"Spanish John" was the nom de guerre of John, son of John, son of Æneas, son of Ranald McDonell of Scottos, or Scothouse, who was also head of the Glengarry family. He was born at "Crowlin," Knoidart, in 1728. He left home to study in the Scots College in Rome in 1740, but in 1744 we find him serving as Ensign in the "Regiment Irlandia" for King Carlo of Naples, and in 1746 he was on his way to Scotland carrying money and despatches for Prince Charles. After his release and the pacification of the Highlands he married and remained in Scotland until 1773, when he emigrated to America and settled in Scoharie County, in the then Province of New York. Three years later he held a commission as Captain in the King's Royal Regiment of New York, the "Royal Greens," under the command of Colonel Sir John Johnson, Bart., and served until the regiment was disbanded about 1784. He then settled in Canada, where he died at Cornwall in 1810, and was buried at St. Andrews, P.Q.
His sons, particularly John and Miles, were famous men in the days of the rival factions engaged in the struggle for the Northwest fur trade, and his name is still widely and honorably represented in Canada. At the request of his friend Bishop Strachan, then the Reverend Mr. Strachan and school-master at Cornwall, Colonel McDonell wrote a short account of his early life and adventures, which was published in The Canadian Magazine, Montreal, May and June, 1825, and forms the basis of the following story.
While I have amplified the old and introduced such new characters, incidents, and situations as were necessary to create a work of fiction out of material which is but a recital of those incidental and generally disconnected happenings that go to make up a man's experience, I have taken every pains to preserve what I conceive to be the character of the narrator and the essential value of his narrative.
From le père Labat and le président Debrosses I learned of the conditions of Italy; from O'Callaghan, the particulars of the Irish Brigade; from Professor Cavan, of Charlottetown, P.E.I., who was a student in the Scots College in the early forties, when the conditions were still unchanged—when the Abbé Macpherson, their Rector, could well remember Prince Charlie in his last days: "he used to visit us and say we were the only subjects he had left"—information that brought me into touch with the life there; from the Rev. Mr. McNish, of Cornwall, the Gaelic toasts; and from "Ascanius," much of the detail of the end of "The Forty-five."
WILLIAM McLENNAN.
Montreal.