From Isle aux Noix Nairne was sent, in the summer of 1779, with fifty of his Royal Highland Emigrants, to command at Carleton Island, near Kingston where Lake Ontario flows into the St. Lawrence; some thirty-five years later his only surviving son held a military command at the same place. Here there was much to do in strengthening the fortifications and in keeping up communications with Niagara and other points in the interior. The situation was not without its embarrassments. Prisoners were sent in from Niagara and he had no prison in which to keep them. For want of fresh meat and vegetables there was much sickness. But the Indians were his greatest trial. Through him came their supplies and, to hold them at all, he had sometimes to serve out the rum for which such savages are always greedy. On July 4th, Nairne made a speech to these Mississaga Indians and said pretty plainly what he thought of them. Against the American scouts they had proved no defence; at night they fired off guns in the neighbouring woods and created false alarms, which prevented Nairne's men from getting their proper sleep. "My men work hard in the day," he said, "and I will have them to sleep sound at night," and he warned the Indians that he would fire upon them if their noise disturbed him further. The savages, he wrote to Haldimand, are "almost unbearable, greedy and importunate." They behaved more like rebels than friends and their talk ended always in the demand for rum, "the cause of all bad behaviour in Indians."