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