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,