The money was gone, no man dared to touch our hero, and he and Dundonell went peacefully home together! Our hero had dominated and insulted the Mackenzies and was obliged to be satisfied with that result.
In the following years (1751-54) Knoydart and Lochaber were perfectly demoralised. The hidden treasure of Loch Arkaig had set Macdonalds against Camerons; cousins were betraying cousins, and brothers were blackmailing brothers. The details (much veiled in this work) are to be found in the Duke of Cumberland’s MSS. at Windsor Castle. The murder of Campbell of Glenure by Allan Breck, or by Sergeant Mohr Cameron, and the reports of Pickle, James Mohr, and a set of other spies, had alarmed the Government with fears of a rising aided by Prussia. Consequently arrests were frequent and no man knew whom he could trust. Col of Barisdale, a double-dyed traitor, was dead in gaol, but his eldest son was being hunted on island, loch, and mountain. Now in a letter from an English officer, Captain Izard, dated September 30, 1751, and preserved at Windsor, he says: ‘Dr. Macdonald, living at Kylles, and brother of Glengarry, told that young Barisdale lay at his house the Monday before and proposed going to the Isle of Skye.’
The giver of this information was not a man in whom to confide. Our hero, however, confided. Disguised as a rough serving-man he went fishing for lythe with ‘my relation, Dr. Macdonell of Kylles, an eminent physician.’ An English vessel, the Porcupine, under the notorious Captain Fergusson, came in sight. Dr. Macdonell insisted on taking our hero on board her, and there, as he sat over his punch, informed the English officers that the servant who accompanied him was a gentleman. Fergusson arrested Macdonell at once on suspicion of being young Barisdale, and he lay for some time a prisoner in Fort William. Now the Doctor may only have blabbed in his cups, but, taken with Captain Izard’s report, his behaviour looks very odd. Our hero, however, does not suspect his relation, the Doctor, but denounces his cousin, Captain Allan Macdonald of Knock, in Sleat, as his betrayer, and ‘the greatest spy and informer in all Scotland.’ However it be, the betrayal of Colonel John was apparently a family affair.
A long list of charges, doubtless of Jacobite dealings, was brought against him, and a midshipman on the Porcupine assured him that Allan Macdonald of Knock was the informer. So the Colonel was locked up in Fort William, then, or just before, crowded with prisoners, such as Lochiel’s uncle Fassifern, his agent, Charles Stuart, Barisdale’s second son, and Cameron of Glenevis, with his brother Angus. The date must have been June or July, 1753, for young Barisdale was taken in July, and the Colonel was then a prisoner. Young Barisdale just escaped hanging; Fassifern was exiled; Stuart was accused of the Appin murder; Sergeant Mohr Cameron was betrayed and executed; the traitors were clansmen of the victims, and, though our Colonel says nothing of all this, the facts gave him good cause for anxiety. It is fair to add that no mention of his enemy, Macdonald of Knock, seems to occur in the Cumberland Papers, where so many spies hide their infamy.
Our hero escaped by aid of Mr. Macleod of Ulnish, sheriff-depute of Skye, ‘being both my friend and relation as well as the friend of justice.’ This gentleman suppressed the only good evidence against the Colonel, which indeed merely proved his wearing the proscribed kilt. After nine months of gaol the Colonel was released and seized the first opportunity to challenge Knock, who would not face him.
So ends the Colonel’s adventure. ‘I was then in love with your mother,’ he says simply, and on this head he says no more. He had ‘kept the bird in his bosom,’ a treasure lost by many of his kin, and among them, one fears, by Allan of Knock. A certain Ranald Macdonell of [in] Scammadale and Crowlin, who, born about 1724, married in May 1815, and died in November of the same year, aged ninety, is said to have ‘severely punished that obnoxious person known as Allan of Knock, over whose remains there was placed an inscription not less fulsome than false.’[113] Allan, whether he betrayed the Colonel or not, has obviously a bad name in Knoydart.
The Colonel lived happily on his property till 1773, when he settled in Schoharie County, New York. When the American rebellion broke out he served in the King’s Royal Regiment of New York, and, after the final collapse of the British, he retired to Cornwall in Ontario. As General Macdonnell wrote of him in 1746, ‘He has always behaved as an honourable gentleman and a brave officer, irreproachable in every respect.’