The Black Watch and Fraser’s Highlanders sailed from Greenock on April 14, 1776, and disembarked at Staten, where the main body was stationed. Here the Highlanders were drilled in a new form of warfare, to enable them to overcome the resistance of the colonists. Broad-swords and pistols were laid aside, and greater reliance was placed upon marksmanship. After some preliminary fighting at Long Island the Americans, under Washington, secured a masterly retreat. In the month following the British troops took possession of the heights commanding New York. So far England had swept everything before her. During the cessation that followed this engagement Washington devoted every moment to strengthening his forces. The American troops were no more trained than the Boers in South Africa, but like the latter they could claim in their favour a thorough knowledge of the country with practised marksmanship, derived from years of fighting with the Indians. Their hatred for the English, which burned deeper day by day, was in no degree cooled when they saw amongst the English troops both German mercenaries and Redskins. It is difficult for us to realise how bitterly the Americans abhorred the very sight of an Indian, while on the other hand, an unwritten page in history is the strange alliance that bound many Royalists to their merciless allies, and the brutal instincts such a fellowship aroused in some of the Highlanders, particularly those of the older, wilder generation, the scourings of the ‘45. On one occasion, for instance, a Highlander with the honest name of Donald M’Donald, led a party of Redskins against a block-house called Shell’s Bush. After the siege, which most fortunately ended in favour of the settler, it was discovered that “M’Donald wore a silver-mounted tomahawk, which was taken from him by Shell. It was marked by thirty scalp-notches, showing that few Indians could have been more industrious than himself in gathering that description of military trophies.”[7] It is also worth mentioning, for few histories have dealt with this point, that the unfortunate Highlanders who had settled in America in the years succeeding Culloden, and who, in their loyalty to the throne, fought against the American settlers, were eventually left in the lurch at the conclusion of hostilities, and forced to trek into Canada. Amongst these hapless people who lost their homes were Flora Macdonald and her husband. Her family divided and her future in jeopardy, she set sail again for Scotland, and there she died at the end of the eighteenth century, in the land where she had befriended Prince Charlie.