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.