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Updated: June 11, 2025
He was also one of the few Campbells who were likely to be trusted and welcomed by the Macdonalds; for his niece was married to Alexander, the second son of Mac Ian. The sight of the red coats approaching caused some anxiety among the population of the valley. John, the eldest son of the Chief, came, accompanied by twenty clansmen, to meet the strangers, and asked what this visit meant.
But before he reached the court-house, where for a half-hour yet the cupola bell would not clang out its summons to veniremen and witnesses, he found fresh fuel for his wrath. He was not a popular man with these clansmen, though involuntarily he had been useful in leading their victims to the slaughter.
The officers who use these last arguments, among whom is your friend Fergus Mac-Ivor, maintain, that if the Highlanders are strangers to the usual military discipline of Europe, the soldiers whom they are to encounter are no less strangers to their peculiar and formidable mode of attack; that the attachment and courage of the chiefs and gentlemen are not to be doubted; and that as they will be in the midst of the enemy, their clansmen will as surely follow them; in fine, that having drawn the sword, we should throw away the scabbard, and trust our cause to battle, and to the God of Battles.
It was the jousting-ground of jealous nobles, not only on Greenside, or by the King's Stables, where set tournaments were fought to the sound of trumpets and under the authority of the royal presence, but in every alley where there was room to cross swords, and in the main street, where popular tumult under the Blue Blanket alternated with the brawls of outlandish clansmen and retainers.
A member of that New Zealand tribe had come under the weights of justice at Auckland. The clansmen mustered to his rescue, and were willed to turn Auckland upside down, if necessary, in achieving it. The Governor heard betimes of the advance of their war canoes, and he arranged his welcome.
Add to this that the night was unusually dark. Instead of marching in three clear divisions, the columns got mixed in the darkness and mutually kept each other back. Soon the light-footed clansmen got ahead of the Lowland and French and Irish regiments unused to such heavy walking. Every few minutes messengers from the rear harassed the leaders of the van by begging them to march more slowly.
They dig two shallow tanks called umkoi, into which is poured water supposed to possess the virtue of purifying the bones of any deceased clansmen who have died violent or unnatural deaths, or at places far away from their homes, where it was not possible to perform their funeral ceremonies according to custom. Three vertical stones are also erected, called maw umkoi.
Leek was as full of Highlanders as a wasp-cake is of maggots, and still they were swarming in. Donald and the clansmen, indifferent to the crush and hubbub, clave a way for us to the market-place, where, on the Colonel's advice, they were dismissed to beat for billets.
Even on the plains among the Arabs and the mixed tribes described as Moors, things are not much better, for there, too, vendettas and cattle lifting keep them at loggerheads, and there is nothing the clansmen like so well as a raid on the Governor's kasbah or castle.
In the old days of warfare many of these mountain dwellers never knew the sea; they were prevented from reaching it by the beach clansmen who claimed the fishing for their own and made it death for the hill people to venture down to the shore.
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