erprising people in quest of furs travel for years towards the north
and towards the west through vast countries of good soil uninhabited as
yet ... [except] for hunting, and watered with innumerable lakes and
rivers, stored with fish, besides every other convenience for the use of
man, and certainly destined to be filled with people in some future
time. We have only [now] heard of one named Mackenzie[17] who is
reported to have been as far as the Southern Ocean (from Canada) across
this continent to the West." Long before Canada stretched from the
Atlantic to the Pacific Nairne was thus dreaming of what we now see.

Of war, then raging, Nairne took a philosophic view. "War may be
necessary," he writes in 1798, "for some very Populous countrys as any
crop when too thick is the better of being thinned." But it occurred to
him that the problem of over-population in Europe might have been solved
in a less crude manner. "It is strange," he says, "that there should be
so much of the best part of the globe still unoccupied, where the foot
of man never trod, and in Europe such destruction of people. It is
however for some purpose we do not, as yet, comprehend." Those were the
days when Napoleon Bonaparte's star was rising and when, in defiance of
England, led by Pitt, he smote state after state which stood in the path
of his ambition. Nairne's friend and business agent James Ker, an
Edinburgh banker, was obviously no admirer of Pitt, for he writes on
July 20th, 1797, of the struggle with revolutionary France which, though
it was to endure for more than twenty years, had already, he thought,
lasted too long:

After a four years' war undertaken for the attainment of objects
which were unattainable, in which we have been gradually deserted
by every one of our allies except Portugal, ... too weak to leave
us; and after a most shameless extravagance and Waste of the public
money which all feel severely by the imposition of new and
unthought of taxes, we have again sent an ambassador to France to
try to procure us Peace.... If our next crop be as bad as our two
last ones God knows what will become of us. If it were not for the
unexampled Bounty and Charity of the richer classes the Poor must
have literally starved, but we have been favoured with a very mild
winter.

In 1798 when Napoleon led his forces to Egypt and disappeared from the
ken of Europe, Nairne hopes devoutly that