen. So also have Mr. W.H. Blake, K.C., of
Toronto, a good authority on all that concerns life at Murray Bay, and
M. J.-Edmond Roy, Assistant Archivist at Ottawa, whose "Histoire de la
Seigneurie de Lauzon" and many other works relating to the Province of
Quebec entitle him to the rank of its foremost historical scholar. To
another authority on the seigniorial system in Canada, Professor W.
Bennett Munro, of Harvard University, I am much indebted for information
readily given. My colleagues Professor W.J. Alexander, Ph.D., of
University College, and Professor Pelham Edgar, Ph.D., of Victoria
College, Toronto, have given me the benefit of their discriminating
criticism. Dr. A.G. Doughty, C.M.G., Dominion Archivist, and the Rev.
Abbé A.E. Gosselin of Laval University, have responded with unfailing
courtesy to my numerous calls upon them, and Mr. John Fraser Reeve, the
great-grandson of Colonel Malcolm Fraser, who figures so prominently in
the story, has given me invaluable information about the Fraser family.
Dr. J.M. Harper and M. P.-B. Casgrain, of Quebec, and Mr. A.C.
Casselman, of Toronto, have also aided me on some difficult points. To
the Honourable Edward Blake, K.C., of Toronto, I am indebted for
reproductions of some of his paintings of scenes at Murray Bay, and to
the Honourable Dudley Murray, of London, England, for a photograph of
the portrait of General Murray preserved in the General's family.

Toronto, _July, 1908_.




CONTENTS

                                                            PAGE

CHAPTER I

THE FOUNDING OF MALBAIE

The situation of Malbaie.--The physical features of
Malbaie.--Jacques Cartier at Malbaie.--Champlain at
Malbaie.--The first seigneur of Malbaie.--A new policy for
settling Canada.--The Sieur de Comporté, seigneur of
Malbaie, sentenced to death in France.--His career in
Canada.--His plans for Malbaie.--Hazeur, Seigneur of
Malbaie.--Malbaie becomes a King's Post.--A Jesuit's
description of Malbaie in 1750.--The burning of Malbaie by
the British in 1759.                                           1


CHAPTER II

THE TWO HIGHLAND SEIGNEURS AT MALBAIE

Pitt's use of Highlanders in the Seven Years' War.--The
origin of Fraser's Highlanders.--The career of Lord
Lovat.--Lovat's son Simon Fraser and other Frasers at
Quebec.--Malcolm Fraser and John Nairne future seigneurs of
Malbaie.--The Highlanders and Wolfe's victory.--The
Highlanders in the winter of 1759-60.--Malcolm Fraser on
Murray's defeat in April, 1760.--The return of Canadian
seigneurs to France.--General Murray buys Canadian
seigniories.--Nairne and Fraser at Malbaie.--Their grants
from Murray.                                                  22


CHAPTER III

JOHN NAIRNE, SEIGNEUR OF MURRAY BAY

Colonel Nairne's portrait.--His letters.--The first Scottish
settlers at Malbaie.--Nairne's finance.--His tasks.--The
curé's work.--The Scottish settlers and their French
wives.--The Church and Education.--Nairne's efforts to make
Malbaie Protestant.--His war on idleness.--The character of
the habitant.--Fishing at Malbaie.--Trade at
Malbaie.--Farming at Malbaie.--Nairne's marriage,--Career
and death in India of Robert Nairne.--The Quebec Act and its
consequences for the habitant.                                40


CHAPTER IV

JOHN NAIRNE IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

Nairne's work among the French Canadians.--He becomes Major
of the Royal Highland Emigrants.--Arnold's march through the
wilderness to Quebec.--Quebec during the Siege,
1775-76.--The habitants and the Americans.--Montgomery's
plans.--The assault on December 31st, 1775.--Malcolm Fraser
gives the alarm in Quebec.--Montgomery's death.--Arnold's
attack.--Nairne's heroism.--Arnold's failure.--The American
fire-ship.--The arrival of a British fleet.--The retreat of
the Americans.--Nairne's later service in the War.--Isle aux
Noix and Carleton Island.--Sir John Johnson and the
desolation of New York.--Nairne and the American prisoners
at Murray Bay.--Their escape and capture.--Nairne and the
Loyalists.--The end of the War.--Nairne's retirement to
Murray Bay.                                                   62


CHAPTER V

THE LAST DAYS OF JOHN NAIRNE

Nairne's careful education of his children.--His son John
enters the army.--Nairne's counsels to his son.--John Nairne
goes to India.--His death.--Nairne's declining years.--His
activities at Murray Bay.--His income.--His daughter
Christine and Quebec society.--The isolation of Murray Bay
in Winter.--Signals across the river.--Nairne's
reading.--His notes about current events.--The fear of a
French invasion of England.--Thoughts of flight from
Scotland to Murray Bay.--Nairne's last letter, April 20th,
1802.--His death and burial at Quebec.                        93


CHAPTER VI

THOMAS NAIRNE, SEIGNEUR OF MURRAY BAY

His education in Scotland.--His winning character.--He
enters the army.--Malcolm Fraser's counsels to a young
soldier.--Thomas Nairne's life at Gibraltar.--His desire to
retire from the army.--His return to Canada in 1810-11.--His
life at Quebec.--His summer at Murray Bay, 1811.--His
resolve to remain in the Army.--Beginning of the War of
1812.--Captain Nairne on Lake Ontario.--Quebec Society and
the proposed flight from danger to Murray Bay.--Anxiety at
Murray Bay.--The progress of the War.--An American attack on
Kingston.--Captain Nairne on the Niagara frontier.--Naval
War on Lake Ontario.--Nairne's description of a naval
engagement.--Sense of impending disaster at Murray Bay.--The
American advance on Montreal by the St. Lawrence.--Nairne's
regiment a part of the opposing British force.--The Battle
of Crysler's Farm.--Nairne's death.--His body taken to
Quebec.--The grief of the family at Murray Bay.--The
funeral.                                                     124


CHAPTER VII

A FRENCH CANADIAN VILLAGE

Life at Murray Bay after Captain Nairne's death.--Letters
from Europe.--Death of Malcolm Fraser.--Death of Colonel
Nairne's widow and children.--His grandson John Nairne,
seigneur.--Village Life.--The Church's Influence.--The
Habitant's tenacity.--His cottage.--His labours.--His
amusements.--The Church's missionary work in the
Village.--The powers of the bishop.--His visitations.--The
organization of the Parish.--The powers of the
_fabrique_.--Lay control of Church finance.--The curés'
tithe.--The best intellects enter the Church.--A native
Canadian clergy.--The curé's social life.--The Church and
Temperance Reform.--The diligence of the curés.--The
habitant's taste for the supernatural.--The belief in
goblins.--Prayer in the family.--The habitant as voter.--The
office of Churchwarden.--The Church's influence in
elections.--The seigneur's position.--The habitant's
obligations to him.--Rent day and New Year's Day.--The
seigneur's social rank.--The growth of discontent in the
villages.--The evils of Seigniorial Tenure.--Agitation
against the system.--Its abolition in 1854.--The last of the
Nairnes.--The Nairne tomb in Quebec.                         168


CHAPTER VIII

THE COMING OF THE PLEASURE SEEKERS

Pleasure seeking at Murray Bay.--A fisherman's experience in
1830.--New visitors.--Fishing in a mountain lake.--Camp
life.--The Upper Murray.--Canoeing.--Running the
rapids.--Walks and drives.--Golf.--A rainy day.--The
habitant and his visitors.                                   222


AUTHORITIES                                                  243


APPENDICES


APPENDIX A (p. 31)   The Journal of Malcolm Fraser,
                        First Seigneur of Mount Murray,
                        Malbaie.                             249

APPENDIX B (p. 38)   Title Deed of the Seigniory of
                        Murray Bay, granted to Captain
                        John Nairne.                         271

APPENDIX C (p. 78)   The Siege of Quebec in 1775-76.
                        Colonel Nairne's Narrative.          273

APPENDIX D (p. 98)   Memorandum of Colonel Nairne,
                        5th April, 1795, for his son
                        John Nairne in regard to
                        military duty.                       277

APPENDIX E (p. 104)  The "Porpoise" (Beluga or
                        White Whale) Fishery on the
                        St. Lawrence.                        279

APPENDIX F (p. 122)  The Prayer of Colonel Nairne.           286

APPENDIX G (p. 144)  The Curés of Malbaie.                   287


INDEX                                                        291




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


COLONEL JOHN NAIRNE                                 Frontispiece
(From the Oil Painting in the Manor House at Murray Bay.)
                                                            PAGE

CAP À L'AIGLE FROM THE WEST SHORE OF MURRAY BAY                6
(From the Water Colour by the late L.R. O'Brien, in the
possession of the Hon. Edward Blake, K.C.)

VIEW ACROSS MURRAY BAY FROM THE CAP À L'AIGLE SHORE           21
(From an Oil Painting by E. Wyly Grier, in the possession of
the Hon. Edward Blake.)

GENERAL JAMES MURRAY                                          35
(From an Oil Painting preserved in the General's Family.)

THE MANOR HOUSE AT MURRAY BAY                                 74
(From amateur photographs.)

VIEW FROM POINTE AU PIC UP MURRAY BAY                        102
(From a Water Colour by the late L.R. O'Brien in the
possession of the Hon. Edward Blake.)

THE GOLF LINKS AT MURRAY BAY                                 237
(From a Photograph by W. Notman and Son, Montreal.)


MAPS

THE ST. LAWRENCE FROM QUEBEC TO MURRAY BAY                     1

SKETCH MAP OF LAKE ONTARIO AND THE RIVER ST. LAWRENCE TO
ILLUSTRATE THE WAR OF 1812-14                                148




[Illustration: THE ST. LAWRENCE FROM QUEBEC TO MURRAY BAY]




A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs




CHAPTER I

THE FOUNDING OF MALBAIE

     The situation of Malbaie.--The physical features of
     Malbaie.--Jacques Cartier at Malbaie.--Champlain at Malbaie.--The
     first seigneur of Malbaie.--A new policy for settling Canada.--The
     Sieur de Comporté, seigneur of Malbaie, sentenced to death in
     France.--His career in Canada.--His plans for Malbaie.--Hazeur,
     Seigneur of Malbaie.--Malbaie becomes a King's Post.--A Jesuit's
     description of Malbaie in 1750.--The burning of Malbaie by the
     British in 1759.


If one is not in too great a hurry it is wise to take the steamer--not
the train--at Quebec and travel by it the eighty miles down the St.
Lawrence to Malbaie, or Murray Bay, as the English call it, somewhat
arrogantly rejecting the old French name used since the pioneer days of
Champlain. This means an early morning start and six or seven hours--the
steamers are not swift--on that great river. Only less than a mile apart
are its rugged banks at Quebec but, even then, they seem to contract the
mighty torrent of water flowing between them. Once past Quebec the river
broadens into a great basin, across which we see the head of the
beautiful Island of Orleans. We skirt, on the south side, the twenty
miles of the island's well wooded shore, dotted with the cottages of
the habitants, stretched irregularly along the winding road. Church
spires rise at intervals; the people are Catholic to a man. Once past
this island we begin to note changes. Hardly any longer is the St.
Lawrence a river; rather is it now an inlet of the sea; the water has
become salt; the air is fresher. So wide apart are the river's shores
that the cottages far away to the south seem only white specks.

Hugging the north shore closely we draw in under towering Cap Tourmente,
fir-clad, rising nearly two thousand feet above us; a mighty obstacle it
has always been to communication by land on this side of the river. Soon
comes a great cleft in the mountains, and before us is Baie St. Paul,
opening up a wide vista to the interior. We are getting into the Malbaie
country for Isle aux Coudres, an island some six miles long, opposite
Baie St. Paul, was formerly linked with Malbaie under one missionary
priest. The north shore continues high and rugged. After passing Les
Eboulements, a picturesque village, far above us on the mountain side,
we round Cap aux Oies, in English, unromantically, Goose Cape, and, far
in front, lies a great headland, sloping down to the river in bold
curves. On this side of the headland we can see nestling in under the
cliff what, in the distance, seems only a tiny quay. It is the wharf of
Malbaie. The open water beyond it, stretching across to Cap à l'Aigle,
marks the mouth of the bay. The great river, now twelve miles broad,
with a surging tide, rising sometimes eighteen or twenty feet, has the
strength and majesty almost of Old Ocean himself.

As we land we see nothing striking. There is just a long wharf with some
cottages clustered at the foot of the cliff. But when we have ascended
the short stretch of winding road that leads over the barrier of cliff
we discover the real beauties of Malbaie. Before us lies the bay's
semi-circle--perhaps five miles in extent; stretching far inland is a
broad valley, with sides sloping up to rounded fir-clad mountain tops.
It is the break in the mountains and the views up the valley that give
the place its peculiar beauty. When the tide is out the bay itself is
only a great stretch of brown sand, with many scattered boulders, and
gleaming silver pools of water. Looking down upon it, one sees a small
river winding across the waste of sand and rocks. It has risen in the
far upland three thousand feet above this level and has made an arduous
downward way, now by narrow gorges, more rarely across open spaces,
where it crawls lazily in the summer sunlight:--_les eaux mortes_, the
French Canadians call such stretches. It bursts at length through the
last barrier of mountains, a stream forty or fifty yards wide, and flows
noisily, for some ten miles, in successive rapids, down this valley,
here at last to mingle its brown waters with the ice-cold, steel-tinted,
St. Lawrence.

When the tide is in, the bay becomes a shallow arm of the great
river,--the sea, we call it. The French are better off than we; they
have the word "_fleuve_" for the St. Lawrence;--other streams are
"_rivières_." Almost daily, at high water, one may watch small schooners
which carry on the St. Lawrence trade head up the bay. They work in
close to shore, drop their anchors and wait for the tide to go out. It
leaves them high and dry, and tilted sometimes at an angle which
suggests that everything within must be topsy-turvy, until the vessel is
afloat again. With a strong wind blowing from the north-east the bay is
likely to be, at high tide, an extremely lively place for the mariner; a
fact which helps perhaps to explain the sinister French name of Malbaie.
The huge waves, coming with a sweep of many miles up the broad St.
Lawrence, hurl themselves on the west shore with surprising vehemence,
and work destruction to anything not well afloat in deep water, or
beyond the highest of high water marks. At such a time how many a
hapless small craft, left incautiously too near the shore, has been
hammered to pieces between waves and rocks!

Tired wayfarers surveying this remote and lovely scene have fancied
themselves pioneers in something like a new world. In reality, here is
the oldest of old worlds, in which pigmy man is not even of yesterday,
but only of to-day. This majestic river, the mountains clothed in
perennial green, the blue and purple tints so delicate and transient as
the light changes, have occupied this scene for thousands of centuries.
No other part of our mother earth is more ancient. The Laurentian
Mountains reared their heads, it may be, long before life appeared
anywhere on this peopled earth; no fossil is found in all their huge
mass. In some mighty eruption of fire their strata have been strangely
twisted. Since then sea and river, frost and ice, have held high
carnival. Huge boulders, alien in formation to the rocks about them,
have been dropped high up on the mountain sides by mighty glaciers, and
lie to-day, a source of unfailing wonder to the unlearned as to how they
came to be there.

Man appeared at last upon the scene; the Indian, and then, long after,
the European. In 1535, Jacques Cartier, the first European, as far as we
know, to ascend the St. Lawrence, creeping slowly from the Saguenay up
towards the Indian village of Stadacona, on the spot where now is
Quebec, must have noted the wide gap in the mountains which makes the
Malbaie valley. Not far from Malbaie, he saw the so-called "porpoises,"
or white whales, (beluga, French, _marsouin_) that still disport
themselves in great numbers in these waters, come puffing to the surface
and writhe their whole length into view like miniature sea-serpents.
They have heads, Cartier says, with no very great accuracy, "of the
style of a greyhound," they are of spotless white and are found, he was
told (incorrectly) only here in all the world. He anchored at Isle aux
Coudres where he saw "an incalculable number of huge turtles." He
admired its great and fair trees, now gone, alas, and gave the island
its name--"the Isle of Hazel Nuts"--which we still use. For long years
after Cartier, Malbaie remained a resort of its native savages only.
Perhaps an occasional trader came to give these primitive people, in
exchange for their valuable furs, European commodities, generally of
little worth. In time the Europeans learned the great value of this
trade and of the land which offered it. So France determined to colonize
Canada and in 1608, when Champlain founded a tiny colony at Quebec, the
most Christian King had announced a resolution to hold the country. Ere
long Malbaie was to have a European owner.

[Illustration: CAP À L'AIGLE FROM THE WEST SHORE OF MURRAY BAY

"A great headland sloping down to the river in bold curves."]

As Champlain went up from Tadousac to make his settlement of Quebec he
noted Malbaie as sufficiently spacious. But its many rocks, he thought,
made it unnavigable, except for the canoes of the Indians, whose light
craft of bark can surmount all kinds of difficulties. Perhaps Champlain
is a little severe on Malbaie which, when one knows how, is navigable
enough for coasting schooners, but his observations are natural for a
passing traveller. In the years after Quebec was founded no more can be
said of Malbaie than that it was on the route from Tadousac to Quebec
and must have been visited by many a vessel passing up to New France's
small capital on the edge of the wilderness. In the summer of 1629 the
occasional savages who haunted Malbaie might have seen an unwonted
spectacle. Three English ships, under Lewis Kirke, had passed up the
river and to him, Champlain, with a half-starved force of only sixteen
men, had been obliged to surrender Quebec. Kirke was taking his captives
down to Tadousac when, opposite Malbaie, he met a French ship coming to
the rescue. A tremendous cannonade followed, the first those ancient
hills had heard. It ended in disaster to France, and Kirke sailed on to
Tadousac with the French ship as a prize.

When peace came France began more seriously the task of settling Canada.
Though inevitably Malbaie would soon be colonized, it was still very
difficult of access. A wide stretch of mountain and forest separated it
from Quebec; not for nearly two hundred years after Champlain's time was
a road built across this barrier. Moreover France's first years of rule
in Canada are marked by conspicuous failure in colonizing work. The
trading Company--the Company of New France or of "One Hundred
Associates"--to which the country was handed over in 1633, thought of
the fur trade, of fisheries, of profits--of anything rather than
settlement, and never lived up to its promises to bring in colonists.
It made huge grants of land with a very light heart. In 1653 a grant was
made of the seigniory of Malbaie to Jean Bourdon, Surveyor-General of
the Colony. But Bourdon seems not to have thought it worth while to make
any attempt to settle his seigniory and, apparently for lack of
settlement, the grant lapsed. Even the Company of New France treasured
some idea that would-be land owners in a colony had duties to perform.

After thirty years France at length grew tired of the incompetence of
the Company and in 1663 made a radical change. The great Colbert was
already the guiding spirit in France and colonial plans he made his
special care. Louis XIV too was already dreaming of a great over-sea
Empire. The first step was to take over from the trading Company the
direct government of the colony. The next was to get the right men to do
the work in New France. An excellent start was made when, in 1665, Jean
Talon was sent out to Canada as Intendant. He had a genius for
organization. Though in rank below the Governor he, with the title of
Intendant, did the real work of ruling; the Governor discharged its
ceremonial functions. Talon had a policy. He wished to colonize, to
develop industry, to promote agriculture. In his capacious brain new and
progressive ideas were working. He brought in soldiers who became
settlers, among them the first real seigneur of Malbaie. An adequate
military force, the Carignan regiment, came out from France to awe into
submission the aggressive Iroquois, who long had made Montreal, and even
Quebec itself, unsafe by their sudden and blood-thirsty attacks.
Travelling by canoe and batteau the regiment went from Quebec up the
whole length of the St. Lawrence, landed on the south shore of Lake
Ontario, and marched into the Iroquois country. With amazement and
terror, those arrogant savages saw winding along their forest paths the
glittering array of France. Some of their villages were laid low by
fire. The French regiment had accomplished its task; with no spirit left
the Iroquois made peace.

A good many officers of the Carignan regiment, with but slender
prospects in France, decided to stay in Canada and to this day their
names--Chambly, Verchères, Longueuil, Sorel, Berthier and others are
conspicuous in the geography of the Province of Quebec. Malbaie was
granted to a soldier of fortune, the Sieur de Comporté, who came to
Canada at this time, but apparently was not an officer of the Carignan
Regiment. His outlook at Malbaie cannot have been considered promising,
for Pierre Boucher, who in 1664 published an interesting account of New
France, declared the whole region between Baie St. Paul and the Saguenay
to be so rugged and mountainous as to make it unfit for civilized
habitation. But Philippe Gaultier, Sieur de Comporté, was of the right
material to be a good colonist. Born in 1641 he was twenty-four years of
age when he came to Canada. Already he had had some stirring adventures,
one of which might well have proved grimly fatal had he not found a
refuge across the sea. Comporté, then serving as a volunteer in a
Company of Infantry led by his uncle, La Fouille, was involved in one of
the bloody brawls of the time that Richelieu had made such stern efforts
to suppress. The Company was in garrison at La Motte-Saint-Heray in
Poitou. On July 9th, 1665, one of its members, Lanoraye, came in with
the tale of an insult offered to the company by a civilian in the town.
Lanoraye had been marching through the streets with a drum beating, in
order to secure recruits, when one Bonneau, the local judge, attacked
him, and took away the drum. Lanoraye rushed to arouse his fellow
soldiers. When Comporté and half a dozen other hot-heads had listened to
his tale, they cried with one voice, "Let us go and demand the drum. He
must give it up." So at eight or nine o'clock at night they set out to
look for Bonneau. They came upon him unexpectedly in the streets of the
town. He was accompanied by seven or eight persons with whom he had
supped and all were armed with swords, pistols or other weapons. When
Lanoraye demanded the drum, Bonneau was defiant and told him to go away
or he should chastise him. The inevitable fight followed. Comporté,
whose own account we have, says that it lasted some time and the results
were fatal. Comporté declares that he himself struck no blows but the
fact remains that two of Bonneau's party were so severely wounded that
they died. Comporté and the rest of the Company soon went to Canada. In
their absence he and others were sentenced to death.

In Canada he appears to have behaved himself. In France a simple
volunteer, in New France he became an important citizen. Talon trusted
him and made him Quarter-Master-General. In 1672 Comporté received an
enormous grant of land stretching along the St. Lawrence from Cap aux
Oies to Cap à l'Aigle, a distance of some eighteen miles, including
Malbaie and a good deal more. About the same time he married Marie
Bazire, daughter of one of the chief merchants in the colony, by whom he
had a numerous family. So eminently respectable was he that we find him
churchwarden at Quebec. In time he retired from trade, in which he had
engaged, and became a judge of the newly established Court of the
Prévôté at Quebec. This was not doing badly for a man under sentence of
death. But over him still hung this affair in France and, in 1680, he
petitioned the King to have the sentence annulled. For this petition he
secured the support of the families of the men killed in the quarrel
fifteen years earlier. In 1681 Louis XIV's pardon was registered with
solemn ceremonial at Quebec, and at last Comporté was no longer an
outlaw.

He had plans to settle his great fief. Working in his brain no doubt
were dreams of a feudal domain, of a seigniorial chateau looking out
across the great river, of respectful tenants paying annual dues to
their lord in labour, kind, and money, of a parish church in which over
the seigniorial pew should be displayed his coat of arms. But if these
pictures inspired his fancy and cheered his spirit, they were never to
become realities. In 1687 he was, apparently, in need of money, and he
resolved to sell two-thirds of his interest in the seigniory of Malbaie.
The price was a pitiful 1000 livres, or some $200, and the purchasers
were François Hazeur, Pierre Soumande and Louis Marchand of Quebec, who
were henceforth to get two-thirds of the profits of the seigniory. Then,
in 1687, still young--he was only forty-six--Comporté died, as did also
his wife, leaving a young family apparently but ill provided for. His
name still survives at Malbaie. The portion of the village on the left
bank of the river above the bridge is called Comporté, and a lovely
little lake, nestling on the top of a mountain beyond the Grand Fond,
and unsurpassed for the excellence of its trout fishing, is called Lac à
Comporté; it may be that well-nigh two and a half centuries ago the
first seigneur of Malbaie followed an Indian trail to this lake and wet
a line in its brown and rippling waters.

Comporté and his partners in the seigniory had planned great things.
They had begun the erection of a mill, an enterprise which Comporté's
heirs could not continue. So the guardian of the children determined to
sell at auction their third of the seigniory. The sale apparently took
place in Quebec in October, 1688. We have the record of the bids made.
Hazeur began with 410 livres; one Riverin offered 430 livres; after a
few other bids Hazeur raised his to 480 livres; then Riverin offered 490
and finally the property was sold to Hazeur for 500 livres. Malbaie was
cheap enough; one third of a property more than one hundred and fifty
square miles in extent sold for about $100! In 1700 for a sum of 10,000
livres ($2,000) Hazeur bought out all other interests in the seigniory
and became its sole owner. Its value had greatly improved in 22 years.

Of Hazeur we know but little. He was a leading merchant at Quebec and
was interested in the fishing for "porpoises" or white whales. When he
died in 1708 he left money to the Seminary at Quebec on condition that
from this endowment, forever, two boys should be educated; for the
intervening two centuries the condition has been faithfully observed;
one knows not how many youths owe their start in life to the gift of
the former seigneur of Malbaie. There, however, no memory or tradition
of him survives. In his time some land was cleared. The saw mill and a
grist mill, begun by Comporté, were completed and stood, it seems, near
the mouth of the little river now known as the Fraser but then as the
Ruisseau à la Chute. Civilization had made at Malbaie an inroad on the
forest and was struggling to advance.

On Hazeur's death in 1708 his two sons, both of them priests, inherited
Malbaie. Meanwhile the government developed a policy for the region. It
resolved to set aside, as a reserve, a vast domain stretching from the
Mingan seigniory below Tadousac westward to Les Eboulements, and
extending northward to Hudson Bay. The wealth of forest, lake, and
river, in this tract furnished abundant promise for the fur and other
trade of which the government was to have here a complete monopoly.
Malbaie was necessary to round out the territory and so the heirs of
Hazeur were invited to sell back the seigniory to the government. The
sale was completed in October, 1724, when the government of New France,
acting through M. Begon, the Intendant, for a sum of 20,000 livres
(about $4,000) found itself possessed of Malbaie "as if it had never
been granted," of a saw mill and a grist mill, of houses, stables and
barns, gardens and farm implements, grain, furniture, live stock,
cleared land, cut wood and all other products of human industry there
in evidence.[1]

Within the reserve, in addition to Malbaie, were a number of trading
posts--Tadousac, Chicoutimi, Lake St. John, Mistassini, &c. In this
great tract the government expected to reap large profits from its
monopoly of trade with the Indians. Some of the fertile land was to be
used for farms which should produce food supplies for the posts. The
Intendant had sanguine hopes that the profit from trade and agriculture
would aid appreciably in meeting the expense of government. It was, we
may be well assured, an expectation never realized.

We get a glimpse of Malbaie in 1750 as a King's post. There were two
farms, one called La Malbaie, the other La Comporté. The two farmers
were both in the King's service and, in the absence of other diversions,
quarrelled ceaselessly. The region, wrote the Jesuit Father Claude
Godefroi Coquart, who was sent, in 1750, to inspect the posts, is the
finest in the world. He reported, in particular, that the farm of
Malbaie had good soil, excellent facilities for raising cattle, and
other advantages. Only a very little land had been cleared, just enough
wheat being raised to supply the needs of the farmer and his assistants.
The place should be made more productive, M. Coquart goes on to say, and
the present farmer, Joseph Dufour, is just the man to do it. He is able
and intelligent and if only--and here we come to the inherent defect in
trying to do such pioneer work by paid officials who had no final
responsibility--he were offered better pay the farm could be made to
produce good results. The old quarrel with the farmer at La Comporté had
been settled; now the farmer of Malbaie was the superior officer,
rivalry had ceased, and all was peace.

Coquart gives an estimate of the farming operations at Malbaie which is
of special interest as showing that, if the old régime in Canada did not
produce good results, it was not for lack of criticism. Better cattle
should be raised, he says; at Malbaie one does not see oxen as fine as
those at Beaupré, near Quebec, or on the south shore. The pigs too are
extremely small, the very fattest hardly weighing 180 pounds; in
contrast, at La Petite Rivière, above Baie St. Paul, the pigs are huge;
one could have good breeds without great expense; it costs no more to
feed them and [a truism] there would be more pork! Of sheep too hardly
fifty are kept at Malbaie through the winter; there should be two or
three hundred. From the two farms come yearly only thirty or forty pairs
of chickens.

Father Coquart's census is as rigorous and unsparing of detail as the
Doomsday Book of William the Conqueror. He tells exactly what the
Malbaie farm can produce in a year; the record for the year of grace
1750 is "4 or 6 oxen; 25 sheep, 2 or 3 cows, 1200 pounds of pork, 1400
to 1500 pounds of butter, one barrel of lard,"--certainly not much to
help a paternal government. The salmon fishery should be developed, says
Coquart. Now the farmers get their own supply and nothing more. Nets
should be used and great quantities of salmon might be salted down in
good seasons. Happily, conditions are mending. The previous farmer had
let things go to rack and ruin but now one sees neither thistles nor
black wheat; all the fences are in place. Joseph Dufour has a special
talent for making things profitable. If he can be induced to continue
his services, it will be a benefit to his employer. But he is not
contented. Last year he could not make it pay and wished to leave.
Nearly all his wages are used in the support of his family. He has three
grown-up daughters who help in carrying on the establishment, and a boy
for the stables. The best paid of these gets only 50 livres (about $10)
a year; she should get at least 80 livres, M. Coquart thinks. Dufour has
on the farm eight sheep of his own but even of these the King takes the
wool, and actually the farmer has had to pay for what wool his family
used. Surely he should be allowed to keep at least half the wool of his
own sheep! If it was the policy of the Crown to grant lands along the
river of Malbaie there are many people who would like those fertile
areas, but there is danger that they would trade with the Indians which
should be strictly forbidden. So runs M. Coquart's report. It was
rendered to one of the greatest rascals in New France, the Intendant
Bigot, but he was a rascal who did his official tasks with some
considerable degree of thoroughness and insight. He knew what were the
conditions at Malbaie even if he did not mend them.

After 1750 the curtain falls again upon Malbaie and we see nothing
until, a few years later, the desolation of war has come, war that was
to bring to Canada, and, with it, to Malbaie, new masters of British
blood. After long mutterings the war broke out openly in 1756. In those
days the farmer at Malbaie who looked out, as we look out, upon the
mighty river would see great ships passing up and down. Some of them
differed from the merchant ships to which his eye was accustomed. They
stood high in the water. Ships came near the north shore in those days
and he could see grim black openings in their sides which meant cannon.
Already Britain had almost driven France from the sea and these French
ships, which ascended the St. Lawrence, were few. Then, in 1759,
happened what had been long-expected and talked about. Signal fires
blazed at night on both sides of the St. Lawrence to give the alarm,
when not French, but British ships, sailed up the river, a huge fleet.
They stopped at Tadousac and then slowly and cautiously filed past
Malbaie. On a summer day the crowd of white sails scattered on the
surface of the river made an animated scene. In wonder our farmer and
his helpers watched the ships silently advance to their goal. There were
39 men-of-war, 10 auxiliaries, 70 transports and a multitude of smaller
craft carrying some 27,000 men; it was the mightiest array Britain had
ever sent across the ocean. New France was doomed.

The French fought bravely a campaign really hopeless. Montcalm massed
his chief force at Quebec and there awaited attack. In vain had he
appealed to France for further help; he was left unaided to struggle
with a foe who had command of the sea, whose fleet could pass up and
down before Quebec with the tide and keep the French guards for twenty
miles in constant nervous tension as to where a landing might be made.
Wolfe carried on his work relentlessly. He warned the Canadians that he
would ravage their villages if they did not remain neutral. Neutral it
was almost impossible for them to be for the French urged them in the
other direction. With stern rigour, Wolfe meted out to them his
punishment. He sent parties to burn houses and destroy crops and Malbaie
was not spared. On August 15th, 1759, Captain Gorham reported to Wolfe
that with 300 men, one half of them Rangers from the English colonies,
the other half Highlanders, he had devastated the north shore of the St.
Lawrence. The soldiers did their work thoroughly. From Baie St. Paul,
the last considerable village east of Quebec, they went on thirty miles
to Malbaie where they destroyed almost all of the houses. We do not know
whether the competent Dufour was still the farmer at Malbaie. But all
the fine pictures of better cattle, better pigs and sheep, better
farming, better fishing, ended with the applying of the British
soldiers' torch to the wooden buildings: much of the settlement went up
in smoke. Some of the cattle, pigs and sheep found their way perhaps to
Wolfe's commissariat. But a good many were left and no doubt they are
the ancestors of many of the cattle, sheep and pigs we see at Malbaie
still. This first visit of Americans and Highlanders to Malbaie has its
special interest. A few years later Highlanders came again, not to
destroy but to settle, and to become the ancestors of families that to
this day show their Highland origin in their names and in their
faces, but never a trace of it in their speech or in their customs.[2]
The Americans were longer in coming back. But, after more than a hundred
years they, too, were to come again, not to destroy but in a very
literal sense to build; their many charming cottages now stretch along
the shore of the Bay that looks across to Cap à l'Aigle.

[Illustration: VIEW ACROSS MURRAY BAY FROM THE CAP À L'AIGLE SHORE

(The farther point: Cap aux Oies, the nearer Pointe au Pic)]

[Footnote 1: Exact information in regard to the brothers Hazeur, who
have a place in this story merely because they held the seigniory of
Malbaie, may be found in articles by Mgr. H. Têtu, in the _Bulletin des
Recherches Historiques_ (Lévis, Quebec) for August, 1907, and the
following numbers. They were the Canon Joseph Thierry Hazeur, born in
1680, and Pierre Hazeur de L'Orme, born in 1682, both apparently at
Quebec. The younger brother took the name de L'Orme from his mother's
family. He was for many years the representative in France of the
Chapter of the Cathedral at Quebec, which held, from the Pope and the
King, four or five abbeys in France. His copious letters published by
Mgr. Têtu illustrate with some vividness details of the ecclesiastical
life of the time. For several years after the British conquest of Canada
the Quebec Chapter continued to receive the revenues of the Abbey of
Meaubec. The elder Hazeur, less able than his brother, was Curé at Point
aux Trembles. An invalid, he spent his later years chiefly in Quebec.]

[Footnote 2: Malcolm Fraser, an officer in the 78th Highlanders and
afterwards first seigneur of Mount Murray, one of the two seigniories
into which Malbaie was divided, was sent out on these ravaging
expeditions. Years after, some of Fraser's neighbours of French origin
rallied him on his capacity for devastation as shown at this time. See
Fraser's _Journal_, Appendix A, p. 253, and the _Mémoires_ of Philippe
Aubert de Gaspé, 1866, Ch. II.]




CHAPTER II

THE TWO HIGHLAND SEIGNEURS AT MALBAIE

     Pitt's use of the Highlanders in the Seven Years' War.--The origin
     of Fraser's Highlanders.--The career of Lord Lovat.--Lovat's son
     Simon Fraser and other Frasers at Quebec.--Malcolm Fraser and John
     Nairne, future seigneurs at Malbaie.--The Highlanders and Wolfe's
     victory.--The Highlanders in the winter of 1759-60.--Malcolm Fraser
     on Murray's defeat in April, 1760.--The return of Canadian
     seigneurs to France.--General Murray buys Canadian
     seigniories.--Nairne and Fraser at Malbaie.--Their grants from
     Murray.


The great British fleet which has passed up beyond Malbaie to Quebec is
important for our tale. It carried men who have since become world
famous; not only Wolfe but Jervis, afterward Lord St. Vincent, Cook, the
great navigator, Guy Carleton, who saved Canada for Britain during the
American Revolution, and many others of lesser though still considerable
fame. But for Malbaie the most interesting men in that great array were
those connected with the 78th, or Fraser's, Highlanders. On the decks of
the British ships were hundreds of these brawny, bare-legged and kilted
sons of the north, speaking their native Gaelic, and on occasion
harangued by their officers in that tongue. A few years earlier many of
them had served under Prince Charles Stuart to overthrow, if possible,
King George II, and the house of Hanover; now they were fighting for
that King against their old allies the French. Unreal in truth had been
the rising in behalf of the Stuarts. Scotland had no grievances: she did
not wish to dissolve the union with England, and if the tyranny of any
royal house troubled her it was that of the Stuarts, alien from most
Scots in both religious and political thought. But when, in 1745, some
of the chieftains called out their clansmen, loyalty made these heed the
summons, though half-heartedly. The same devotion was now given to the
house of Hanover. Years earlier Duncan Forbes of Culloden, one of the
noblest and wisest Scots of his age, had urged Walpole to call the
Highlanders to fight Britain's battles. The hint was not then taken but
later, Pitt, the greatest war minister Britain has ever had, revived
Forbes's plan. Some Highland regiments were formed. The Highland dress
that had been proscribed after Culloden as the brand of treason was now
given its place in Britain's battle array: ever since it has played
there its creditable part. Wolfe called his Highland companions in arms
the most manly lot of officers he had ever seen.

The Highland regiment that came with Wolfe to Quebec was known as
Fraser's Highlanders because recruited chiefly from that ancient and
powerful Scottish clan. In the rising of 1745 the Frasers had supported
the Stuart cause and they suffered when that cause was lost. In 1747
the head of the clan, Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, an old man of 80,
perished on the scaffold for his treason. The details of Lovat's career
are amazing. In one aspect he was a wild, half barbarous Highland
chieftain, in another one of the polished gentlemen and courtiers of his
time. He was devoured by the ambition to be the most powerful man in
Scotland. In that age others, more reputable than Fraser, found it wise
to stand well with both royal houses, but he surpassed them all in
tortuous treachery. In the rising of 1715 he was on the Whig side; in
1745 he was forced at last to come out openly for the Stuarts. For
neither side did he really care: he was merely serving his own ends.
Considering his deeds it is a wonder that he so long escaped the
scaffold. When he was a young man a certain Baroness Lovat stood in the
way of his own claims to be the heir to the title of Lovat; so he
offered to marry this lady's daughter and thus end the dispute. When his
advances were refused he determined to use force and seized Lady Lovat's
residence, Castle Dounie, only to find that the young lady had been
spirited away. He resolved on the spot to marry her mother who was in
the castle. She was a widow of thirty-four, he a man of thirty, so the
disparity of age was not great. Stories of what happened vary, but it is
said that in the dead of night a clergyman was brought to Lady Lovat's
chamber and she was forced to go through the form of marriage, the
bag-pipes playing in the next room to drown her cries. The lady was
connected with the great house of Atholl who warred on Fraser with fire
and sword. Outlawed, he escaped to the Continent to survive for half a
century of intrigue and treason.

Though profligate, cruel, treacherous and avaricious, so smooth was
Lovat's address, so profound his knowledge of Scotland, and so strong
his hold upon his own clansmen, that he always remained a man to be
reckoned with. Since he served on the Hanoverian side in 1715 George I
granted a pardon for his many offences; for his treason in 1745 George
II let him go to the block. His last days in London were like those of a
dying saint. He wrote to his son Simon Fraser, who led Fraser's
Highlanders at Quebec in 1759, a beautiful spiritual letter. To the
Major of the Tower he said he was going to Heaven where, he added, "very
few Majors go." He was gay on his last morning:--"I hope to be in heaven
by one o'clock or I should not be so merry now,"--and expressed his pity
for those who "must continue to crawl a little longer in this evil
world." He took what he called an eternal farewell from some of those
about him: "we shall not meet again in the same place; I am sure of
that." He practised kneeling at the block so that he might do it with
dignity on the scaffold. A great crowd assembled to witness his
execution and a platform fell killing several people. "The more
mischief, the better sport," said Lord Lovat grimly, but he wondered
that so many should come to see the taking off of his "old grey head."
He carefully felt the edge of the executioner's axe to make sure that it
was sharp.

No doubt there was a touch of madness in Lord Lovat but the Fraser clan
was devoted to him. By his treason all his honours and estates were
forfeited. At the time his heir, Simon Fraser, only twenty-one years
old, was a prisoner in the Castle of Edinburgh, attainted for high
treason. But so good was his conduct that in 1750 he received a pardon.
Then, a penniless man, he was called to the Scottish Bar. But another
career was in store for him. Some years later when Pitt formed his
design to use the Highlanders in the Seven Years' War he made Simon
Fraser Colonel of a battalion, to be raised on the forfeited estates of
his family and from the clan of which he was head. Success was
instantaneous. Within a few weeks Fraser was at the head of some 1500
men. They wore the Highland dress, with a sporran of badger's or otter's
skin and carried musket and broadsword; some of them wore a dirk at
their own cost. Among the officers were no less than five Simon
Frasers,[3] three or four each of Alexander Frasers and John Frasers,
and a good many other Frasers, among them a young Ensign, Malcolm
Fraser, destined to rule one of the seigniories at Malbaie for more than
half a century. Other Scottish names also appear, Macnabs, Chisholms,
Macleans, and among them John Nairne who, like Malcolm Fraser, spent the
best part of his life at Malbaie.

The head of the Nairne clan, a John Nairne, third Baron Nairne, had
fought for the Stuarts in 1745. He died an exile in France. Of how close
kin to him was the young Highland Officer, John Nairne, who settled
later at Malbaie, we do not know. His family was of course Jacobite. In
"Waverley" Sir Walter Scott mentions a Miss Nairne with whom he says he
was acquainted, and this lady appears to have been one of the sisters of
Captain John Nairne. In 1745, as the Highland army rushed into
Edinburgh, Miss Nairne was standing with some ladies on a balcony, when
a shot, discharged by accident from a Highlander's musket, grazed her
forehead. "Thank God," she said, "that the accident happened to me whose
principles are known; had it befallen a Whig [the name then identified
with the anti-Jacobite party] they would have said it was done on
purpose."[4] At Murray Bay there is still a miniature portrait of Prince
Charlie given it is said by himself to Miss Nairne.

Before fighting under Wolfe John Nairne had followed the Dutch flag.
Just before the rising of 1745, when a youth of only 17, he, like a
great many others of his countrymen, is found serving in the well known
"Scots Brigade"; many years later at Malbaie, he tells in his letters,
of old companions in this service with well known Scottish names--Bruce,
Maclean, Seton, Hepburn, Campbell, Dunbar, Dundass, Graham, and so on.
In the pay of Holland Nairne remained for some nine years. He made, he
says, "long voyages" possibly to the Dutch possessions in the far East.
But he was glad of the chance to serve his own land which came when
Britain, embarked upon the Seven Years' War, was anxious to recall her
banished sons and to find soldiers, Scots or of any other nationality,
who would fight her battles. So John Nairne left the Dutch service to
join the 78th Highlanders and henceforth his loyalty to the house of
Hanover was never questioned. From the first, since Scotland offered
only a poor prospect of a career, Nairne may have thought of remaining
in the new world when the war should end. The Highlander of that day,
like the Irishman, found better chances abroad than at home. Unlike
Nairne, Malcolm Fraser, a younger man, had not seen foreign service. The
two met for the first time when, in 1757, they both joined the 78th
Highlanders. Soon they became fast friends and for nearly half a century
they were to live in the closest relations.

Fraser's Highlanders had landed at Halifax in Nova Scotia in June, 1757.
Their dress seemed unsuited to both the severe winters and the hot
summers of North America and a change of costume was proposed; but
officers and men protested vehemently and no change was made. During the
campaigns in America the Highlanders boasted, not with entire truth as
we shall see, that they with their bare legs enjoyed better health than
those who wore breeches and warm clothing. At Louisbourg they did well.
At Quebec a Highland officer's knowledge of French proved a great boon.
When, in the darkness of the momentous morning of September 13th, 1759,
Wolfe's boats were drifting down with the tide close to the north shore
near Quebec, intending to land and scale the heights at what is now
Wolfe's Cove, a French sentry called out sharply from the bank, "_Qui
vive?_" A Highland officer, who had served in Holland, was able to reply
"_France!_" without betraying his nationality.

"_A quel régiment?_" demanded the sentry.

"_De la reine_," answered the Highlander, giving the name of a
well-known French regiment commanded by Bougainville; and then he added
in a low voice, "_Ne faites pas de bruit; ce sont les vivres_"--for a
convoy with provisions was expected by the French. The Highlanders were
at the forefront in the stiff climb up the heights which proved to be
Wolfe's master stroke. Malcolm Fraser has left his own account of that
morning's work. The troops, he says, had been in the boats since nine
o'clock on the previous night. At about twelve they had set out with a
falling tide and they landed just as day was breaking. The light
infantry struggled up the hill first, the French meanwhile firing on the
boats, killing and wounding some of the occupants; but "the main body of
our army soon got to the upper ground, after climbing a hill or rather a
precipice, of about three hundred yards, very steep and covered with
wood and brush." By ten the army was drawn up in order of battle,--"in a
masterly manner," John Nairne said later,--on the Plains of Abraham, the
bag-pipes of the Highlanders screaming a wild defiance to the foe. Then
followed that brief death grapple, fatal to the leader on each side.
Fraser and his Highlanders, we are told, rushed at the enemy with their
broadswords in such irresistible fury that they were driven with a
prodigious slaughter into the town. The Highlanders suffered as much
after the battle as in it, for General Murray led them to reconnoitre in
the direction of the General Hospital and a good many were shot by the
French from bushes and from houses in the suburbs of St. Louis and St.
John. To the French the Highlanders seemed especially ferocious,
possibly owing to the wild music of their pipes, their waving tartans,
their terrible broadswords, and perhaps, also, their partially naked
bodies. They were indeed christened "the savages of Europe."

Not many days after Wolfe's victory the Highlanders marched into Quebec
with the victorious army. The French garrison was sent away to Europe,
the British fleet itself soon followed, and the conquerors, with General
Murray in command, settled down to face for the first time the rigours
of a winter at Quebec. The Highlanders suffered terribly. One suspects
that, in spite of their protests, the Highland costume was ill-suited to
meet the severity of the climate; and, in any case, the army was
ill-fed, ill-housed, and overworked. Malcolm Fraser kept a journal,[5]
but Nairne, the other future seigneur at Malbaie, the most methodical of
men, was less ready with the pen and appears to have made no chronicle
of those slow but momentous days. The bitter weather was the dread
enemy. Fraser tells how men on duty lost fingers and toes and some were
even deprived of speech and sensation in a few minutes through "the
incredible severity of the frost.... Our regiment in particular is in a
pitiful situation having no breeches. Nothing but the last necessity
obliged any man to go out of doors." Colonel Simon Fraser is, he adds,
doing his best to provide trousers. Pitying nuns observed the need and
soon busied themselves knitting long hose for the poor strangers. The
scurvy carried off a good many. In April, 1760, of 894 men in Fraser's
Highlanders not fewer than 580 were on the sick list and it was a wan
and woe-begone host that set itself grimly to the task of meeting the
assault on Quebec for which the French under Lévis had been preparing
throughout the winter.

When it came on April 28th, 1760, the Highlanders were not wanting.
Instead of fighting behind Quebec's crazy walls Murray marched his men
out to the Plains of Abraham to meet the enemy in the open. On ground
half covered by snow, with here and there deep pools of water from the
heavy rain of the previous day, the two armies grappled in what was
sometimes a hand to hand conflict. Of the British one-third had come
from the hospital to take their places in the ranks. The proportion of
the Highlanders who did this was even greater; half of them rose on that
day from sick beds. It proved a dark day for Britain. Murray was
defeated, losing about one-third of his army on the field. Four of the
Highland officers were killed, twenty-three were wounded, among them
Colonel Simon Fraser himself. Malcolm Fraser was dangerously wounded;
but he tells us gleefully that within twenty days he was entirely cured.
Nairne seems to have gone through the fight without a hurt. It was
surely by a strange turn of fortune that men, some of whom fought
against George II in '45 and had been condemned as traitors, should
fifteen years later shed their blood like water for the same sovereign.
Malcolm Fraser was disposed to be critical of Murray's tactics. He ought
to have stood like a wall on the rising ground near Quebec, says Fraser;
but "his passion for glory getting the better of his reason he ordered
the army to march out and attack the enemy ... in a situation the most
desired by them and [that] ought to be avoided by us as the Canadians
and Savages could be used against us to the greatest advantage in their
beloved ... element, woods." Nearly half a century later when Malcolm
Fraser was giving advice to a young officer, Nairne's son, he advised
him not to be too critical of the actions of his superiors. The
confident young diarist of 1760 had meanwhile learned reserve. But he
was not alone among the Highlanders in his criticism of Murray. A Murray
led at Culloden in April, 1746, as at Quebec in April, 1760. Lieutenant
Charles Stewart was wounded in both battles; as he lay in Quebec
surrounded by brother officers he said, "From April battles and Murray
generals, Good Lord deliver me." It is to General Murray's credit that,
when the remark was repeated to him, he called on his subordinate to
express the hope for better luck next time.

A little later Quebec was saved by the arrival of a British fleet and
the French fell back on Montreal. Murray followed them but the
Highlanders remained in garrison at Quebec, apparently because, with
half the officers and men invalided, they could make but a poor muster
for active campaigning. It thus happened that Nairne and Fraser did not
share the glory of being present at the fall of Montreal. There, on a
September day in 1760, the Governor of Canada, the Marquis de Vaudreuil,
handed over to General Amherst, the Commander-in-Chief in America of the
armies of Great Britain, the vast territory which he had ruled. It was
not certain, albeit the great Pitt was resolved what to do, that, when
the war ended, the country would not be handed back to France. The
French officers professed, indeed, to believe that a peace was imminent
by which France should save what she held in America. Meanwhile,
however, they and their regiments were to be sent to France. The few
residents at Malbaie whom Captain Gorham had spared, looking out across
the river in October, 1760, saw it dotted with the white sails of many
ships outward bound. Though they floated the British flag, their decks
were crowded with the soldiers of France now carried home by the
triumphant conqueror.

But more than the soldiers went back to France. Rather than live under
the sway of the British, many civilians also left Canada, among them
some of the seigneurs of Canadian manors. Land was cheap in Canada and
it is not to be wondered at that young British officers, seeking their
fortune, should have thought of settling in the country. A hundred
years earlier French officers of the Carignan Regiment had abandoned
their military careers to become Canadian seigneurs. In the end John
Nairne and Malcolm Fraser took up this project most warmly and in their
plan to get land they had the support of their commanding officer,
General Murray. Murrays, Nairnes and Frasers had all fought on the
Jacobite side in 1745; and we know how the Scots hold together.

[Illustration: GENERAL JAMES MURRAY]

James Murray, son of a Scottish peer, Lord Elibank, was himself still a
young man of only a little more than thirty,--a high-spirited, brave,
generous and impulsive officer. His family played some considerable part
in the life of the time and they were always suspected of Jacobite
leanings. Murray's brother, Lord Elibank, was a leader among the
Scottish wits of his day. Dr. Johnson's famous quip against the Scots
when he defined oatmeal as a food in England for horses and in Scotland
for men was met by Elibank's neat retort: "And where will you find such
horses and such men?" Another brother, Alexander, was a forerunner of
John Wilkes the radical; the cry of "Murray and Liberty" was heard in
London long before that of "Wilkes and Liberty." A third brother, George
became an admiral. General James Murray sometimes described himself as a
soldier of fortune. He was certainly not rich. Yet now when many of the
Canadian seigneurs sold their manors, in some way Murray was able to
purchase half a dozen of these vast estates. He bought that of Lauzon
opposite Quebec on which now stands the town of Levis and half a dozen
villages. He bought St. Jean and Sans-Bruit (now Belmont), near Quebec,
Rivière du Loup and Madawaska, on the lower St. Lawrence, and Foucault
on Lake Champlain.

To Nairne and Fraser, brave young Scots, who had done good service,
Murray was specially attracted. Nairne, though only a lieutenant, till
1761, when he purchased a captaincy, was his junior by but a few years;
Lieutenant Malcolm Fraser was three years younger than Nairne. The young
men were seeking their fortunes but since they had very little money to
buy estates, as Murray did, they could not expect to get land in the
more settled parts of the country. For them Malbaie was a promising
field and in September, 1761, they went down to have a look at it. The
property was vested in the government, for which Murray could act. It
was not wholly untrodden wilderness, for some land was cleared and a
good deal of live stock still remained. The houses too had not been
entirely destroyed by Gorham's men. The war had not yet ended. It was
still uncertain whether Britain would hold Canada. But, for the moment,
there was little to do. It was possible that in Canada further
opportunities of military service would not be wanting. As seigneurs in
Canada the young officers would retain rank as gentlemen and would not
sink to the social level of mere cultivators of the soil. The experience
too of founding settlements in the Canadian wilderness had
compensations. Good sport was always to be had. They could pay at least
annual visits to Quebec for a few weeks, and were, perhaps, hardly more
remote from the cultivated world than some of the chieftains in their
own Scottish Highlands.

The survey of Malbaie must have proved satisfactory. It is true, as the
young officers said, that there was an over-abundance of "mountains and
morasses," with good land scattered only here and there. But in their
formal proposals to Murray they made this fact the plea for the grant of
a larger area. Nairne apparently had greater resources than Fraser and,
being now a captain, was his senior in rank. He asked for the more
important tract lying west of the little river at Malbaie and stretching
to the seigniory of Les Eboulements, Fraser for that lying east of the
river and stretching some eighteen miles along the St. Lawrence to the
Rivière Noire. The grants were to extend for three leagues into the
interior. They were to be held under seigniorial tenure but Nairne asked
for 3000 acres of freehold and Fraser for 2000. They thus close their
petition to Murray: "This [request], if his Excellency is pleased to
grant, will make the proposers extremely happy, and they shall forever
retain the most grateful remembrance of his bounty; and [they] hope his
Excellency will be pleased in the grant to allow them to give the lands
to be granted such a name as may perpetuate their sense of his great
kindness to them." They got what they asked for. It may indeed be
doubted whether Murray had any right to allot huge areas of land in a
country which had not yet been ceded finally to Great Britain, but any
defects of title in this respect were corrected long after by new grants
under the great seal. As it was, Murray wrote on a sheet of ordinary
foolscap, still preserved at Murray Bay, a brief deed of the land[6]
and, behold, the two young officers have become landed proprietors! To
their request for permission to use Murray's name, in grateful
remembrance of his kindness, he also assented. Nairne's seigniory was to
be called Murray's Bay and Fraser's Mount Murray. The grants were made
because "it is a national advantage and tends to promote the cultivation
of lands within the province to encourage His Majesty's natural-born
subjects settling within the same"; and the consideration was "the
faithful services" rendered by the two officers.

A good deal of stock and farm implements remained at Malbaie and this
the new proprietors arranged to buy, giving in payment their promissory
notes, Nairne's for £85, 6s. 8d., currency and Fraser, who got only
one-third, his for £42, 13s. 4d. They seem to have had a good deal for
their money. There were a score and a half or so of cattle, four or five
horses, (one of them twenty-two years old), twenty sheep, fourteen pigs,
besides chickens and other living creatures. In addition there were
waggons and other farm appliances, most of them probably old and of
little use, though they must have helped to tide over the first
difficult days when everything would have to be provided.

On getting his grant Nairne retired from the army on half pay, but
Fraser remained on active service for many years still. Thus Nairne was
the more continuously resident at Murray Bay and in its development he
played the greater part. Fraser's interests were divided, not only
between Murray Bay and the army, but also between Murray Bay and another
seigniory which he secured on the south side of the river at Rivière du
Loup and known as Fraserville. For us therefore the interest at Murray
Bay now centres chiefly in Nairne and his family.

[Footnote 3: The name Simon Fraser appears with credit more than once in
Canadian history. It was a Simon Fraser who crossed the Rocky Mountains
and first followed for its whole course the Fraser River named after
him.]

[Footnote 4: Waverley, Chapter II.]

[Footnote 5: See Appendix A., p. 249. "Journal of Malcolm Fraser, First
Seigneur of Mount Murray, Malbaie."]

[Footnote 6: See copy of the grant in Appendix B., p. 271.]




CHAPTER III

JOHN NAIRNE, SEIGNEUR OF MURRAY BAY

     Colonel Nairne's portrait.--His letters.--The first Scottish
     settlers at Malbaie.--Nairne's finance.--His tasks.--The curé's
     work.--The Scottish settlers and their French wives.--The Church
     and Education.--Nairne's efforts to make Malbaie Protestant.--His
     war on idleness.--The character of the habitant.--Fishing at
     Malbaie.--Trade at Malbaie.--Farming at Malbaie.--Nairne's
     marriage.--Career and death in India of Robert Nairne.--The Quebec
     Act and its consequences for the habitant.


In the dining room of the Manor House at Murray Bay Nairne's portrait
still hangs. It was painted, probably in Scotland, when he was an old
man, by an artist, to me unknown. The face is refined, showing
kindliness and gentleness in the lines of the mouth, and revealing the
"friendly honest man" that he aspired to be. His nose is big and in
spite of the prevailing gentleness of demeanour the thin lips, pressed
together, indicate some vigour of character. He has the watery eye of
old age and this takes away somewhat from the impression of energy. It
is not a clever face but honest, rather sad, and unmistakeably Scottish
in type. Nairne wears the red coat of the British officer and a wig in
the fashion of the time. The portrait might be one of a frequenter of
court functions in London rather than that of a hardy pioneer at Murray
Bay, who had carried on a stern battle with the wilderness.

Nairne was a good letter writer. To his kin in Scotland he sent from the
beginning voluminous annual epistles. They are not such as we now write,
hurriedly scratched off in a few minutes. With abundant time at his
disposal Nairne could write what must have occupied many days. When
written, the letters were sometimes copied in a book almost as large as
an office ledger. It is well that this was done, for in this book is
preserved almost the sole record of the life at Murray Bay of a century
and a half ago. The pages are still fresh and the handwriting, while not
that of one much accustomed to use the pen, is clear and vigorous. The
zeal for copying letters was intermittent. There are gaps, covering many
years. Then, for a time, not only the letters sent, but those received,
are copied into the book. In the long winter evenings there was not much
to do. Malcolm Fraser, it is true, lived just across the river at the
neighbouring manor house. But Malcolm was more usually away than not.
Besides, as one grows older, there is no place like one's own fireside
of a winter evening. So our good seigneur read and dozed and wrote and
we are grateful that he has told us so much about past days.

Nairne's first visit to Malbaie was, as we have seen, in the autumn of
1761, when he took possession of his seigniory. Not until the following
year was the formal grant made by Murray. Long afterwards, in 1798,
writing to a friend, Hepburn, in Scotland, Nairne recalled his arrival
at his future home. "I came here first in 1761 with five soldiers [alas,
we do not know their names!] and procured some Canadian servants. One
small house contained us all for several years and [we] were separated
from every other people for about eighteen miles without any road." He
contrasts this with what he sees about him at the time of writing--a
parish with more than five hundred inhabitants, with one hundred men
capable of bearing arms, grist mills, fisheries, good houses and barns,
fertile fields, a priest, a chapel, and so on. The five soldiers of whom
Nairne speaks were no doubt men of the 78th Highlanders and ancestors of
a goodly portion of the population of Malbaie at the present time.
Perhaps some of them had fought at Culloden; certainly all fought at
Louisbourg and Quebec.

In the first days at Murray Bay Nairne was in debt. In 1761, probably to
purchase his captaincy, he had incurred a considerable obligation to his
friend General Murray; where Murray got £400 to lend him is a mystery,
for he was himself always pressed for funds. With everything to do at
Murray Bay, mills to be built, roads to be opened, a manor house to be
constructed, it was not easy to get together any money; for years the
debt hung like a mill-stone round Nairne's neck. But he had always a
certain, if small, revenue in his half pay and, in time, he acquired,
chiefly by inheritance, what was, for that period in Canada, a
considerable fortune. In 1766, when Nairne was in Scotland, General
Murray, who had himself just arrived from Canada, wrote urgently to ask
for payment. Murray owed to a Mr. Ross £8,000 and could not borrow one
shilling in England on his estates in Canada; so he said "delay will be
a very terrible disappointment to me." But this disappointment he had to
bear. In 1770 the debt was still unpaid and may have remained so for
some years longer. Happily the friendship between the former comrades
was not impaired by their financial relations. Murray promised to put
Nairne in the way of being "very comfortable and easy" in Canada, if he
would follow his advice, but nothing came of his offer. For some years
after 1761 Nairne thought of returning to Scotland, whither ties of kin
drew him strongly. But his father's death in 1766 or 1767 helped to
weaken these ties. In any case Scotland offered no career and he must do
something to pay the debt to Murray and to provide for himself.

Nairne's chief task as seigneur was to put settlers on his huge tract.
The seigneur, indeed, discharged functions similar to those of a modern
colonization company, but with differences that in some respects favour
the older system. Now-a-days the occupier buys the land and the
colonization company gets the best possible price for what it has to
sell; it can hold for a rise in value and, if it likes, can refuse to
sell at all. Nairne had no such powers. Under the law, if a reputable
person applied for land, he must let him have it. Settlers required no
capital to buy their land, and, as long as they paid their merely
nominal rent, they could not be disturbed in their holdings. The rent
amounted to about one cent an acre, and some twenty cents or a live
capon for each of the two or three arpents of frontage which a farm
would have. The rent charge was uniform and depended not upon the
quality of the land or upon the individual seigneur but upon what was
usual in the district; moreover, under the French law, no matter how
valuable the land became, the rent could not be increased and, though so
trifling, it was rarely required until the settler's farm had begun to
be productive. Sometimes in a single year Nairne would put as many as
twenty brawny young fellows on his land to hew out homes for themselves.
Each of them got a tract of about one hundred acres and, as the annual
rental received for a dozen farms would be hardly more than twenty
dollars, the seigneur reaped no great profit from his tenants. It was
only when a tenant sold a holding, that the seigneur secured any
considerable sum. To him then went one-twelfth of the price. The other
chief source of profit, as settlement increased, was from the
seigneur's mill. To it all the occupiers of his land must bring their
grain and pay a fixed charge for its grinding. In scattered settlements
the mill brought little profit and was a source of expense rather than
of income. But, as population increased, this "_droit de banalité_"
became valuable. The mill at Malbaie was, in time, very prosperous.

In Canada the seigneur was not the oppressor of his people but rather
their watchful guardian. He planned roads and other improvements,
checked abuses, and enforced justice. At his side stood, usually, the
priest. The moment a parish was established a curé was entitled to the
tithe; near every manor house, the village church was sure to spring up.
Even when, as at Malbaie, the priest and the seigneur were not of the
same faith they were often fast friends. Nairne's relations were good
with the neighbouring curé, when, at length, Malbaie had a resident
priest. Each village would thus usually have at least two men of some
culture working together for its spiritual and temporal interests. Both
remained in touch with the outside world; the priest with his bishop at
Quebec, the seigneur with the representative there of the sovereign.
Upon each change of governor Nairne was required to appear at Quebec to
render fealty and homage. With head uncovered and wearing neither sword
nor spur he must kneel before the governor, and take oath on the
Gospels to be faithful to the king, to be party to nothing against his
interests, to perform all the duties required by the terms of his
holding, and, especially, to appear in arms to defend the province if
attacked. We find Nairne excused by General Haldimand in 1781 from
discharging this ceremony, but only because he was away on active
service.

When Nairne settled at Murray Bay he was unmarried and so, no doubt,
were the soldiers he brought with him. Only after five or six years did
he himself find a wife but we may be sure that his men did not wait so
long. What more natural than that they should marry the French Canadian
servants of whom Nairne speaks? A visitor at Murray Bay is struck with
names like McNicol, Harvey, Blackburn, McLean, and one or two others
that have a decidedly North British ring. Some, if not all, are names of
one or other of the half dozen soldiers who settled at Murray Bay in
Nairne's time. There was no disbanding there of a regiment, as tradition
has it. In time the 78th Highlanders were disbanded, but certainly not
at Murray Bay, and, though hundreds of them remained in Canada, only a
few individual soldiers came to Nairne's settlement. Already when he
arrived French Canadians were there and from the first the community was
prevailingly French and Catholic. In 1784 when joined with Les
Eboulements and Isle aux Coudres under a single priest Malbaie already
had 65 communicants. As likely as not some even of the Highlanders were
Catholics. In any case their children became such and spoke French, the
tongue of their mothers; even Nairne's own children spoke only French
until they went to Quebec to school.

When, from time to time, a missionary priest visited the place he
baptized children of Catholic and Protestant alike, including even the
children of the Protestant family in the manor house. The only religious
services that the people ever shared in were those of the Roman Catholic
Church. Nairne would have wished it otherwise. He held sturdy Protestant
views, and wished to bring in Protestant settlers. On one or more of his
visits to Scotland he made efforts to induce Scots to move to Canada.
But he met with no great success. A Scottish friend, Gilchrist, who had
visited Nairne at Murray Bay, writes, in 1775, to express hope that he
will not encourage French settlers who will rob him, who have
"disingenuous, lying, cheating, detestable dispositions," and are the
"banes of society." He adds, "I am glad you give me reason to believe
you are to carry over some industrious honest people from hence with
you. I am convinced 'twere easy by introducing a few such [to bring
about that] the dupes to the most foolish and absurd religion now in the
world might be warmed out and your quiet as well as interest established
from Point au Pique to the Lake."[7] The Roman Catholic faith had more
vitality than Nairne's correspondent supposed. It was Protestantism that
should in time be "warmed out" of Murray Bay.

To prevent this Nairne did what he could; for a long time he entertained
hopes not only that the Protestants at Murray Bay might be held to their
faith but also that the Roman Catholics would be led into the Protestant
fold. His chief complaint against the Roman Catholic Church was in
regard to education. There was woeful ignorance. Nairne was in command
of the local militia and he found that officers of militia, and even a
neighbouring seigneur, could not read. When Roman Catholic services were
held at Murray Bay, as they were regularly before he died, the tongue
was one that the people did not understand. At the services there was
nothing "but a few lighted candles, in defyance of the sun, and the
priest singing and reading Latin or Greek.... None of us understands a
word." He complains of "the greatest deficiency in preaching sentiments
of morality and virtue." Indeed, very few of the priests could preach or
say anything in public beyond the Latin mass. Nairne tried to secure
better means of educating his people. Probably earlier also, but
certainly in 1791, he was writing to the Anglican Bishop of Quebec to
help him to do something. He lives, he says, in "the most Northerly and,
I believe, the poorest parish on the Continent of America." The people
cannot read and have no literary amusement. Their idle days they spend
in drunkenness and debauchery and he wishes something done for them. Ten
years later Nairne is returning to the charge. There are five Protestant
families in the neighbourhood. They cannot even be baptized except by
the curé. They cannot get any Protestant instruction; so the Protestant
children are reared Roman Catholics. Nairne wished to have a Protestant
clergyman established at Murray Bay; he could make that place his
headquarters and carry on missionary work in the neighbouring parishes.
But the five Protestant families at Murray Bay soon became three, for
Nairne says, in 1801, that his and Colonel Fraser's families and one
other man, an Englishman, are the only remaining Protestants. He and
Fraser, he adds, are growing old and, in any case, it was doubtful
whether the Englishman would attend service.

Yet Nairne still begged for a Protestant missionary. He desired most of
all a free school. The teacher should be, he says, French but able also
to preach in English; there was now no school at Murray Bay; a free
school and a church system which would release the people from paying
tithes could work wonders and, probably, most of the people would soon
become Protestants. Knowing the tenacity with which the French
Canadians have clung to their faith, it seems hardly likely that
Nairne's dreams would have been realized. At any rate nothing was done.
At that time there were hardly more than a dozen Anglican clergymen in
all Canada and the Bishop of Quebec had no one to spare to look after
the few scattered sheep at Murray Bay. On the other hand the rival
Church did not forget her own. Long before the British conquest
occasional services had been held at Malbaie and these were continued,
with some regularity, until a resident priest came in 1797. The visiting
priests worked hard. They were, Nairne says, "industrious in private to
confess the people, especially the women, which branch of their duty is
deemed most sacred and necessary." Against this tremendous power of the
confessional, Protestantism had nothing that could be called an opposing
influence. When a Protestant died he might not, of course, be buried in
the Roman Catholic burial ground. For these outcast dead Nairne set
aside a plot near his own house, where, still, under a little clump of
trees, their bones lie, neglected and forgotten. Not more than half a
dozen Protestants were ever buried there and this shows that even the
Protestant pioneers were few in number; hardly one of their children
remained outside the Roman Church.

Nairne thought the Canadians not too prone to industry and he deplored
the multitude of religious holidays that gave an excuse for idleness.
In a year there were not less than forty, in addition to Sundays, and on
some of the holidays, such as that of the patron saint of the parish,
there were scenes of great disorder. Nairne wrote on the subject to the
Roman Catholic Bishop of Quebec asking him to take steps to ensure that
the people might come to think it not sinful but virtuous to work for
six days in the week. The Bishop promised consideration of the matter.
Already it had been under debate and in the end the Bishop gave orders
that labour might continue on most of the Church's festivals; that of
the patron saint of the parish was in time abolished. Nairne thus helped
to bring about a considerable industrial reform. But beyond this he
achieved little.

The French Canadians, who occupied his vacant acres, have shown both a
marvellous tenacity for their own customs and also a fecundity that has
enabled people, numbering 60,000 at the time of the British conquest, to
multiply now to some 2,500,000, scattered over the United States and
Canada. To govern them has never been an easy problem. Nairne says that
the French officer, Bougainville, who had known the Canadians in many
campaigns, called them at Murray's table a brave and submissive people;
he thought they needed the strong hand of authority and added that he
was sure the British method of government would soon spoil them. Under
the French régime they had had no gleam of political liberty. For twenty
years before the conquest France had exacted from them the fullest
possible measure of military service. The British ended this and brought
liberty. Its growth is sometimes so rapid as to be noxious, and, no
doubt, some of those who came to Nairne's domain gave him much trouble.
"No people," Nairne said of them, "stand more in awe of punishment when
convinced that there is power to inflict it, as none are so easily
spoiled as to be mutinous by indulgences." Some of them showed striking
intelligence: in 1784 we find Nairne recommending for appointment as
Notary one Malteste (no doubt the well-known name Maltais is a later
form) as a "remarkable honest, well-behaved countryman with more
education than is commonly to be found with one in his station." The
dwellers at Malbaie were for the most part a quiet people entirely
untouched by the movements of the outside world. "Nothing here," wrote
Nairne in 1798, "is considered of importance but producing food to
satisfy craving Stomachs, which the people of this cold and healthy
country remarkably possess, and to feed numbers of children.... They
have no other ambition or consideration whatever but simply to procure
food and raiment for themselves and their numerous families."

They had a very clear idea of their rights. Nairne's grant conferred
upon him those of fishing and hunting. But the inhabitants declared that
when land was once granted, the seigneur lost all control over the
adjoining waters. Nairne wished, for instance, to prohibit the spearing
of salmon at night by the Canadians, with the aid of torches or
lanterns. But they had never been hampered by such restrictions and,
when Nairne tried to check them, they said that they would not be
hindered. It was in vain that he said "I had rather have no power at all
and no seigneurie at all [than] not to be able to keep up the rights of
it." When, in 1797, he ordered one Joseph Villeneuve to cease the
"flambeau" fishing at night, the fellow "roared and bellowed" and set
him at defiance; no less than twenty companions joined him in the
fishing. They would acknowledge no law nor restraint and seem to have
had _force majeure_ on their side. It was not until long after that the
legislature at Quebec passed strict laws regulating the modes of
fishing.

Whatever the limitations on the seigneur's authority he had the
undoubted right of control over fishing in rivers and lakes until the
adjacent lands were conceded to occupiers. It was important, therefore,
not to grant lands which carried with them the best fishing and Nairne's
ardent friend Gilchrist kept exhorting him from Scotland on this point.
"There is no place ... I would so willingly and happily pass life in,"
he wrote, in 1775, "as in your Neighbourhood and often have I been
seized with the memory of your easy and uncontrolled way of rising,
lying, dancing, drinking, &c., at your habitation.... One hope ... I
wish to be well founded and that is that your Stewart, Factor or
Attorney, has not conceded any lands with the River in front from the
Rapides du Vieux Moulin. If otherwise, you have lost more than the
profits [which] all above Brassar's will yield in our lifetime. The
fishing in that part of the River is alone worth crossing the Atlantic."

Over trade Nairne and Fraser tried to exercise some real control. Their
grants gave them no right to trade with the Indians and in reality no
authority over trade. But they were guardians of the law and took steps
to check traders from violating it. One Brassard, who lived up the
Murray River, seems to have been a frequent offender. It was easy to
debauch the Indians with drink and then to get their furs for very
little and the seigneurs needed always to be alert. In 1778 we find
Malcolm Fraser making with one Hugh Blackburn a bargain which outlines
what the seigneurs tried to do in regard to trade. Blackburn binds
himself in the sum of £200 to obey certain restrictions: he will not
attempt to debauch the Indians belonging to the King's Posts; in no
circumstances will he sell them liquor; nor will he sell liquor on
credit to anyone. He will obey the lawful orders of Nairne and Fraser
relative to the carrying on of his trade; he will pay his debts, and
will make others pay what they owe him, refusing them credit if accounts
are not paid within six months. In consideration of these pledges by
Blackburn Fraser guarantees his credit with the Quebec merchants. The
difficulty in regard to trade with the Indians settled itself by the
tragic remedy of their gradual extinction. In 1800 Nairne says that the
Micmacs, once a great nuisance, are now rarely seen.

Nairne was a good farmer and his letters contain many references to
farming operations. At Murray Bay, he says, plowing goes on for seven
months in the year, from the middle of April to the middle of November.
But the Canadians do not plough well; they do not understand how to
preserve the crops when cut; and, on the whole, are backward in
agriculture. He himself preserved for a domain more land than he could
ever get cleared, for this clearing was heavy work. Some of the soil at
Murray Bay is very good. Gilchrist writes indeed to say that he has been
talking in Scotland about Nairne's land. "On my mentioning that you had
lime, without digging for it, it was acknowledged that you possessed all
the advantages possible and that anything might be done with ground such
as yours which is dry; and I verily believe would you thoroughly lime
your land you may keep it in crops as long as you please and have
prodigious returns." Good farming, he says, Nairne may have and he
should preserve good fishing; then Murray Bay will be perfect. "If I
have the pleasure of seeing your sisters, I'll represent Mal Bay as the
counterpart of Paradise before the fall." He adds some local
characterizations. "Catish will do for Eve, La Grange for Adam, and
Dufour for the Devil."

Nairne was married in 1766 to Christiana Emery. Of her history I know
nothing, except that she was born in Edinburgh and married in Canada.
Soon after marriage Nairne paid a long visit to Scotland and there in
1767 the freedom of the borough of Sterling was conferred upon him. Mrs.
Nairne must have been considerably younger than her husband, for though
he lived to ripe old age, she survived him by twenty-six years, dying at
Murray Bay in 1828. Whether she brought any dowry I do not know; Nairne
certainly had had in mind the improvement of his position by marrying.
Nine children were born to them but three died in childhood of an
epidemic fever that broke out at Murray Bay in 1773 while Nairne was in
Scotland. A fourth child, Anne, died of consumption. Five children lived
to grow up--three daughters and two sons.

Canada seemed so remote that it was not easy for Nairne to keep in touch
with his kin. The scattering of families, one of the penalties Imperial
Britain, with a world wide domain, imposes upon her sons, had taken
Nairne's brother Robert to India. At a time only ten years later than
Clive's great victory of Plassey, Britain's grasp on the country was, as
yet, by no means certain and India was amazingly remote; five years
usually elapsed between the sending of a letter to India from Canada and
the receipt of a reply! On January 5th, 1770, Robert Nairne writes from
Marlborough, India, acknowledging a letter from his brother John, only
recently received, dated April 21, 1767. The brothers discuss family
news and family plans, their old father's health, the desirability of
settling down at home in Scotland, the life each is living, remote from
that home. Though an officer, Robert engaged in trade and made some
money. "The Company's pay is hardly subsistence," he says, "and here we
have not, as on t'other side of India the spoils of plundered provinces
to grow fat on. I keep my health very well and if I want the
satisfaction, I am also free from many Anxietys, people are subject to
who are more in the glare of life." He was in a retired place, where
there were few people and perennial summer, with "no variety of seasons
nor of anything else." Time passes insensibly, he says; "in India years
are like months in Europe ... I write, read, walk and go in company the
same round nearly throughout the year. Here we have little company; yet
everyone wants to go to out settlements where they are quite alone. I
cannot account for it. Mal Bay is your out settlement. Do you like that
as well as Quebec?"

Robert Nairne was something of a philosopher. "Have you ever so much
philosophy," he writes to the seigneur of Murray Bay in 1767, "as to
think everything that happens is for the best? I am so far of that mind
that content and discontent I think arises [_sic_] rather from the cast
of our own thoughts than from outward accidents and that there is nearly
an equal distribution of the means of happiness to all men, and that
they are the happiest that improve their means the most." He felt the
weariness of exile, the Scot's longing for his own land. "Certainly to a
person of a right tone of mind if there are enjoyments in life, it must
be in our own country amongst our friends and relations. With such
conditions the bare necessaries of life are better than riches without
them.... Death is but a limited absence and you and I are much in that
state with regard to our friends at home."

It was not long before Robert Nairne's letters ceased altogether. In
1776, John Nairne received at Murray Bay the sad news that, in November
or December, 1774, his brother had been killed in a petty expedition
against some local tribesmen. A native chieftain had murdered, cooked
and eaten a rival who was friendly to the East India Company and Robert
Nairne with some natives, and only three Europeans, went up country,
through woods and bogs, to seize the offender. When there was fighting
his natives fled, and he was shot through the body. It was a pity, says
John Nairne's correspondent, Hepburn, to lose his life "in so silly a
manner." He would soon have been governor of Bencoolen and was in a way
to make "a great figure in life." Of his fortune of £6,000 John Nairne
received a part. Twenty-five years after his brother's death Nairne was
to get at Murray Bay similar news of the loss of his own son in distant
India. It has levied a heavy tribute of Britain's best blood.

In 1774 Nairne again revisited Scotland. Though no politician, he must
have heard much about the Quebec Act, then before the Imperial
Parliament. The Governor of Canada, Sir Guy Carleton, after careful
consideration of the whole question, had reached the conclusion, not
belied by subsequent history, as far as the Province of Quebec is
concerned, that Canada would always be French and that, with some slight
modifications, the French system found there by Britain should be given
final and legal status under British supremacy. So the Quebec Act was
passed in 1774. While the British criminal law was introduced, the
French civil law, including the land system under which Nairne held
Murray Bay, was left unchanged. The Bill gave the Church the same
privileged position that it had enjoyed under Catholic sovereigns. The
tithe could be collected by legal process; taxation for church purposes
voted by the parochial authority called the _fabrique_ was as compulsory
as civil taxes, unless the person taxed declared that he was not a Roman
Catholic; and the whole ecclesiastical system of New France was
supported and encouraged. The Bill caused much irritation in Protestant
New England, which saw some malicious design in the establishment of
Roman Catholicism on its borders. The Continental Congress of 1775
denounced the Quebec Act, and even the Declaration of Independence has
something to say about it.

It is obvious that Nairne disliked the Bill. His irrepressible friend,
Gilchrist, wrote giving a picture of its probable dire social results,
upsetting all domestic relations between the two races. The Bill, says
Gilchrist, "is the most pernicious [that] could have been devised. Judge
of the Fêtes now that the fools have got the sanction of the British
Parliament to their beggaring principles. It is not clear that your
Protestant servants will [even] be allowed to work upon their [the Roman
Catholic] idle days. What would you and I think on being told by these
black rascals [the priests are meant of course] that our people, I mean
Protestants, durst not obey our orders without a dispensation from
them?"

The social consequences of the Quebec Act did not prove as revolutionary
as Nairne's animated correspondent feared. Less than is usually supposed
did the habitant like it since it placed him again under the priest's
and the seigneur's authority, suspended since the British conquest. To
the English colonies it added one to other causes of friction that boded
trouble to the British Empire. In the previous year the people of Boston
had defied Britain, by throwing into their harbour cargoes of tea upon
which the owners proposed to pay a hated duty, levied by outside
authority. The Quebec Act brought a final rupture a step nearer and at
last there was open war. "The colonists have brought things to a crisis
now, indeed;" wrote Gilchrist; "the consequences must be dreadful to
them soon and I am afraid in the end to our country." To Great Britain
indeed disastrous they were to be and soon the seigneur of Murray Bay
was busy with his share in preparing for the conflict.

[Footnote 7: The Lake is no doubt Lake Nairne, the present Grand Lac.]




CHAPTER IV

JOHN NAIRNE IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

     Nairne's work among the French Canadians.--He becomes Major of the
     Royal Highland Emigrants.--Arnold's march through the wilderness to
     Quebec.--Quebec during the Siege, 1775-76.--The habitants and the
     Americans.--Montgomery's plans.--The assault on December 31st,
     1775.--Malcolm Fraser gives the alarm in Quebec.--Montgomery's
     death.--Arnold's attack.--Nairne's heroism.--Arnold's failure.--The
     American fire-ship.--The arrival of a British fleet.--The retreat
     of the Americans.--Nairne's later service in the War.--Isle aux
     Noix and Carleton Island.--Sir John Johnson and the desolation of
     New York.--Nairne and the American prisoners at Murray Bay.--Their
     escape and capture.--Nairne and the Loyalists.--The end of the
     War.--Nairne's retirement to Murray Bay.


When war with the revolted colonies grew imminent, it was obvious that a
man of Nairne's experience in military matters would soon be needed. One
aim of the government was to keep the French Canadians quiet by
disarming their prejudices and impressing upon them their duty to George
III. From Quebec, on July 13th, 1775, Nairne was given instructions to
undertake this work for his district. Self-control and cool
persuasiveness fitted him for his task, he was told; his work would be
to visit all the parishes on the north shore, with the aim of winning
the loyal support of the French Canadians during the coming struggle.
Though fifteen years of tranquility under the mild British sway had made
the habitants prosperous and averse to war, it was still possible to get
from them useful military service, under the leadership of British
officers. Nairne was to tell them that the Americans would borrow their
dollars, take their provisions, pay for them only in worthless letters
of credit upon the Congress, and even make free with their lands. He was
to show, also, how bitterly the Protestant English colonies hated the
Roman Catholic faith of the Canadians. A British fleet, he was to add,
would soon arrive and, if the Canadians joined the revolt, the second
British conquest would be shorter and not quite so gentle as the first;
for "a fair and open enemy is a different thing from a rebel and a
traitor."

Fifteen years earlier the Canadians had borne a heavy part in defending
their country against the British assailant; now they were to fight in
his interests. Whenever possible Nairne was to employ the same old
Captains of militia who had fought the battles of France against the
British; he was to make a roll of those fit to bear arms, and to report
the number of discharged soldiers in his district. To him were entrusted
commissions for Captains whom he might select; the inferior officers he
might also name. The Church aided his work as much as possible, the
Vicar-General sending to the priests instructions to this effect.

On taking up his task Nairne found that at Murray Bay there were
thirty-two men between the ages of 16 and 55. When summoned to meet him
they were respectful, but showed fear of having to serve in the army and
pleaded that they were only a new settlement. Had there been, as is so
generally supposed, many disbanded soldiers among them we should have
had a different tale but, already, in 1775, most of the people at Murray
Bay were French. Neither they nor their neighbours showed any zeal for
the upholding of British rule in Canada. At Les Eboulements and Baie St.
Paul, whither Nairne went, the inhabitants were respectful, as at Murray
Bay, but also objected to military service. At Isle aux Coudres they
disregarded Nairne's summons to meet him, while at St. Anne de Beaupré
they made open manifestations of hostility.

In the actual fighting, now imminent, Nairne was eager to take part,
and, on August 12th, he wrote to Sir Guy Carleton offering himself for
any service and applying for a vacant captaincy. On the 9th of September
he received an urgent summons to Quebec, and, from that time, for six or
seven years, he was engaged in the great fratricidal struggle.

Again, in a time of crisis, Great Britain made special use of the
Highlanders. Many of those who had served during the conquest of Canada
had become settlers in the New World. Now at the call to arms some of
them--between one and two hundred--rallied again to fight Britain's
battles. They were formed into a regiment known as the Royal Highland
Emigrants. It was not a regular corps but was organized for this special
campaign only. Nairne's rank in the regular army was that of Captain;
now he was given the duty of Major, though this promotion was not yet
permanent. Malcolm Fraser served in the same corps as Captain and
Paymaster. The commanding officer, Colonel Allan McLean, was brave and
indefatigable and he and his Highlanders played a creditable part in the
work of saving Canada for Britain.

When the American colonies saw that the war was inevitable they saw too
that Quebec was the key of the situation. Washington himself declared
that in favour of the holders of Quebec would the balance turn in the
great conflict. From the outset there was an eager desire to attack the
Canadian capital. Washington believed--with some truth, indeed,--that
its defences were ridiculous. He thought, too, that the Governor, Sir
Guy Carleton, had no money to buy even provisions, that the Canadians
were eager to throw off the yoke of Great Britain and to co-operate with
the revolted colonies, and that some even of the few regulars to be
found in Quebec would join the colonial army. To take Quebec seemed,
therefore, comparatively easy, and the task was undertaken by a man with
a sinister name for posterity as a traitor to the young republic, but a
vigorous and able officer,--Colonel Benedict Arnold. Wolfe's rôle Arnold
essayed to play and Wolfe's fame he fondly hoped would be his.

A fundamental difference existed, however, between Arnold's task and
that of Wolfe. Wolfe's army had been carried to Quebec in ships;
Arnold's was to advance by land. He chose the shortest route to Quebec
from the New England seaboard. It lay through the untrodden wilderness
and its difficulties were terrible. Half of it was up the Kennebec river
along whose shallow upper reaches the men would have to drag their boats
on chill autumn days in water sometimes to their waists; then they must
take them over the steep watershed dividing the waters flowing northward
to the St. Lawrence from those flowing southward to the Atlantic. Even
when they embarked on the upper waters of the Chaudière, which flows
into the St. Lawrence near Quebec, the hardships were killing. The
numerous rapids and falls on that swift and turbulent river would wreck
their boats. At the time no fleet defended Quebec. If, instead of
advancing by this land route, the Americans had been able to bring, by
sea, an adequate force as Wolfe had done, the later history of Canada
might indeed have been different.

Arnold set out in the middle of September with 1100 or 1200 men,--"the
very flower of the colonial youth" they have been called. Many were
hardy frontier men trained in Indian wars, who knew well the
difficulties of the wilderness. But now they were face to face with
something more difficult than they had ever before encountered. When one
Parson Emerson had committed the enterprise to the divine care in a
prayer that, tradition says, lasted for one hour and three-quarters, the
army began its struggle across the dreadful three hundred miles of
forest. The swollen rivers swept away much ammunition and food, until
upon the army settled down the horror of starvation. The boats proved to
be badly built; their crews were always wet and shivering. At night the
men had sometimes to gather on a narrow footing of dry land in the midst
of a swamp and huddled over a fire that at any moment rain might
extinguish. The cold became terrible. Many lay down by the trail to die.
When the journey was half over, Colonel Enos, deeming it useless to lead
the force farther amid such conditions, turned back. With him went some
hundreds of men; but Arnold held on grimly. He pushed ahead to get
succour for his starving force from the Canadian settlements near
Quebec. With a few boats and canoes his party committed themselves to
the Chaudière river. In two hours Arnold was swept down twenty miles,
steering as best he could through the rapids, and avoiding the rocks, in
the angry river. At one place all his boats and canoes were carried over
a fall and capsized, the occupants struggling to land. But this reckless
courage did wonders. By October 30th, after more than a month of
unspeakable hardship, Arnold had reached the borderland of civilization
in Canada, and was sending back provisions to his men. It is little
short of marvellous that at Point Levi on November 9th he could muster
six hundred men, five hundred of whom were fit for duty.

The Canadians and Indians had been very friendly; without their aid the
greater part of Arnold's force would have perished. Even before Quebec
he was dependent on their kindly offices. Its defenders, among whom were
Nairne and Fraser, moved every boat to the north side of the St.
Lawrence; the frigate _Lizard_ and the sloop-of-war _Hunter_, pigmy
representatives at Quebec of Britain's might upon the sea, lay near
Wolfe's Cove ready to attack him if he tried to cross. But the Indians
brought canoes and on the night of November 13th, silently and
unobserved, they carried Arnold's force across the river almost under
the bows of the ships watching for them. The Americans landed where
Wolfe had landed sixteen years earlier. On the morning of the 14th, to
the surprise of Quebec's garrison, a body of Americans appeared on the
Plains of Abraham, not eight hundred yards from the walls, and gave
three loud huzzas. The British answered with three cheers and with the
more effective retort of cannon, loaded with grape and canister shot,
and the hardy pioneers of Arnold's attacking force retired.

Quebec was not in a happy situation. Montreal had already fallen to the
Americans advancing by Lake Champlain, and to force the final surrender
of Canada General Montgomery was hurrying to join Arnold at Quebec. For
a time its defenders were uncertain whether Carleton himself, absent at
Montreal, had not fallen into the hands of the enemy. A miraculous
escape he indeed had. Leaving Montreal on a dark night, when the
Americans were already within the town, Carleton went in a skiff down
the river, both shores of which were already occupied by the enemy for
fifty miles below Montreal. At the narrows at Berthier their blazing
camp fires sent light far out over the surface of the water. Carleton's
party could hear the sentry's shout of "All's Well," and the barking of
dogs. But they let the boat float down with the current so that it might
look like drifting timber, and, when they could, impelled it silently
with their hands. At Three Rivers they thought themselves safe and
Carleton lay down in a house to sleep. But, while he was resting, some
American soldiers entered the house. His disguise as a peasant saved
him; he passed out unchecked. The skiff soon carried him to an armed
brig, the _Fell_, which lay at the foot of the Richelieu Rapids. He
hastened on to Quebec, which showed joy unspeakable when he arrived on
November 19th. Meanwhile Montgomery pursued his rival down the river and
on December 1st he joined Arnold before Quebec.

Now the siege began in earnest. Carleton had 1800 men; Arnold and
Montgomery can hardly have had more than a thousand, and these were
badly equipped. For the Americans the prospects of success were, at no
time, very great, unless they could secure help from the Canadians.
This, indeed, was not wholly wanting. Montgomery's march along the north
shore of the St. Lawrence to Quebec was a veritable triumph. He promised
to the habitants liberty, freedom from heavy taxes, the abolition of the
seigneurs' rights and other good things. Some of the Canadians hoped
that, in joining the Americans, they were hastening the restoration of
France's power in Canada--an argument however of little weight with
many, who remembered grim days of hard service and starvation when,
without appreciation or reward, they had fought France's battle. The
habitants were, in truth, friendly enough to the Americans; but they
would not fight for them. The invaders tried to arouse the fear of the
peasantry by a tale that when the British caught sixty rebel Canadians,
they had hanged them over the ramparts of Quebec, without time even to
say "Lord, have mercy upon me," and had thrown their bodies to the dogs.
But this only made the habitants think it as well perhaps not to take
arms openly against such stern masters. The Church's weight was wholly
on the British side. Canadians who joined the rebel Americans died
without her last rites. Only one priest, M. de Lotbinière, a man, it is
said, of profligate character, espoused the cause of the invaders. For
doing so he was promised a bishopric: to see Puritan New Englanders
offering a bishopric in the Roman Catholic Church as a reward for
service, is not without its humour.

As December wore on Montgomery grew eager to seize his prey. Carleton
sat unmoved behind his walls and allowed the enemy to invest the town.
He would hold no communication with the rebel army. When Montgomery sent
messengers to the gates, under a flag of truce, Carleton would not
receive them; the only message he would take, he said, would be an
appeal to the mercy of the King, against whom they were in rebellion.
Montgomery, too, showed for his foe lofty scorn, in words at least. On
December 15th in General Orders he spoke of "the wretched garrison"
posted behind the walls of Quebec, "consisting of sailors unacquainted
with the use of arms, of citizens incapable of the soldier's duty and
[a gibe at the corps in which Nairne served] a few miserable emigrants."
He went on to promise his troops that when they took Quebec "the effects
of the Governor, garrison, and of such as have been active in misleading
the inhabitants and distressing the friends of liberty" should be
equally divided among the victors. The opposing sides showed, in truth,
the bitterness and exasperation of family quarrels and abandoned the
usual courtesies of war. The Americans lay in wait to shoot sentries;
they fired on single persons walking on the ramparts. It was reported to
the British that Montgomery had said "he would dine in Quebec or in Hell
on Christmas"--gossip probably untrue, as a British diarist of the time
is fair enough to note, since it is not in accord with the dignity and
sobriety of Montgomery's character.

He did what he could to make possible this Christmas festivity within
Quebec's walls. His men got together some five hundred scaling ladders.
Then heavy snow came and the defenders jeered at such preparations: "Can
they think it possible that they can approach the walls laden with
ladders, sinking to the middle every step in snow? Where shall we be
then? Shall we be looking on cross-armed?" The clear and inconceivably
cold weather was also one of Quebec's defences for, as one diarist puts
it, no man, after being exposed to it for ten minutes, could hold arms
in his half-frozen hands firmly enough to do any execution. But by
nothing short of death itself was Montgomery to be daunted; steadily he
made his plans to assault the town.

Meanwhile Quebec was ready. Carleton ordered out of the town all who
could not assist to the best of their power in the defence. Some shammed
illness to escape their tasks. But this was the exception. Well-to-do
citizens worked zealously, took their share of sentry duty on the
bitterly cold nights, and submitted to the commands of officers in the
militia, their inferiors in education and fortune. On the loftiest point
of Cape Diamond Carleton erected a mast, thirty feet high, with a sentry
box at its top. From this he could command a bird's eye view of the
enemy's operations, to a point as distant as Ste. Foy Church. When one
of the besiegers asked a loyalist Canadian what the queer-looking object
on the pole really was he answered, "It is a wooden horse with a bundle
of hay before him." A second remark capped this one: "General Carleton
has said that he will not give up the town till the horse has ate all
the hay; and the General is a man of his word."

Although Montgomery did not eat his Christmas dinner in Quebec a few
days later he was ready for an assault. The crisis came on the last day
of the year 1775. Early on that day, between four and five in the
morning, Captain Malcolm Fraser, in command of the main guard, was
going his rounds in Quebec when he saw a signal thrown by the enemy from
the heights outside the walls near Cape Diamond. Fraser knew at once
that it meant an attack. He sent word to the other guards in Quebec and
ordered the ringing of the alarm bell, and the drum-beat to arms. He
himself ran down St. Louis street, shouting to the guards to "Turn out"
as loudly and often as he could, and with such effect that he was heard
even by General Carleton, lodged at the Recollet convent. It was a
boisterous night and the elements themselves raged so fiercely that some
of the alarms were not heard. But, in time, all Quebec was aroused and
the guards stood at their posts.

The alarm was completed when to its din was added the menacing sound of
cannon. The besiegers began to ply the town with shells, and those who
looked out over the ramparts could see in the darkness the flash of
guns. Soon began from behind ridges of snow, within eighty yards of the
walls of Cape Diamond, the patter of musketry. The Americans were
seeking to lead the defenders of Quebec to believe that an assault on
the walls of the Upper Town on the side of the Plains of Abraham was
imminent and to hold the defence to this point. In fact the real danger
was far away.

[Illustration: THE MANOR HOUSE AT MURRAY BAY

(The upper view from the West, the lower from the East)]

Montgomery's was a hazardous plan. He had resolved to try to seize the
Lower Town first and then to get his troops into the Upper Town by
way of the steep Mountain Street, thus taking the defenders of the walls
in the rear. It was a desperate venture, depending for its success
largely upon the surprise of the garrison which Malcolm Fraser's
thorough-going alarm had prevented. Montgomery himself, with a force of
several hundred men, marched to the Lower Town from Wolfe's Cove along
the narrow path under the cliffs, a distance of nearly two miles, with
progress impeded by darkness, by heavy snow-drifts, and by blocks of ice
which the tide had strewn along the shore. His men struggled on in the
dark hoping to surprise the post which guarded the road below Cape
Diamond at a point called Près de Ville. Here were some fifty defenders
and the tale of what happened is soon told. The guardians of the post
were on the alert, for at it, too, Malcolm Fraser's warning had been
effective. As Montgomery bravely advanced, at the head of his men, there
was a flash and a roar in the darkness and the blinding snow storm, and,
a moment after, Montgomery lay dead in the snow with a bullet through
his head. Two or three other officers were struck down. The British
heard groans and then there was silence. As daylight came they saw hands
and arms protruding from the snow, but only slowly did they realize that
the chief of their foes was killed.

Nairne was on duty elsewhere but he did not miss severe fighting. Arnold
was to advance on the Lower Town from the north-eastern suburb, St.
Roch's, to meet at the foot of Mountain Street Montgomery coming from
the west. At first he was more fortunate than Montgomery. When the
rocket from Cape Diamond went up he set out. The storm was frightful but
it served to conceal Arnold's force from Quebec's sentries. The
Americans passed under the height where stands the Hôtel Dieu. Here
Nairne was stationed with a small guard. They spied the Americans in the
darkness and kept up as effective a fire as the dim light permitted. But
the assailants were able to advance along the whole east side of Quebec
and to reach the entrance to the Sault au Matelot, a short and narrow
street opening into the steep Mountain Street, by which alone the Upper
Town could be reached. Here fortune favoured them for, apparently, in
spite of Fraser's alarm, they surprised the guard at the first barrier
by which the street was closed. The street itself they secured but when
they reached the second barrier at its farther end, commanding the road
to the Upper Town, it was well defended by an alert garrison. Arnold had
already been wounded and taken to the rear and Morgan, an intrepid
leader, was in command of the assailing force. Every moment he expected
that Montgomery would arrive to attack the second barrier on the Sault
au Matelot from the West as he attacked it from the East. But
Montgomery was dead and Morgan waited in vain.

While the Americans were checked by the second barrier, Carleton was not
idle. There was an excellent chance to send a force out of the Palace
Gate near the Hôtel Dieu, by which the assailants had passed, and to
attack them in the rear. For this duty Colonel Caldwell was told off and
he took with him Nairne and his picket of about thirty men. The force
plodded through the deep snow in the tracks of the enemy who, about
daybreak, were astonished to find themselves shut in by British forces
at each end of the Sault au Matelot. A hand to hand fight followed. The
Americans took refuge in the houses of the street and it was the task of
the British to drive them out. In this Nairne distinguished himself.
"Major Nairne of the Royal Emigrants and M. Dambourges of the same corps
by their gallant behaviour attracted the attention of every body,"
writes an English officer.[8] By ladders, taken from the enemy, they
mounted to a window of one of the houses, from which came a destructive
fire, and at the point of the bayonet drove the foe out by the door into
the street. In the end, to the number of more than four hundred, the
Americans were forced to surrender. The casualties included thirty
killed and forty-two wounded. By eight o'clock all was over. "It was
the first time I ever happened to be so closely engaged," Nairne wrote
to his sister on May 14th, 1776, "as we were obliged to push our
bayonets. It is certainly a disagreeable necessity to be obliged to put
one another to death, especially those speaking the same language and
dressed in the same manner with ourselves.... These mad people had a
large piece of white linen or paper upon their foreheads with the words
"Liberty or Death" wrote upon it." Nairne's account is modest enough.
One would not gather from it that his own conspicuous courage had
obtained general recognition.[9]

Even with Montgomery killed, Arnold wounded, and quite one-quarter of
their force dead or captured, those grim men who wished "Liberty or
Death" had no thought of raising the siege. Ere long Arnold was again
active and, for four months longer, the Americans kept Carleton shut up
within Quebec. So deep lay the snow that to walk into the ditch from the
embrasures in the walls was easy; buried in the snow were the muzzles of
guns thirty feet from the bottom of the ditch. Sometimes Nairne was
actively engaged in scouting work. In February we find him leading a
party to take possession of the English burying ground in the suburbs;
on March 19th, he went out into the open from Cape Diamond to the
height overlooking the Anse de Mer. But nothing happened; a diarist
expresses, on April 21st, his contempt for the American attack by
writing: "Hitherto they have killed a boy, wounded a soldier, and broke
the leg of a turkey."[10]

The assailants were, in truth, impotent before the masterly inactivity
of Carleton, who waited patiently behind his walls for the arrival in
the spring of a British fleet. Counting upon this expectancy the
Americans tried an old-time ruse. Between nine and ten o'clock in the
evening of May 3rd, with the moon shining brightly and the tide flowing
in and nearly high, a ship under full sail came into view from the
direction of the Island of Orleans. With the wind behind her she swung
in at a good rate of speed. Those who watched were, for a moment, sure
that the long expected rescue had come. But, as she bore down to the
_cul de sac_ where lay the shipping at Quebec, she made no response to
signals. At last, the British, after three vain efforts to draw a
response, warned her to reply or they should fire. When this threat was
carried out she was only some two hundred yards away. Then suddenly
flames burst out on the ship, followed by random explosions; a boat left
her side rowed very swiftly, and it was now apparent that she was sent
to burn, if possible, the British shipping. It must have been an
anxious moment when she was so near and heading straight for her prey.
But, showing a natural prudence, those who steered left her too soon
and, with no hand at the helm, her head came up quickly in the wind. By
this time all Quebec had been alarmed and, as attack from the landward
side was also expected, every man was soon at his post. The ship was a
striking sight as, with sails and rigging on fire, she drifted
helplessly before the town. When the tide turned she floated down, a
mass of fire, with explosions shaking her from time to time, to the
shallows off Beauport where she soon lay stranded, a blackened ruin of
half-burnt timbers.

Quebec still waited for rescue, and not in vain. At day break, on the
6th of May, a frigate appeared round Point Levi. Again went forth the
cry of "A ship," "A ship." "The news," we are told, "soon reached every
pillow in town." Men half dressed rushed to the Grand Battery, which was
quickly crowded with spectators, who indulged in much shaking of hands,
and in the exchange of compliments, as the character of the ship became
clear. She was the British frigate _Surprise_, and, with much
difficulty, had forced her way, under full sail, through the great
fields of ice which still blocked the river. Following her closely were
the _Isis_ and a sloop the _Martin_. Quebec went wild with joy. But
there was still serious business on hand. The _Surprise_ brought a part
of the 29th regiment and a good many marines. They were landed at once.
Carleton lost not a moment and, by twelve o'clock of the same day, the
gates of Quebec were thrown open and he marched out to attack the
Americans.

It was only a thin red line that stretched across the Plains of Abraham.
But the Americans dared not face it. The newly arrived ships might, they
feared, carry a force up the river and cut off retreat; so, after some
desultory skirmishing, the investing army fled. It was now commanded by
General Wooster, for Arnold had gone to Montreal. The flight soon became
a panic. Arms, clothes, food, private letters and papers were thrown
away. Nairne was in command of a portion of the Highland Emigrants, who
were the vanguard of the British pursuing force, and was among the first
to occupy the American batteries. On that very ground he had fought,
victorious in 1759, woefully beaten in 1760; now, a victor again, he
helped to drive back a force, some of whose members had been his
companions in those earlier campaigns. That night the relieved British
slept secure in Quebec, while the bedraggled American force was making
its distressful way towards Montreal.

Though the American army soon withdrew from Montreal and from Canada,
the war was still to drag on for many weary years. Throughout the whole
of it Nairne remained on active service. In September, 1776, we find
him in command of the garrison at Montreal. In 1777 he was sent to
command the post at Isle aux Noix which guarded the route into Canada by
way of Lake Champlain. Here Fraser was serving under him as Captain; the
two friends were usually together throughout the war. At Isle aux Noix
Nairne remained until June, 1779. We get glimpses from his letters of
the defects in the service at this time. There were involuntary evils,
such as scurvy, caused by want of fresh meat and vegetables, but
relieved by drinking a decoction of hemlock spruce. Moral evils there
were too, such as gambling and drunkenness; in 1778 the commanding
officer gave warning that he had heard of losses at play, and that those
taking part in such practises would be excluded from promotion.

The British officers showed sometimes a fool-hardy recklessness. On
March 9th, 1778, one Lieutenant Mackinnon, with forty-five volunteers,
set out from Pointe au Fer, near Isle aux Noix, to surprise an American
post at Parsons' House, no less than sixty miles distant, and in the
heart of the enemy's country. A few days later two of the volunteers
returned with news that the attack had wholly failed, that six of the
party were killed and six wounded, and that Lieutenant Mackinnon and
four others were missing. So reckless an attack was bad enough and, in
the General Orders, it was condemned as "a presumptuous disregard of
military discipline"; only vigilance and watchfulness were required of
the picket at Pointe au Fer, so that the enemy might not invade the
province. At the incident the Commander-in-Chief was very angry. "I
never saw the General in such a passion in my life," wrote an officer to
Nairne. Mackinnon had surrounded the house in the darkness and both he
and his men, as far as is known, had done their best. Though wounded and
for a time missing, in the end Mackinnon got back crippled to Isle aux
Noix. But he had failed, and whispers soon began that he showed
cowardice in the attack; an absurd charge, as Nairne said, for he had
given proof of rather too much, than of too little, courage. The
accusation gave Nairne infinite trouble. The subalterns in the Royal
Highland Emigrants refused to do duty with Mackinnon, and General
Haldimand, who succeeded Carleton in the summer of 1778, would not take
the matter seriously enough to grant a Court Martial, that Mackinnon
might clear himself. For quite a year and a half the affair dragged on.
In the end, at a Court of Enquiry, Mackinnon was acquitted. Haldimand
told Nairne to rebuke the officers sternly for combining to subvert
authority, for disrespect to their superiors, and for refusing, on the
basis of futile reports and hearsays, to serve with Mackinnon. "I much
mistake his character," wrote Nairne of Mackinnon, "if he can ... be
prevented from calling one or two of those gentlemen to a severe
account."

A part of Nairne's duty was to watch the French Canadians and check
sedition. In spite of the failure of Arnold's expedition many of them
were still favourable to the American cause. They harboured deserters in
the remoter parishes, gave protection and assistance to rebels, and
threw as many difficulties as possible in the path of loyalists. Nairne
found two men issuing papers from a printing press to foment sedition
and sent them down to Quebec to stand their trial for treason.

From Isle aux Noix Nairne was sent, in the summer of 1779, with fifty of
his Royal Highland Emigrants, to command at Carleton Island, near
Kingston where Lake Ontario flows into the St. Lawrence; some
thirty-five years later his only surviving son held a military command
at the same place. Here there was much to do in strengthening the
fortifications and in keeping up communications with Niagara and other
points in the interior. The situation was not without its
embarrassments. Prisoners were sent in from Niagara and he had no prison
in which to keep them. For want of fresh meat and vegetables there was
much sickness. But the Indians were his greatest trial. Through him came
their supplies and, to hold them at all, he had sometimes to serve out
the rum for which such savages are always greedy. On July 4th, Nairne
made a speech to these Mississaga Indians and said pretty plainly what
he thought of them. Against the American scouts they had proved no
defence; at night they fired off guns in the neighbouring woods and
created false alarms, which prevented Nairne's men from getting their
proper sleep. "My men work hard in the day," he said, "and I will have
them to sleep sound at night," and he warned the Indians that he would
fire upon them if their noise disturbed him further. The savages, he
wrote to Haldimand, are "almost unbearable, greedy and importunate."
They behaved more like rebels than friends and their talk ended always
in the demand for rum, "the cause of all bad behaviour in Indians."

On the remoter frontiers the war was ruthless beyond measure. Sir John
Johnson devastated the Mohawk valley, in the present State of New York,
and some of his prisoners were received at Carleton Island. Of this
inglorious warfare Haldimand's secretary, Captain Matthews, wrote to
Nairne a little later [17th June, 1780], "You will have heard that Sir
John Johnson has executed the purpose of his enterprise without the loss
of a man, having destroyed upwards of an hundred dwelling houses, barns,
mills, stock, &c., and brought off 150 Loyalists, besides Women and
Children." The worst outrages came from the Indian allies, of whom
Nairne thought so badly. From Niagara, on March 1st, 1779, Captain John
MacDonnell wrote to Nairne of the terrible massacre at Cherry Valley, on
the New York frontier, which excited horror throughout the colonies, and
did much to inflame the hatred of the Americans for England. Not,
however, the English but the Indians were really guilty. "There has
nothing appeared," wrote Captain MacDonnell, "on the theatre of the war
of near so tragical or rather barbarous a hue; the reflection never
represents itself to my view but when accompanyed with the greatest
horrors; both Sexes, young and old Tomahawked, Speared and Scalped
indiscriminately in the most inhuman and cruel manner. But that there
was all possible care and precaution taken to prevent them is
undenyable. Captain Butler, who had command of the expedition, was
indefatigable in his endeavours and exertions to restrain and mitigate
the fury and ferocity of the savages often at the risk of the Tomahawk
being made use of against himself as well as the Indian officers.... Out
of a hundred and seventy scalps three-fourths were those of Women and
Children." Butler's name is still looked upon in the United States as
that of a fiend incarnate, but the testimony of his fellow officer seems
to free him from blame for the worst of the horrors. Both sides were
bitter, but Nairne himself never shows any vehemence of passion. In his
view the war was a painful necessity, to be fought to the end without
anger.

Late in 1779, Nairne was recalled from Carleton Island. He reached
Montreal on the 5th of December, and, two days later, secured leave of
absence to look after his private affairs. At this time General
Haldimand had matured a plan to take advantage of the remote position of
Murray Bay to confine there some of his American prisoners. At Murray
Bay they seemed particularly safe. There was as yet no road over Cap
Tourmente; in any case to go in the direction of Quebec would mean
seizure sooner or later; to go in the opposite direction would be to
perish in the wilderness; and the only outlet was by water across a
wintry river some twelve miles broad. On the 26th of January, 1780,
Haldimand wrote to Nairne at Murray Bay that he was to erect buildings
for rebel and other prisoners, and that, to do the work, some men were
being sent down; he was to employ in addition as many of the inhabitants
as he might think necessary.

Nairne stayed on at Murray Bay in 1780 much longer than the two months
for which he had originally asked. A part of his duty was to watch that
American colony, so different in station and situation from the many
Americans who now visit the spot. As yet there were no barracks in which
to confine the poor fellows, and the climate of Murray Bay is not too
hospitable in winter. Some kind of rough quarters must have been
prepared for the prisoners, in the winter of 1779-80, and they were kept
busy in helping to build the houses intended for their occupation. They
seemed contented. One of them Nairne kept about his person. He knew
where everything was placed and all the men were used, Nairne says, in
the best manner he could think of. But liberty is sweet and they longed
for their own land. So, early in May, 1780, when the ice was out of the
river and there was a chance to get away, eight of them made a dash for
liberty.[11] No doubt under cover of night, they stole a boat and put
out boldly into the great river across which, in so small a craft, few
ever venture, even in mild summer weather. Almost wonderful to relate,
they reached the south shore in safety. Nairne was uncertain whether
they had gone up, down, or across the river. He hurried to Tadousac,
crossed to Cacouna and then went up the south shore. At St. Roch he
found that the men, rowing a boat, had been seen to pass. On May 14th
this boat was found abandoned. On the 15th the men were seen on the
highway carrying their packs. We are almost sorry to learn that the poor
fellows were in the end captured and taken to Quebec. Nairne reported
the flight of these men on the 14th of May. Their example was contagious
for, on the 18th, while he was absent in their pursuit, four others
made off, found a small boat on the shore some nine miles from Malbaie,
and put out into the river, where their tiny craft was seen heading for
Kamouraska on the south shore. A few days later two others also escaped.
These had not courage to strike out into the river, and one of them was
caught at Baie St. Paul. Nairne offered a reward of four dollars for
each of the prisoners and probably all were taken. A sequel of the
incident was that a non-commissioned officer and eight men of the
Anhalt-Zerbst Regiment were sent to guard the remaining prisoners at
Murray Bay--a task apparently beyond Nairne's local militia. This guard
was, no doubt, composed of Germans; one wonders to what extent they
fraternized with the French Canadians. It is amusing to read that, when
one of them deserted, he was brought back by a habitant.

In 1781 we find Nairne stationed at Verchères on the south side of the
St. Lawrence, nearly opposite Montreal. He was now in charge of the
expatriated Loyalists who had found refuge in that part of Canada. A
whole corps of them were billeted in the two parishes of Verchères and
Contrecoeur--the officers chiefly at Contrecoeur. They lived, of
course, in the cottages with the habitants. On December 16th, 1781,
Nairne writes to General Riedesel, a German officer who played a
conspicuous part on the British side in the Revolutionary war and was
now in command at Sorel, that the Canadians do not mind supplying
firewood for the loyalist officers but that they rather object to having
the same people quartered upon them for two years at a time. Though an
occasional officer had said that the Loyalists were not obedient, he
adds that they were quiet and orderly people. Some of them had large
families and must have crowded uncomfortably their involuntary hosts.
These colonial English living in the households of their old-time
enemies, the French Canadians, make a somewhat pathetic picture. We see
what domestic suffering the Revolutionary War involved. Some were very
old; one "genteel sort of woman," a widow, had four children, the
youngest but four months old; there was another whose husband had been
hanged at Saratoga as a spy. Very large sums passed through Nairne's
hands in behalf of the Loyalists. One account which he renders amounts
to about £20,000.[12]

Nairne's regiment, the Royal Highland Emigrants, had been put upon the
permanent establishment in 1779. Sometimes he complained that his own
promotion was slow; not until the spring of 1783 was he given the rank
of Lieutenant-Colonel. Having reached this goal he intended, as soon as
he decently could, to sell out and retire. Late in 1782 we find him
again in command at Isle aux Noix and not sure but that he may at any
time be surprised by the Americans. It seems odd that, though Cornwallis
had already surrendered at Yorktown, and the war was really over, Nairne
was still hoping for final victory for Great Britain; on February 8th,
1783, he writes: "It is to be hoped that affairs will at last take a
favourable turn to Great Britain; her cause is really a just one." In
fact preliminary articles of the most disastrous peace Great Britain has
ever made had already been signed.

Nairne was now anxious to go home. But even in June, 1783, he could not
get leave of absence from Isle aux Noix for even a fortnight. Conditions
were still unsettled. American traders were now pressing into Canada but
Nairne sent back any that he caught; the cessation of arms was, he said,
no warrant as yet for commercial intercourse and many suspicious
characters were about. The troops from Europe were returning home.
General Riedesel, about to leave for Germany, wrote from Sorel on July
6th, 1783, a warm letter of thanks to Nairne for the attention,
readiness, and punctuality of his services. Not long after, in the same
year, Nairne was at last free. He now sold his commission, receiving for
it £3,000. With the sale he renounced all claim to half-pay, pension, or
other consideration for past services and the sum he received was,
therefore, no very great final reward for his long services. There had
been some competition for this commission and its final disposal throws
some light on promotion in the army under the purchase system. General
Haldimand insisted that Captain Matthews, who appears to have been his
relative, should get it, since the General "must provide for his own
family." At this time Malcolm Fraser too thought of selling out but he
made difficulties about terms and the opportunity passed; Fraser was,
indeed, to live to see recruiting service in the war of 1812. When the
war was over, Nairne hurried to Murray Bay and to the country life in
which he delighted, and in his correspondence we soon find him
discussing not high questions of national defence but the qualities of
"a well-bred bull calf" and of an improved plough. "I have more
satisfaction," he says, perhaps with a touch of irony, "in a country
life and [in] cultivating a farm than even [in] being employed as first
major of the Quebec militia." Henceforth his heart is wholly at Murray
Bay and in his interests there.

[Footnote 8: Diary of an English Officer. Proceedings of the Literary
and Historical Society of Quebec, 1871-72, p. 61.]

[Footnote 9: See Appendix C., p. 273, for the text of his letter to his
sister describing the operations of the winter at Quebec. It is an able
review of the campaign.]

[Footnote 10: Proceedings of the Literary and Historical Society of
Quebec, 7th Series, 1905, p. 75; "Blockade of Quebec," etc.]

[Footnote 11: The men's names were Peter Ferris, Squir Ferris, Claudius
Brittle (Sr.), Claudius Brittle (Jr.), Nathan Smith, Marshal Smith,
Justice Sturdevant, John Ward.]

[Footnote 12: The book in which Nairne kept the accounts, with the names
of the recipients of the king's bounty, is still at Murray Bay.]




CHAPTER V

THE LAST DAYS OF JOHN NAIRNE

     Nairne's careful education of his children.--His son John enters
     the army.--Nairne's counsels to his son.--John Nairne goes to
     India.--His death.--Nairne's declining years.--His activities at
     Murray Bay.--His income.--His daughter Christine and Quebec
     society.--The isolation of Murray Bay in Winter.--Signals across
     the river.--Nairne's reading.--His notes about current events.--The
     fear of a French invasion of England.--Thoughts of flight from
     Scotland to Murray Bay.--Nairne's last letter, April 20th,
     1802.--His death and burial at Quebec.


Colonel Nairne's life was troubled with many sorrows. In 1773, when he
was on a visit to Scotland, Malcolm Fraser had had the painful duty of
writing to tell him of the death of three of his infant children at
Murray Bay from a prevailing epidemic. His daughter, Anne, born in 1784,
was sent to Scotland to be educated. She contracted consumption and
after a prolonged illness died there in 1796. "This event gave me great
affliction," wrote Nairne, "she was always a most amiable child." There
now remained two sons and three daughters,[13] and Nairne may well have
been certain that his name would go down to an abundant posterity. One
of the chief interests of his life was their training and education. All
in turn were sent to Scotland for their chief schooling. The eldest son,
John, born in 1777, and his sister Christine, some three years older,
lived in Edinburgh with aunts who showed exhaustless kindness and
interest. Nairne was grateful, and writing from Malbaie on August 27th,
1791, he says: "[I] am glad of an opportunity, my dear Christine and
Jack, to remind you both in the strongest manner I am able of the
gratitude and assiduous Duty you owe to your Aunts and other Relations
for admitting you into their family and also for the attention they are
pleased to bestow on your education." Upon his children he imposes
indeed counsels of perfection not easy to fulfil; "Remember it's my
injunctions and absolute orders to you both to have always an obedient
temper to your superiors ... to receive every reprimand with submission
and attention as it can only be intended for your benefit in order to
give you a valuable character which of all things is the greatest
blessing both for this world and the next; besides you must consider
that you are never to indulge yourselves in any sort of indolence or
laziness but to rise early in the morning to be the more able to fulfil
your Duty.... As to you, Jack, I expect to see you a Gallant and
honourable fellow that will always scorn to tell the least lie in your
life. It was well done to answer Captain Fraser [Malcolm Fraser, a
Lieutenant in 1762, is still only a Captain in 1791!] with which he was
well pleased.... Both of you have I think improved in your writing which
gives me pleasure." He adds regretfully to Christine: "I cannot send you
a muff this year but perhaps I may do so next year." The letter closes
with a modest list of purchases to be sent out from Edinburgh for
Malbaie: "one piece of Calico for two gowns; one piece of calico for
children; three pieces of linen (for shirts), two of which coarse and
the other a little finer; one yard of cambrick; five yards of muslin
(for caps and Handkerchiefs); six yards of lace (for caps); twelve yards
of different ribbons, three pairs of worsted stockings and three pairs
of cotton stockings for myself."

Jack was to follow a military career, and he entered the army when a
youth of sixteen or seventeen. His first active service was in the West
Indies, after war with revolutionary France broke out, and the dangers
of that climate gave his father some anxiety; all will be well, he
hopes, if Jack continues to take a certain "powder of the Jesuits'
Bark"; above all "the best rules are temperance and sobriety"; then "the
same gracious Power who protected me in many dangers through the course
of three Wars will also vouchsafe protection to you through this one."
In 1795, when Jack was only eighteen, his corps was back in England
and, through the influence of a distant relative, General Graeme, with
the Duke of York, Commander in Chief of the Army and all powerful in
days when promotion went avowedly by favour and purchase rather than by
merit, Jack secured a Lieutenancy in the 19th Regiment. His father was
delighted: "I wish you much joy with all my heart of your quick rise in
being at your age already a Lieutenant in an old Regiment whereas I was
past twenty-six years of age before I obtained a Lieutenancy in the
British service and that only in a young corps." At the time, with
Britain warring on the French Directory, service in Europe for Jack was
not unlikely, and was desired by Nairne. But in the end Jack's regiment
was ordered to India. Nairne was sorely disappointed, but writing to
Jack he laid down a great guiding principle: "we must suppose that
Providence orders everything aright and that, provided we are always
active and diligent in doing our duty, there is reason to be satisfied."
In view of what was to happen, his anxiety for the success of his son is
pathetic. He exhorts him in regard to every detail of conduct. He is to
avoid drink and gambling; to pay his accounts promptly; to be punctual
and scrupulously exact whenever duty or business is concerned. The
father is particularly anxious about his son's capacity to express
himself in good English and lays down the sound maxim that "writing a
correct and easy style is undoubtedly of all education the most
necessary and requisite." To acquire this he "ought to write and read a
great deal with intense labour, attention and application"; to write
several hours a day is not too much and to get time he must go to bed
early and rise early. It is wise to keep a grammar and dictionary always
at hand to correct possible errors. He should also translate from French
into English. The father himself undertakes the duty of the complete
letter writer, drawing up for Jack a model on which his letters may be
based. "In writing ordinary letters (as in conversation) a large scope
may be taken, as of News, all sorts of information, adventures,
descriptions, remarks, enquirys, compliments, &c., &c., but in a letter
upon business one is commonly confined only to what is necessary to be
said on the subject and to civilitys and politeness." Certainly Jack did
not lack admonition and when he does well his father writes that it
makes him "very happy." When in one letter Jack mentions the practise of
smoking his father is severe: "All our family have ever been temperate
not [practising] even the Debauchery of smoking tobacco, a nasty Dutch,
Damn'd custom, a forerunner of idleness and drunkenness; therefore Jack,
my lad, let us hear no more of your handling your Pipe, but handle well
your fuzee, your sword, your pen and your Books."

Certainly the pictures sometimes drawn of the brutality, violent manners
and ignorance of the British officer at this period find no confirmation
in Nairne's monitions to his son, or in the account of his own military
experience which dates from the mid-eighteenth century. He says to Jack:
"Say your Prayers regularly to God Almighty and trust entirely to His
Will and Pleasure for your own preservation.... If you should happen to
be in an engagement attend to your men, encourage them to act with
spirit in such a manner as most effectually to destroy their
enemy's."[14] When Jack is a little too free in his demands for money
the Colonel, writing on Nov. 22nd, 1795, tells him of his own
experience:

     I have done wrong in having given you so much money since you went
     into the Army which might have served you almost without any pay
     from the King and which by the bye I can little afford. You
     obtained it easily; for which reason I suppose you have spent it
     easily: you have no right to expect more than I had at your age yet
     you seem to regard twenty pounds as I would have done twenty
     shillings. But you must now understand that twenty pounds is a
     considerable sum to my circumstances they being straitened for the
     Rank and the family which I have to support; therefore I have to
     inform you that you are to draw no more Bills upon Mr. Ker nor upon
     me without first obtaining his or my consent in writing for so
     doing. It is no disgrace nor does it hurt the service (but quite
     the contrary) for every officer and soldier to live within the
     limits of the pay which Government has thought proper to allow
     them. They are thereby more led to temperance, to improve
     themselves by study, to mind their duty and how best to promote the
     service of their country. I served sixteen years as a subaltern
     officer in the army, made long sea voyages with the Regiment,
     furnished myself with sea stores, camp equipage and every other
     necessary equipments [and] my Father nor any Relation during that
     time was never [put to] one farthing's expense upon my account.
     Altho' I sometimes lost money in the Recruiting service I repayed
     it by stoppages from my pay, was always present with the men
     whether in camp or in Garrison and punctually attending on my Duty.
     I endeavoured to be in a good mess for my Dinner, drank small Beer
     or Water when it was good; when the Water was bad qualified it with
     a mixture of Wine or Ginger or Milk or Vinegar but no grog or
     smoking tobacco. I was always an enemy to suppers, never engaged
     myself in the Evenings, but on particular occasions or to be
     Complaisant to Strangers. Nor [did I] ask Company to see me when on
     Guard; nor show a Vanity to treat people. By which means I had a
     great deal of quiet and sober time to myself, to read and to write,
     &c., &c., especially as I always rose early in the Mornings. You
     may believe also that I was always far from being concerned in any
     sort of Gaming so as to risk losing any of my money or to have a
     desire to gain any from others. By such a Conduct I received more
     favour and regard sometimes from my Commanding officers even than I
     thought I was entitled to.

These monitions to Jack were written while his father was in Scotland in
1795. There they separated, the father to return to Canada with
Christine whose schooldays were now ended, Jack to go with his regiment
to India. In parting from his son the father pronounced a solemn
benediction: "that God may preserve you and assist you in following
always that which is good and virtuous shall ever be my most earnest
prayer." They never met again. Jack continued to draw rather freely upon
his father for funds, and Nairne wrote to the Colonel of the regiment to
ask for information about the young man. Before an answer came Scottish
relatives learned in 1800 of Jack's fate and wrote of it to Murray Bay.
A friend of the family in India had noticed in the newspaper that some
one was promoted to John Nairne's place. This led to enquiry, when it
was found that he had died in August, 1799. Not until six months after
his death, and then only in reply to the enquiry as to Jack's demands
for money, did his commanding officer write the following letter to
Colonel Nairne:

     _Colonel Dalrymple to Colonel Nairne_

     _From Columbo [India], 1st Feb., 1800._

     I received your letter dated October, 1798, but a short time ago
     but too late, had there been any occasion to have spoken to your
     son upon the subject it contained for, Poor fellow, it is with pain
     I'm to inform you of his death. He died upon the 7th of August,
     1799, in the Coimbalore country upon the return from the capture of
     Seringapatam. Never did a young man die more regretted nor never
     was an officer more beloved by his corps. He was an honour to his
     profession. An involuntary tear starts in my eye on thus being
     obliged to give you this painful information.

     The cause of his having drawn for so much money from Bombay was
     unfortunately his ship parted from us and they did not join at
     Columbo for some months, where I understand he had been induced to
     play by some designing people. But I assure you, from the moment he
     joined here, his life was exemplary for all young men. He was
     beloved by every description of people. From the very sudden way he
     took the field and the very expensive mode of campaigning in this
     country he was in debt to the paymaster. He was not singular; they
     were all in the same predicament. The first division of the prize
     money which was one thousand ster. Pagodas, about your hundred
     pounds, will only clear him with the Regiment.

Long before this letter arrived the news was known at Murray Bay.
Malcolm Fraser, the tried family friend, writes on September 1st, 1800,
that he has just discharged the most painful task of telling the sad
news to Jack's sister and companion, Christine, who was visiting in
Quebec. In his grief Nairne gives an exceeding bitter cry, "Lord, help
me. I shall lose all my children before I go myself." His sister
Magdalen wrote from Edinburgh on March 17th, 1800, to offer comfort and
to hope that he bears the trial "with Christian fortitude, and that God
will reward him by sparing those that remain to be a blessing to him,"
Nairne's sisters now had with them in Edinburgh the two remaining
children, Tom and Mary, called "Polly." John is gone but Tom is left,
says the fond aunt, and to console Nairne she tells of Tom's virtues:
"Never was father blessed with a more promising son than our little
Tom, and though I used to dread he was too faultless and too good to
live, I would now persuade myself he is intended by Providence to
compensate you for the losses you have sustained." On Tom now centred
the hopes of the Nairne family.

[Illustration: VIEW FROM POINTE AU PIC UP MURRAY BAY]

The sands of Nairne's own life were running out. As he looked around him
he could see much to make his heart content. He was never unmindful of
the singular beauty of the place. "I wish I could send you a landscape
of this place," he wrote to a friend, John Clark, in 1798; "Was you here
your pencil might be employed in drawing a beautiful one which this Bay
affords, as the views and different objects are remarkably various and
entertaining." This is, no doubt, a mild account of the beauties of a
very striking scene, but the 18th century had not developed our
appreciation for nature. Nairne tells of his delight in tramping through
the woods, and over the mountains, with a gun on his shoulder. The
increase of settlement, and the burning of the woods, had driven the
wild animals farther back into the wilderness, but partridges and water
fowl were still abundant. There was salmon fishing almost at his door
and "Lake Nairne," the present Grand Lac, had famous trout fishing. The
thick woods, which at his coming extended all round the bay, were now
cleared away. Much land had been enclosed and brought under cultivation
and to do this had been a laborious and expensive task. Now he had
three farms of his own, each with a hundred acres of arable land and
with proper buildings. There was also a smaller farm for hay and
pasture. "I have been employed lately," he writes in 1798, "making paths
into our woods and marking the trees in straight lines thro' tracts of
pretty good land in order to encourage the young men to take lots of
land." He tells how the successive ridges, representing, no doubt,
different water levels in remote ages, were numbered. In the highest,
Number 7, the lakes are all situated; the elevated land was generally
the best but as yet settlement was chiefly in Flats 1, 2, and 3. His
great aim had always been to get people on the land and he denounced
obstacles put in their way. "For God's sake let them pitch away, and if
they have not good titles give them better." The Manor House had become
a warm and comfortable residence well finished and well furnished. In
1801 Nairne wrote to his sister, with some natural exultation, that
where he had at first found an untrodden wilderness were now order,
neatness, good buildings, a garden and plenty of flowers, fruits and
humming birds. In the winter one might often say "O, it's cold," but
means of warming oneself were always available. His wife had proved
always a useful helper and was indeed a motherly, practical woman,
beloved by the people. These came to pay their compliments on the first
day of the year, when there was much drinking of whiskey and eating of
cakes, all costing a pretty penny. There were 100 young men in the
parish composing a complete company of militia. The children grew up so
fast that he could not distinguish the half of them.

On the commercial side also Murray Bay was developing. In 1800 a man
came through the district buying up wheat at "9 livers a Bushel," but
since the population was increasing very rapidly, and the people were
accustomed to eat a great deal of bread, there was not much wheat for
export. The total exports of all commodities amounted in 1800 to
£1500:--oil, timber, grain, oxen and a few furs being the chief items.
Oil was the most important product; it came from the "porpoise" fishery.
What Nairne calls a porpoise, is really the beluga, a small white whale.
The fishery is an ancient industry on the St. Lawrence.[15] The creature
has become timid and is now not readily caught so that the industry
survives at only a few points. At Malbaie it has wholly ceased; but in
the summer of 1796 sixty-two porpoises were killed at "Pointe au Pique."
In the summer of 1800, which was hot and dry, no less than three hundred
were "catched." Malbaie must have had bustling activity on its shores
when such numbers of these huge creatures were taken in a single
season. We can picture the many fires necessary for boiling the blubber.
The oil of each beluga was worth £5 and the skin £1. Nairne's own share
in a single year from this source of revenue was £70, but even then the
industry was declining.

We have Nairne's statement of income in 1798 and it indicates simple
living at Malbaie. We must remember that in addition, he had received a
number of bequests which brought in a considerable income and that he
had sold out of the army for £3000. Perhaps, too, 1798 was a bad year.

"Porpoise" fishery                          £20
Income from four farms at £20 each           80
Profits from mills                           20
                                          -----
                                           £120

The rent from the land granted to the habitants was scarcely worth
reckoning, as the people paid nothing until the land was productive, a
condition that could apparently be postponed indefinitely. Since under
the seigniorial tenure, the farmers must use the seigneur's grist mill,
Nairne had his mill in operation and Fraser was building one in 1798.
Nairne had also one or more mills for sawing timber. "I hope there are a
great many loggs brought and to be brought to your and my saw mills,"
Fraser wrote in 1797, but an income of only £20 a year from the mills
does not indicate any extortionate exercise of seigniorial rights.

Already some of the city people were beginning to find Murray Bay a
delightful place in which to spend the summer. In 1799 Nairne writes to
a friend, Richard Dobie, in Montreal, that it is the best place in the
world for the recovery of strength. "You shall drink the best of wheys
and breathe the purest sea air in the world and, although luxuries will
be wanting, our friendship and the best things the place can afford to
you, I know, will make ample amends:"--a simple standard of living that
subsequent generations would do well to remember. In 1801 the manor
house must have been the scene of some gaiety for there and at Malcolm
Fraser's were half a score of visitors. Christine, Nairne's second
daughter, who preferred Quebec to the paternal roof, had come home for a
visit and other visitors were the Hon. G. Taschereau and his son, Mr.
Usburn, Mr. Masson, Mrs. Langan and Mrs. Bleakley, Fraser's daughters,
described as "rich ladies from Montreal," the last with three children.
No doubt they drove and walked, rowed and fished, much as people from
New York and Baltimore and Boston and Toronto and Montreal do still on
the same scene, when they are not pursuing golf balls. The coming of
people with more luxurious habits made improvements necessary and also,
Nairne says, increased the expense of living--a complaint that
successive generations have continued with justice to make.

With Tom and Mary Nairne absent at school in Edinburgh, the family at
Murray Bay during Nairne's last days consisted of but four persons--of
himself and his wife and the two daughters Magdalen and Christine.
Christine, a fashionable young lady, disliked Murray Bay as a place of
residence, tolerated Quebec, but preferred Scotland where she had been
educated. "Christine does not like to stay at Murray Bay and Madie her
sister does not like to stay anywhere else," wrote Nairne in 1800. In
the manner of the eighteenth century he was extremely anxious that his
children should be "genteel". Christine's Quebec friends pleased him. "I
saw her dance at a ball at the Lieutenant-Governor's and she seemed at
no loss for Genteel partners but does not prepare to find one for life.
I am well pleased with her and do not in the least grudge her so long as
she is esteemed by the best company in the place." It was not easy to
find at Quebec proper accommodation for unmarried young women living
away from home. Nairne writes in August, 1797, that he and Christine
each paid $1.00 a day in Quebec where they lodged, although they mostly
dined and drank tea abroad. "The town gentry of Quebec are vastly
hospitable Civil and well-bred but no such a thing as an invitation to
stay in any of their houses." At length a Mr. Stewart opened his doors.
He must, Nairne wrote, be paid tactfully for the accommodation he
furnishes. Things went better when later Miss Mabane, the daughter of a
high official of the Government, kept Christine with her at Quebec all
the winter of 1799-1800; no doubt Christine was pleased when Miss Mabane
would not allow her to go to Murray Bay even for the summer. Her elder
sister, Madie, appears to have been hoydenish and somewhat uncongenial
to a young lady so determined to be "genteel."

In the winter time communication with the outside world was almost
entirely suspended. In case of emergency it was possible indeed to pass
on snow shoes by Cap Tourmente, over which there was still no road, and
so reach Quebec by the north shore. But this was a severe journey to be
undertaken only for grave cause. Partly frozen over, and often with
great floes of ice sweeping up and down with the tide, the river was
dangerous; the south shore, lying so well in sight, was really very
remote. Yet news passed across the river. On February 12th, 1797,
Malcolm Fraser, who was on the south shore, found some means of sending
a letter to Nairne. Anxious to get word in return he planned a signal.
He said that on March 6th he would go to Kamouraska, just opposite
Murray Bay, and build a fire. If Nairne answered by one fire Fraser
would be satisfied that nothing unusual had happened; if two fires were
made he would understand that there was serious news and would wish as
soon as possible to learn details. Signalling across the St. Lawrence
attained a much higher development than is found in Fraser's crude plan.
Philippe Aubert de Gaspé tells how the people on the south shore could
read what had happened on the north shore from Cap Tourmente to Malbaie.
On St. John's eve, December 26th, the season of Christmas festivities,
there was a general illumination. Looking then across the river to a
line of blazing fires the news was easily understood. "At Les
Eboulements eleven adults have died since the autumn, three of whom were
in one house, that of Dufour. All are well at the Tremblays; but at
Bonneau's some one is ill. At Belairs a child is dead,"--and so on. The
key is simple enough. The situation of the fire would indicate the
family to which it related. A fire lighted and kept burning for a long
time meant good news; when a fire burned with a half smothered flame it
meant sickness; the sudden extinguishing of the fire was a sign of
death; as many times as it was extinguished so many were the deaths; a
large blaze meant an adult, a small one a child. Before the days of post
and telegraph these signals were used winter and summer; so great an
obstacle to communication was the mighty tide of the St. Lawrence.[16]

At all seasons but especially in winter the news that reached Malbaie
was of a very fragmentary character. With his kin in Scotland Nairne
exchanged only an annual letter but since each side took time and pains
to prepare it, the letter told more, probably, than would a year's bulk
of our hurried epistles. Newspapers were few and dear and only at
intervals did any come. Books too were scarce. Occasionally Nairne notes
those that he thought of buying--St. Simon's "Memoirs;" an account of
the Court of Louis XIV; "A Comparative View of the State and Facultys of
Man with those of the Animal World;" "Elegant Extracts or Useful and
Entertaining passages in prose," a companion volume to a similar one in
poetry, and so on. He writes gratefully, in 1799, to a friend in Quebec,
who had sent newspapers and sermons, both of which remotely different
classes of literature had furnished "great entertainment." From Europe
he is receiving the volumes of the new edition of the Encyclopædia
Britannica, still on the shelves at Murray Bay, and is thankful that
they were not captured by the French. "The older I grow the fonder I am
of reading and that book is a great resource." Our degenerate age gets
little "entertainment" out of sermons and usually keeps an encyclopædia
strictly for "reference"; obviously Nairne read it.

The old soldier watched and commented upon developments which were the
fruit of seed he himself had helped to sow. He had fought to win Canada
for Britain; he had fought to crush the American Revolution. By 1800 he
sees how great Canada may become and is convinced that yielding
independence to the United States has not proved very injurious to Great
Britain. Though, in a short time, the United States was to secure the
great West by purchasing Louisiana from France, when Nairne died it had
not done so and in 1800 he could say that the United States "are small
in comparison of the whole of North America. They are bounded upon all
sides and will be filled up with people in no very great number of
years. Our share of North America is yet unknown in its extent.
Enterprising people in quest of furs travel for years towards the north
and towards the west through vast countries of good soil uninhabited as
yet ... [except] for hunting, and watered with innumerable lakes and
rivers, stored with fish, besides every other convenience for the use of
man, and certainly destined to be filled with people in some future
time. We have only [now] heard of one named Mackenzie[17] who is
reported to have been as far as the Southern Ocean (from Canada) across
this continent to the West." Long before Canada stretched from the
Atlantic to the Pacific Nairne was thus dreaming of what we now see.

Of war, then raging, Nairne took a philosophic view. "War may be
necessary," he writes in 1798, "for some very Populous countrys as any
crop when too thick is the better of being thinned." But it occurred to
him that the problem of over-population in Europe might have been solved
in a less crude manner. "It is strange," he says, "that there should be
so much of the best part of the globe still unoccupied, where the foot
of man never trod, and in Europe such destruction of people. It is
however for some purpose we do not, as yet, comprehend." Those were the
days when Napoleon Bonaparte's star was rising and when, in defiance of
England, led by Pitt, he smote state after state which stood in the path
of his ambition. Nairne's friend and business agent James Ker, an
Edinburgh banker, was obviously no admirer of Pitt, for he writes on
July 20th, 1797, of the struggle with revolutionary France which, though
it was to endure for more than twenty years, had already, he thought,
lasted too long:

     After a four years' war undertaken for the attainment of objects
     which were unattainable, in which we have been gradually deserted
     by every one of our allies except Portugal, ... too weak to leave
     us; and after a most shameless extravagance and Waste of the public
     money which all feel severely by the imposition of new and
     unthought of taxes, we have again sent an ambassador to France to
     try to procure us Peace.... If our next crop be as bad as our two
     last ones God knows what will become of us. If it were not for the
     unexampled Bounty and Charity of the richer classes the Poor must
     have literally starved, but we have been favoured with a very mild
     winter.

In 1798 when Napoleon led his forces to Egypt and disappeared from the
ken of Europe, Nairne hopes devoutly that "he has gone to the Devil, or,
which is much the same thing, among the Turks and Tartars where he and
his army may be destroyed." After Nelson succeeded in his attack on the
French fleet at the Battle of the Nile Nairne rejoices that his country
is supreme on the sea, "By ruling the waves she will rule the wealth of
the world not by plunder and conquest but by wisdom and commerce and
increasing riches everywhere to the happiness of mankind." On March
20th, 1801, when Austria had just made with France the Peace of
Lunéville, Ker writes again to Nairne:

     We live in the age of wonders, sudden changes and Revolutions. The
     French have now completely turned the tables on us. They have
     forced Austria to a disastrous peace and Russia, Prussia, Denmark
     and Sweden from being our friends and Allies are now uniting with
     our bitter foes for our destruction, so that from having almost all
     Europe on our side against France we have now the contest to
     support _alone_ against her _and almost all Europe_ and nothing
     prevents the ambitious French Republic from being conquerors of the
     world but our little Islands and our invincible fleets.
     Notwithstanding all this we do not seem afraid of invasion and a
     large fleet under Sir Hide Parker and Lord Nelson is preparing to
     sail for the Baltic to bring the northern powers to a sense of
     their duty, and to break in pieces the unnatural coalition with our
     inveterate foes, the foes of Religion, Property, true Liberty,
     which but for our strenuous efforts would soon nowhere exist on
     this Globe.

In spite of what Ker says as to no fear of invasion, such a fear grew
really very strong in 1801, and, for a brief period, it seemed as if
Murray Bay might become a refuge for Nairne's kindred in the distressed
mother land. One of his sisters writes in an undated letter:

     We are much obliged to you for the kind of reception you say we
     should have met with at Mal Bay had we fled there from the French
     and I do assure you ... it was for some time a very great comfort
     and relief to think we had resources to trust to. I for one, I am
     sure, was almost frightened out of my wits, for a visit from these
     monsters, even the attempt, tho' they had been subdued after
     landing, was fearsome. I suspect you might have had more of your
     friends than your own family to have provided for. The Hepburns I
     know turned their thoughts toward you and all of us determined to
     work for our bread the best way we could. But you might have no
     small addition to your settlers; some of us poor old creatures
     would have settled heavy enough I fear upon yourself and family. It
     is a fine place Mal Bay turned by your account. What a deal of
     respectable company. I am glad of it on your account. A very great
     piece of good fortune to get Col. Fraser so near; I wonder he does
     not marry Maidy, but she will think him too old. I think Christine
     may do a great deal worse than spend the summer if not more at Mal
     Bay. You are most amazingly indulgent to her. I wish she would make
     a grateful return by bestowing more of her company on her friends
     at home in a situation it would appear so pleasant. But she is a
     good kind-hearted Lassie after all and I suppose when she has got
     her full swing of Quebec she will be very well pleased to return
     home.

A legislature now sat at Quebec, the result of the new Constitutional
Act passed in 1791, and Nairne might have become a member. Murray Bay
then formed a part of what, with little fitness, had been called by the
English conquerors the County of Northumberland, no doubt because it lay
in the far north of Canada as Northumberland lies in the far north of
England. Two members sat in the legislature for this county. "I never
had any idea of trying to be one of them," writes Nairne in 1800, "but
succeeded in procuring that honour for a friend Dr. Fisher, who resides
in Quebec. He is rich and much flattered with it and is ready on all
occasions to speak."

To Nairne, contrary to a general impression, the climate of Canada did
not seem to grow milder as the land was cleared. In any case the blood
of old age runs less hotly. Formerly the winter had its delights of
hunting excursions but now, he writes, these are all over. "The passion
I had formerly for hunting and fishing and wandering through the woods
is abated.... What with the cold hand of old age my former Winter
excursions into the woods seem impossible and no more now of fishing
and hunting which formerly I esteemed so interesting a business." He
writes again: "My employment is more in the sedentary way than formerly
and what from calls in my own affairs and calls from people here in
theirs, accounts to settle, &c., [I have] ... plenty of occupation.
Besides being a Justice of the Peace and Colonel of Militia ... I employ
myself without doors in farming, gardening, clearing and manuring land."
If we may credit the words of Bishop Hubert of Quebec written just at
this time (in 1794) the new liberties gained by the habitants did not
make the seigneur's task easier. The good bishop makes sweeping charges
of general dishonesty; of attempts to defraud the church of her tithe
and the seigneurs of their dues; of bitter feuds between families and
innumerable law suits. In such conditions Nairne, as a justice of the
peace, would have his hands full.

His end was drawing very near. One of his sisters died in 1798. This
brought sad thoughts but he wrote: "I am very thankful to have found in
the world connexions who have produced such regards and sympathys. Time
seems not to be going slowly now-a-days but running fast. I hope we are
to have other times and to know one another hereafter." "I must make
haste now," he wrote later, in 1801, "to finish all improvements here
that may be possible as I will soon be finished myself. Crushed already
under a load of years of 7 times 10 really I find the last 2 years ...
heavier than 20 before that time." "The scenes of this life," he had
written to his old friend and neighbour Malcolm Fraser "are continually
varying like the elements, sometimes cloudy, sometimes sun shine; [it]
never lasts long one way or the other till night soon comes and we must
then lie down and die. Therefore all is vanity and vexation of spirit,
but God will help us and most certainly some time or other bless and
reward the friendly honest man."

His last letter to his Scottish relations was intended to be a farewell:

     _Colonel Nairne to his Sister Miss M. Nairne From Murray Bay, 20th
     April, 1802._

     My Dear Madie,--

     I shall see our friends in the world of spirits probably before any
     of you; whatever darkness we are in here I have always convinced
     myself that we shall meet again in a better place hereafter.

     Although I have enjoyed good health till past 70 years of age, the
     agues of Holland and sometimes excessive fatigue have probably
     weakened parts of my inward machinery that they are now wore out
     and must soon finish their functions. I can have no reason to
     expect to live longer than our father; I am chiefly uneasy that the
     event may occasion grief to my sisters, yet it ought to be less
     felt my being at a distance; a poor affair to grieve when it must
     be all your fates to follow. I am happy that Mr. Ker understands my
     circumstances and my last will, and that he will be so good and so
     able to assist in settling it properly; I wish to follow his ideas
     therein in case of any difficulty, and I am likewise perfectly
     satisfied with all Mr. Ker's accounts with me. I write this letter
     to you to go by the first ship in case I should not be able to
     write later; I do not expect to be able to write to Robie Hepburn
     nor to Mr. Ker; nothing I can tell now from this country can
     entertain them; my mind is taken up with nothing but the
     Friendship, which they know.... So soon as the weather is warmer I
     intend to go to Quebec in order to obtain the best advice: I shall
     not personally be so conveniently situated there, as here. I am
     able yet to go out as far as a bank before the Door and to walk
     through the rooms; indeed the arrangements and conveniences of this
     house with the attendance and attention I receive are all in the
     best manner I can possibly desire; ... it's enough to say that were
     you here I think you would approve of them. Industry and neatness
     prevail and everything nesessary [is] foreseen and provided for. No
     wonder my wife and I agree so well now these thirty-five years as
     she happens to be equal in every moral attribute which I pretend
     to.... We are in friendship with everybody, because we do justice
     impartially and really without vanity have assisted many persons in
     forming farms and providing for the support of familys; although
     thereby not in the way of enriching ourselves it affords perhaps as
     much Satisfaction.

     This place certainly thrives exceedingly; although we may by such
     exertions be recommending ourselves to the Father of all things,
     how poor they appear in my eyes having read lately the Newspapers.
     Most unreasonable are some men in Parliament to find fault with the
     ministry of Pitt and Dundass who have steered the Vessel of the
     State so successfully through such dangerous times and threatening
     appearances. Every Briton I think has reason to be proud of his
     Country which is raised higher than ever before not only in
     national Character but in its prospects of Commerce and Wealth by
     the Peace [the brief Peace of Amiens signed in March, 1802]. What
     prodigious honour and glory has been acquired and bestowed upon our
     Army of Egypt, exertions indeed on the most conspicuous theatre of
     the World and at the most conspicuous period of the world. We
     formerly thought ourselves sort of heroes by conquering Louisbourg
     and Quebec but nothing must be compared to that of Egypt.... The
     French troops have fought much better under their Diacal
     Republican government than under their King's and our troops not
     only fight equally well as formerly, but our Generals and Officers
     are much better writers; never have I read better wrote letters
     than those describing these renown'd events.

     But pray allow me to sink into poetry to help to fill up this
     paper; ... let me transcribe a letter in verse which is handed me
     now by an old Soldier residing near us.[18] He received it from an
     acquaintance of his who is only a private soldier in the 26th
     Regiment. That Regt. is now gone home; ... should it be at
     Edinburgh pray invite James Stevenson to a dram of Whiskey for my
     sake; though I do not know the man we had served together in the
     American War and he shows the idea the private men had of me and
     how a man of a slender education (I believe from Glasgow) can make
     verses. The Canadians here, I believe, have the same opinion though
     they are very far from making verses upon any subject whatever; it
     is much more useful here to cut down trees which they can do with
     great dexterity.

     Quebec, 25th April, 1800.

        My worthy conty, gude Jock Warren,
        Thou's still jocose and ay auld farren,
        Gentle and kind, blythe, frank and free,
        And always unco' gude to me.
        And now thou's sold thy country ware
        And towards hame mean to repair.[19]
        Accept these lines although but weak
        And read them for thy Comrade's sake.
        May plenty still around thee smile
        And God's great help thy foes beguile,
        In Wisdom's path be sure to tread
        And her fair daughter Virtue wed.
        My compliments and love sincere
        To all our friends both here and there,
        But in particular to him
        That's tall in body, long in limb,
        Auld faithful Loyal, Johny Nairne,
        Lang may he count you his ain bairne;
        By his example still be sway'd;
        Be his good precepts still obeyed;
        Revere this good and worthy man
        And always do the best you can.
        This is my wish and expectation,
        God granting you and me salvation.
        We ance were young but now we're auld,
        Oour blood from heat commences cauld,
        A drop of whiskey warms the whole,
        Renews the body, cheers the soul;
        Observing still due moderation,
        In order to prevent vexation,
        Proceeding on with cautious care
        Till Death with his grim face appear;
        Then with a conscience, just and true
        See Heaven's Glory, in your View.

     My neighbour, Mr. Fraser, tells me that by my looks and speaking he
     cannot think me so ill as imagined. You will think the same by my
     writing the above. My distemper is owing to Gravelly Ulcers and it
     is a great chance at my time of life to recover, so [we] should be
     prepared for the worst.

     It is a satisfaction to me to have been able to write this letter,
     such as it is. My thoughts are every day and every night with my
     sisters and [I] figure myself frequently at your fireside. Remember
     I am not to write any more unless I get a great deal better. [I]
     shall refer you to Christine to correspond and to tell you all you
     would wish to know from this country. And now I have nothing but
     Compts. and love to send to all my friends--to Robie Hepburn as my
     oldest and nearest my heart--my blessings to his family, as to the
     Kers and Congaltons. And once more to Anny you and Mary and Mrs.
     Ker and my Polly and Tom. God bless you all. I am truly my dear
     Madie with much affection,

     Yours for aye,

     JOHN NAIRNE.

Nairne was not mistaken in his view that the end was near. He writes
about this time to his physician at Quebec (there was no practitioner at
Murray Bay) describing his symptoms and ends: "Now, dear Doctor, I dare
say you think some apologies necessary for my troubling you so
particularly with the complaints of an old man of 71, as his inward
machinery is probably wore out and irreparable." In a last vain hope
they took him to Quebec for medical care. But the machinery was, indeed,
"wore out," and at Quebec, on July 14th, 1802, he closed his eyes on a
world which, though it brought him labour and sorrow, he thought to be
very good.

Among his own letters is preserved the printed invitation to his
funeral:

     Quebec, _Wednesday, 14th July, 1802._

     Sir,--

     The favour of your company is requested to attend the Funeral of
     the late Colonel Nairne, from No. 1 Grison Street, on Cape Diamond,
     to the place of interment, on Friday next at one o'clock in the
     afternoon.

All that was most worthy in Quebec attended to do honour to his memory.
He was buried in the Protestant cemetery; long after his body was
removed to Mount Hermon Cemetery, to lie beside his son and
grandson--the last of his race.

Nairne played his part with high purpose and integrity. Among his papers
at Murray Bay is a prayer, intended apparently for daily use, in which
he asks that he may be vigilant in conduct and immovable in all good
purposes; that he may show courage in danger, patience in adversity,
humility in prosperity. He asks, too, to be made sensible "how little is
this world, how great [are] thy Heavens, and how long will be thy
blessed eternity." It is the prayer of a strong soul facing humbly and
reverently the tasks of life.[20] He would have wished to found a
community English speaking and Protestant. But the forces of nature were
against him. The few English speaking people who came in (and they were
but a few scattered individuals) for the most part married French
wives. The children held the faith and spoke the tongue which they
learned at their mothers' knees. It was the course of nature, and always
we are foolish to quarrel with nature. A granite monument marks the
resting place where the good old man sleeps in the cemetery at Quebec,
but some memorial might well stand at Murray Bay, that those who look
out upon the majestic river, the blue mountains, the smiling valley
should have before them a reminder of the "friendly, honest man" who, a
century and a half ago, began to win their heritage from the
wilderness.[21]

[Footnote 13: It may be convenient to state at once the dates of the
births and deaths of each of these children:

Magdalen (Madie) (Mrs. McNicol)  born 1767  died 1839.
Christine Nairne                   "  1774    "  1817.
John Nairne                        "  1777    "  1799.
Mary (Polly) Nairne                "  1782    "  1821.
Thomas Nairne                      "  1787    "  1813.
]

[Footnote 14: See Appendix D., p. 277., for a formal memorandum drawn up
by Nairne for his son's guidance.]

[Footnote 15: See Appendix E., p. 279. "The 'Porpoise' (Beluga or White
Whale) Fishery on the St. Lawrence."]

[Footnote 16: "Les Anciens Canadiens," Chapter IV.]

[Footnote 17: Sir Alexander Mackenzie who accomplished in 1793 what was
then the astonishing feat of crossing the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific
Ocean and whose book, "Voyages from Montreal on the River St. Lawrence,
through the Continent of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific
Oceans," first published in 1801, attracted general attention, including
even that of Napoleon Bonaparte.]

[Footnote 18: John Warren, the ancestor of the numerous family at Murray
Bay of that name.]

[Footnote 19: Warren, Nairne's neighbour, had been visiting Quebec
apparently for business reasons.]

[Footnote 20: See Appendix F., p. 286, for this Prayer of Colonel
Nairne.]

[Footnote 21: The inscription to be placed on Nairne's tomb was long a
subject of debate in the family. Two drafts remain at Murray Bay, both
copious in length, and neither like the inscription now to be found at
Mount Hermon Cemetery. (See p. 221.) In the taste of the time
inscriptions were expected to give a full account of the career of the
dead man. One of these inscriptions speaks of Nairne's "enjoying as a
reward of his services a gift of Land on the River St. Lawrence. He had
alike the merit and the happiness of converting a wild and uninhabited
desert into a flourishing colony of above 1000 inhabitants, who regarded
him as their Tender Friend and Patriarch. He died honoured with the
esteem of all who knew him." The other inscription mentions what,
otherwise, we should not have known, that Nairne received a wound on the
Plains of Abraham. It goes on in verse:

    "Though 'gainst the Foe a dauntless Front he reared,
    Ne'er from his lips was aught assuming heard;
    Modest, though brave; though firm, in manners mild,
    Strong in resolve, though guileless as a child;
    To honor true, in probity correct;
    To falsehood [stern] and urgent to detect;
    To party strange, to calumny a foe;
    The good Samaritan to sons of woe;
    At a late hour he heard the fatal call,
    Obeyed and died, wept and deplored by all."
]




CHAPTER VI

THOMAS NAIRNE, SEIGNEUR OF MURRAY BAY

     His Education in Scotland.--His winning character.--He enters the
     army.--Malcolm Fraser's counsels to a young soldier.--Thomas
     Nairne's life at Gibraltar.--His desire to retire from the
     army.--His return to Canada in 1810-11.--His life at Quebec.--His
     summer at Murray Bay, 1811.--His resolve to remain in the
     army.--Beginning of the War of 1812.--Captain Nairne on Lake
     Ontario.--Quebec Society and the proposed flight from danger to
     Murray Bay.--Anxiety at Murray Bay.--The progress of the War.--An
     American attack on Kingston.--Captain Nairne on the Niagara
     frontier.--Naval War on Lake Ontario.--Nairne's description of a
     naval engagement.--Sense of impending disaster at Murray Bay.--The
     American advance on Montreal by the St. Lawrence.--Nairne's
     regiment a part of the opposing British force.--The Battle of
     Crysler's Farm.--Nairne's death.--His body taken to Quebec.--The
     grief of the family at Murray Bay.--The funeral.


At his father's death Thomas Nairne was the only surviving son. In 1791
the father had written of this boy, born in 1787 and thus only four
years old: "Tom continues very stout but not easy to manage and [I] am
afraid it will be difficult to separate [him] from his mother. He does
not speak a word of English; neither do your sisters Mary (now called
Polly) or Anny speak any other language than French; but I intend to
send them all to Quebec next summer, where it's to be hoped they will
soon learn to understand a little English." So to Quebec Tom was sent to
begin his education. By 1798, when only eleven years old, he had gone to
the relatives in Scotland and Nairne's friend, Ker, writes of him: "I
think Tommie one of the sweetest tempered fine boys I ever saw and he
will, I doubt not, be the comfort and delight of you all." Polly was
there too--"a very good girl ... of great use to her Aunts to whom she
pays every attention." Tom, like his brother John, was carefully
instructed by his father. He must look after himself, dress, care for
his clothes, and keep clean, without troubling others. Especially must
he try to think clearly and speak distinctly--truly a sound beginning of
education. His brother's death in 1799 made him an important person, the
pride of his house. "There are many Tams now in this parish," wrote his
father in 1801, "even a part of it is named St. Thomas, all in
compliment to our Tom." At the time of his father's death in 1802, a boy
of fifteen, Tom was attending the Edinburgh High School. Before me lies
a coverless account book of octavo size in which are written by some
careful person, in clear round-hand, recipes, scraps of poetry, problems
in arithmetic and geometry, and among other things, "Tom's Expenses,
1796." A quarter at the High School costs 10/6, "Lattin books," 4/-,
school money is 3/-, a ferret 3d., and so on. His sister Polly's
expenses are entered in the same book and that young lady's outlay was
more formidable. Items for the milliner such as "making up a Bonnet.
3/6," (young ladies still wore bonnets) are frequent. Miss Polly spent
6/- on ear-rings. Once when she took a "Shaise" it cost her 2/-, while
"Chair Hire" is sometimes 1/6 and sometimes reduced to the modest
proportions of 9d. No doubt for her health's sake she bought for 1/- a
"Sacred Tincture" which, we may hope, did her good.

Thomas Nairne was an attractive boy. He lived with his father's executor
and friend, James Ker, an Edinburgh banker, a wise, prudent, far-seeing,
man. Mr. Ker was married to Colonel Nairne's niece and he received Tom
as his own child. The boy was the inseparable companion of Ker's son
Alick. Tom won praises on all sides. An Aunt wrote seriously that she
had feared he was too good to live; and she comforted Nairne's grief at
his son John's death by the thought of what Tom will be to him. He is "a
happy chearful pleased little fellow always quiet at home"--but also
"happy and at home wherever he goes." So thoughtful, she adds, is he
that, entirely on his own motion, he deems it proper to write to his
mother; one of these letters is before me--beautifully written in a
large but well-formed schoolboy hand. "A very promising sweet young
man," was the renewed judgment of his business-like guardian upon Tom
in 1803, when he was a boy of only sixteen. By that time, it was thought
that Tom had exhausted the advantages of the Edinburgh High School. The
Edinburgh accent of the day did not suit the taste of his fastidious
guardian, who hoped that in an English school a better manner of speech
might be acquired. Tom's cousin and companion, Alick Ker, a boy a few
years older, was going to school at Durham and thither also went Tom.
The lads "are the greatest friends in the world," wrote his watchful
aunt; "Alick does not know how to exist without Tom but Tom is more
independent of Alick, for he is not so shy." In an aunt's, perhaps
partial, view Tom was quicker and showed more application than Alick.
"Tom advances with great deliberation in his height," she writes, which
was very convenient, for, since Alick was older, Tom came in for Alick's
out-grown clothes and this saved expense.

When the boy's school days were drawing to an end his future course was
the topic of much discussion. Tom's father had wished him to study law,
though not to practice it: in Canada, he thought, there was no lucrative
opening for any one trained in the law unless he was made a judge. Old
Malcolm Fraser, Tom's a

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