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Naidheachd

“I have killed an Indian!”

8th October 2009

By Ian Macpherson McCulloch

Halifax, Nova Scotia, September 1757 – Tendrils of fog floated from left to right across a desolate dark landscape as the young sentry shivered.  Before him, it seemed an army of three-foot tree stumps was magically marching away through the ground mist to a distant dark wood line. The young soldier, a Lowland Scot from the Edinburgh slums, was tired but watchful, his gaze fixed unrelentingly upon the silent forest some 100 yards distant.  Behind him, the tent lines of his Britannic Majesty’s army in Nova Scotia were just starting to stir in the raw glimmerings of first light.

He had stood guard these last two hours, entertained by numerous fantastical shapes that had writhed and coalesced from the thick rain-laden fog for minutes at a time, only to rip and break apart when the westerly breeze tugged and pushed them along. Every five minutes he paced to one end of his well-trampled beat – “twenty paces extending north and south from my present position, Sergeant!” he had repeated for his guard commander when first posted. 

Teardrops of water had collected on the point of his tricorn hat, the lace and facings on his red frock coat proclaiming him a private soldier of the 1st Foot, simply known to the rest of the army as The Royal.  His only human company during his tour of duty had been the Sergeant of the Guard making his hourly rounds, who had cautioned him to keep a close eye on the wood line to his front or “lose his hair”. The non-commissioned officer had then had given him a surreptitious sip of grog to warm him up - rum laced with lime juice and water - from his canteen and had returned to the guard tent. 

From the extreme periphery of his left eye the sentry suddenly saw quick movement along the wood line, but by the time he had swiveled his head for a better look, a drifting bank of fog had obscured the spot in question. Every nerve now alert, the young Royal gripped his musket tighter as the fog thinned quickly. 

A hooded figure with long hair was making its way through the tree stumps towards him.  Scarcely breathing, he had the presence of mind to first unwrap the cloth keeping his firing pan with its priming powder dry on his firelock and then, taking unsteady aim, croaked out the standard challenge “Halt - who goes there!” But the figure seemed not to have heard, and kept straight on for him. 

Dry-throated, he managed to gasp louder this time, “Halt, who goes there!” and the figure stopped abruptly, 50 feet distant, and crouched down. The sentry saw a flash of bare legs and his imagination did the rest. Only a few weeks before, four sailors on a lark from their warship in Halifax harbor had walked out into the forest and were attacked by an Indian war party.  Two of them were later found dead, minus their pigtails.  The other two jack-tars were still missing.  Petrified with fear, the young soldier could only manage one last “Who goes there?” before pulling the trigger - the report of the booming musket galvanizing the sleepy camp into action.

“The guard being alarmed,” wrote an officer in his journal, “the Serjeant ran out to know the cause.”  When he reached the young sentry, the latter was shouting: “I have killed an Indian!  I have killed an Indian! There he lies!”, so “prepossessed that it was an Indian with a blanket about him who came skulking to take a prisoner, or a scalp.”

When the Sergeant “went to take a view of the dead man”, he grimly told the young sentry that he had shot “one of our own men, and a Highlander…with his hair hanging loose and wrapped up in a dark-coloured plaid.”  The young soldier “was so oppressed with grief and fright, that he fell ill and was despaired of for some days.”  No wonder, as a Highlander had just been killed by a Lowlander and spilt blood called for retribution.

It was quickly determined by senior officers that perhaps the Royal and Fraser’s Highlanders should not be encamped alongside each other, as old wounds took time to heal.  The Royal had stood in the front line of British bayonets at Culloden just eleven years before, pouring their precision volleys into the last Highland charge on British soil.  Men of Keppoch, Clanranald and Glengarry were serving in the 78th and the shooting of a Highlander by a Lowlander, though accidental, was probably deemed dangerous enough to merit everyone paying serious attention.

On the surface, the accident was straightforward and no fault of the sentry.  The young Fraser recruits, just off the boat, had no understanding of British army camp discipline, one British officer characterizing the newly-arrived Highlanders as “raw and unexperienced” with “a very few conversant in, or able to talk English.”  Not only were the Highlanders strangers in a strange land, but strangers to their own army.

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This confusion in the British Army arising from a distinct dress and a cultural divide that included language as well as concepts of honour and duty was only the tip of the prejudicial iceberg.  By contrast, today’s Royal Regiment of Scotland (which singlehandedly perpetuates the myriad of Highland regiments that have gone before) constitutes one of Scotland’s most immediately recognizable but controversial icons. 

The first regiments raised in the 18th century however, had an upward battle for recognition and reputation, their story all but buried under a corpus of 19th and 20th century regimental histories that have overly-romanticized such early levies.  Some Victorian accounts verge on racial stereotyping, branding all Highlanders as enthusiastic but undisciplined warriors whose natural fighting genius only found full expression once they took the King’s shilling and donned the King’s redcoat. 

These simplistic views clash with the many observations made by numerous visitors to the Highlands a few years before the creation of the Black Watch, one Englishman in 1724 noting that Britain’s gallant warriors of the 18th century were actually “a source of detestation to their Lowland countrymen” and “viewed by the English as veritable savages, even as cannibals.” He added that most English officers found service along the frontiers of the Highlands “a perilous and profitless exile, as the legionaries of Rome” had centuries before them.

These perceptions persisted after Culloden 1746 especially when the call went out for Highland regiments to serve in North America.  A recruiting poster for the Black Watch besides promising “would be redcoats” the using of prohibited Highland weapons on the King’s enemies as well as the wearing of the proscribed Feilidh mor (full plaids, or literally, the “big wrap”), mentioned that this was a chance for Highlanders to don “Bonnets blue, with Sword and pistol and warlike Goods,” and “chace the Indians thro’ the Woods.” Thus when Jacobite chieftains and lairds with forfeited estates eagerly offered themselves or their sons (along with the requisite numbers of clansmen recruits) for the posts in the Highland regiments raised for North American service, the parallels were quickly drawn.

Typical was the case of Archibald Macdonell, the eldest son of Coll Macdonell of Barrisdale, the latter executed after Culloden.  Sentenced to death like his father, Archibald had been pardoned in 1754 but remained incarcerated in Edinburgh Castle. In July 1757, he wrote to Lord George Beauclerk, the Commander-in-Chief for Northern Britain, requesting a commission to serve with the 78th Foot, the Fraser Highlanders. Lord Beauclerk was sympathetic to the young prisoner’s request and passed it along to Lord Holdernesse in London with a short note that the unfortunate Archibald was “a tall handsome man – very able to serve – and it were right that he and some other of his tribe were so employed to scalp and have their chance of being scalped…so as not to be a mere burden for life upon the Government.” 

Macdonell’s younger brother, Alexander, had already been commissioned a lieutenant in the 78th Foot on 2 February 1757 and had sailed for America a month earlier on 1 June 1757.  The unfortunate Archibald, still imprisoned, would die two years later in 1759, almost at the same time his younger brother Sandy, scalp intact, was killed at the battle of the Plains of Abraham.

Beauclerk’s racial characterization of the Highlanders as tribes, while perhaps accurate, was a form of racism that quickly became commonplace in any reportage of the Highland soldier serving in North America.
One of the earliest recorded impressions likening them (because of their different dress and language) to the “savages” of North America appeared in the October 1756 issue of Scots Magazine. 

The Black Watch had just arrived in the colony of New York and had preceded upriver to Albany when a gentleman who had accompanied them reported to the Scot’s Magazine that upon their arrival at Albany “an incredible number of Indians flocked to them from all quarters”, and interpreters were subsequently “chosen on either side” so they could effectively communicate. “From the surprising resemblance in the manner of their dress and the great similitude of their language,” he said somewhat tongue-in-cheek, “the Indians concluded they were anciently one and the same people, and most cordially received them as brethren, which may be productive of effects beneficial to the British interest.”

David Stewart of Garth, in his famous Sketches of the Character, Manners and Present State of the Highlanders of Scotland, first published in 1822, would recount the same story but heavily edited:  “When the Highlanders landed they were caressed by all ranks and order of men, but more particularly by the Indians.  On the march to Albany, the Indians flocked from all quarters to see the strangers, who, they believed, were of the same extraction as themselves and therefore received them as brothers.”

Garth obviously didn’t like the second part of the original letter with its Lowlander “wink-wink” racist overtones that portrayed the Highlanders as the British equivalent of a savage.  A New York newspaper not to be outdone recorded the Fraser Highlanders first taste of combat at Louisbourg in the summer of 1758 noting that “About 100 Frenchmen were made prisoners immediately after landing, and a great many Indians killed, amongst whom, it is said, their Chief; and that several of the Savages were taken alive by the Highlanders, whose Heads they chopped off immediately, not being acquainted with the Method of Scalping.”
 
The corpse of the “Savage Chief” mentioned became a grisly exhibit in the camp of the 78th Foot, a curio for all off-duty soldiers and officers to view.  While crude jokes from private soldiers viewing the body were to be expected, an unsavory rumor started and circulated amongst the rest of the army that the Highlanders were merely practicing their savage rites of cannibalism, a slander not appreciated by the proud clansmen. 

Sergeant James Thomson of Tain noted that it was General James Wolfe who surprisingly started tongues wagging, his desire to show the common soldiers that Indians were not bogeymen.

After we had all landed, and pitch’d our tents, General Wolfe who had heard of the extraordinary size of this Savage, order’d the body to be taken up and carried to the Camp, for all the troops to see it.  He was an enormous fat fellow [who] had been shot in the groin, and some of the Soldiers were passing jokes on it.  He had many scars on his body, and was tall and fat. 
After the men had all pass’d by it, and seen him, he was again buried but taken up a second time at the desire of [the Admiral] and General Amherst who had not yet seen him. It was supposed [by us] that his being shown to the troops was to give them a dislike to the savages who were very numerous about the country [but] a report had gone about also that this savage had been dug up for the purpose of giving our Highlanders an opportunity of indulging in their favorite mode of inflicting casualties upon dead bodies, as they were consider’d to be mere Cannibals. 

Colonel William Amherst, brother of General Jeffery Amherst commanding at Louisbourg, paid the Fraser Highlanders a backhanded compliment when he recorded in his 1758 journal with some satisfaction the enemy on the Cape Breton beaches had certainly been terrified by the Scots’ sudden appearance and aggressiveness on the first day when they had landed.  Four or five days after the assault, groups of French regulars who had hidden in the woods from the charging Highlanders were still trickling in to give themselves up. 

“They told us they stood in the utmost awe of Our Savages, & did not dare show themselves for fear of them,” he proudly wrote a week after the landings.  “In their expression of Savages, they [meant] the Highlanders but to distinguish them from the others, they call them Les sauvages sans culottes.”  Mindful of the French slur, Amherst hastened to add that the Highlanders, in his opinion, were actually “most excellent troops” as well as “intrepid, subordinate, sober & indefatigable.”

Right up until the end of the war, British officers slowly came to realize that Highland soldiers were a tremendous combat multiplier in military operations.  One such officer was Brigadier John Clavering ordered to seize the island of Dominica in 1759.  On encountering an errant ship blown off course by a tropical storm and containing two errant companies of the 42nd Foot (Black Watch) he ordered their transport to heave-to, and called for the two 42nd company commanders to repair on board for orders.  Having witnessed the utility of the hardy mountain men at the Fort Royal Bay landings at Martinique, Clavering proposed the Highlanders join his force with these words:  “Gentlemen, I could not bear Scotch talk [until] lately – for I got so many wounds at Prestonpans that I could not bear them.  But now I have changed my mind and would command them sooner than any other people.”
 
The conduct, success and subsequent reputation of the three North American Highland regiments in North America during the Seven years War 1755-1763 was, in a large measure, a strong catalyst in propagating a wider acceptance of the Highlander as an integral and important addition to the British army.  They went, in a relatively short span of years, from rebels to renowned red-coated regiments and became a national “icon” for their homeland.  The transformation however did not take place overnight, as some survivors of the siege of Havana returning home from Cuba in December 1762 found to their chagrin.

Some Black Watch officers attended a play in Convent Garden dressed in their Highland dress.  Unbeknownst to them, much political ill will and unrest had been stirred up by the young King George’s choice for Prime Minister - John Stuart, 3rd Earl Bute.  Instead of being cheered by the English theatre-goers for their successes and sacrifices in the Caribbean, the two Highland officers were pelted with apples, the anti-Scottish crowd chanting, “No Scots! No Scots! Out with them!” James Boswell, the diarist, was present and went to offer them his moral support. One of the Havana veterans remarked angrily to him: “And this is the thanks we get – to be hissed when we come home!”  The other, more irate, growled: “If I had a grup o yin or twa o the tam’d rascals, I sud let them ken what they’re about!”

But, of course, most of those “tam’d rascals” lay in unmarked graves in Cuba or had been unceremoniously dumped over the sides of the hospital ships and transports as they had made their sorry way back to New York, trailed by schools of scavenging sharks. It would be a famous American inventor in 1767 who would pay the most fitting tribute to the prowess and excellent reputation the Highlanders had earned from their eleven years of hard soldiering in the American wilderness and far-flung Caribbean isles.  Benjamin Franklin wrote: 

Last Sunday evening the Royal Highland Regiment embarked for Ireland, which regiment, since its arrival in America, has been distinguished for having undergone most amazing fatigues, made long and frequent marches through an inhospitable country, bearing excessive heat and severe cold with alacrity and cheerfulness, frequently encamping in deep snow, such as those that inhabit the interior parts of this province do not see, and which only those who inhabit the northern parts of Europe can have any idea of, continually exposed in camp, and on their marches, to the alarms of a savage enemy, who, in all their attempts, were forced to fly. . . ., they have our thanks for that decorum in behaviour which they maintained during their stay in this city, giving an example that the most amiable behaviour in civil life is no way inconsistent with the character of the good soldier; and for their loyalty, fidelity, and orderly behaviour, they have every wish of the people for health, honour, and a pleasant voyage.

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