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.