In the year 1804, orders were issued to raise a regiment in the Highlands, to be called the Canadian Fencibles, and to serve in Canada only. Owing to several circumstances the corps was speedily filled up. One extensive glen in Inverness-shire was in that year improved in the modern merciless style, and depopulated. Several other detached parts of the country had been similarly treated. To the young and active, who had thus lost their homes and their usual mode of subsistence, this corps appeared to present the means of reaching a country whither many of their friends and immediate neighbours had gone before them, and where they were taught to expect a permanent settlement without being subject to the "summary ejectment still practised in some parts of the north, when tenants prove refractory," namely, burning their houses about their ears,—a mode of ejecting a virtuous peasantry, for which the civilized revivers of this obsolete, but efficient practice, have not received the notice they deserve.

The men of this corps were ordered to assemble in Glasgow, where it was discovered that the most scandalous deceptions had been practised upon them, and that terms had been promised which Government would not, and could not sanction. The persons who had deceived these poor men by representing the terms in a more favourable light than truth would justify, obtained a great number of recruits without any, or for a very small bounty.

When these men discovered their real situation, they were loud in their remonstrances, and, becoming very disorderly and disobedient, were ready to break out into open mutiny but an immediate inquiry being made into the foundation of their complaints by General Wemyss of Wemyss, who then commanded in Glasgow, they were found to be of such a nature, that it was necessary to satisfy them; in the mean time the regiment, consisting of 800 men, was marched to Ayr. The ordering them so far south from Greenock, the port of embarkation for Canada, gave a kind of confirmation to the previous report, that they were to be sent to the Isle of Wight, and thence to the East or West Indies. However, after a full inquiry, the whole were discharged; the promises made could not be confirmed, as they were founded on the grossest deception, and inconsistent with the objects of Government and the terms proposed. But it was an additional cause of discontent that they had been sent so much farther from home, and that those who still intended to go to Canada were so much farther removed from the usual place of embarkation. As the second battalions of the 78th and 79th regiments were, at that time, recruiting, numbers of the men enlisted with Colonel Cameron, and a few (twenty-two) with me, for the 78th. Several, who had money to pay for the passage, emigrated to America. Those who had not the means spread themselves all over the country, proclaiming their wrongs, and thus helping to destroy the confidence of their countrymen, not only in Government, but in all public men, whom they now began to think utterly unworthy of credit.