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.
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.