are the finest set of fellows in the Highlands.  It is allowed they carried at least 6000 pounds Sterling in ready cash with them.”  In 1774 farmers and heads of families in Stirlingshire were forming societies to emigrate to the colonies and the fever had also extended to Orkney and Shetland and the north of England.  In 1753 it was estimated that there were one thousand Scots in the single county of Cumberland capable of bearing arms, of whom the Macdonalds were the most numerous.  Gabriel Johnston, governor of the province of North Carolina from 1734 to 1752, appears to have done more to encourage the settlement of Scots in the colony than all its other colonial governors combined.

In 1735 a body of one hundred and thirty Highlanders with fifty women and children sailed from Inverness and landed at Savannah in January 1736.  They were under the leadership of Lieutenant Hugh Mackay.  Some Carolinians endeavoured to dissuade them from going to the South by telling them that the Spaniards would attack them from their houses in the fort near where they were to settle, to which they replied, “Why, then, we will beat them out of their fort, and shall have houses ready built to live in.”  “This valiant spirit,” says Jones, “found subsequent expression in the efficient military service rendered by these Highlanders during the wars between the Colonists and the Spaniards, and by their descendants in the American Revolution.  To John ‘More’ McIntosh, Captain Hugh Mackay, Ensign Charles Mackay, Col.  John McIntosh, General Lachlan McIntosh, and their gallant comrades and followers, Georgia, both as a Colony and a State, owes a large debt of gratitude.  This settlement was subsequently augmented from time to time by fresh arrivals from Scotland....  Its men were prompt and efficient in arms, and when the war cloud descended upon the southern confines of the province no defenders were more alert or capable than those found in the ranks of these Highlanders.”  “No people,” says Walter Glasco Charlton, “ever came to Georgia who took so quickly to the conditions under which they were to live or remained more loyal to her interests” than the Highlanders.  “These men,” says Jones, “were not reckless adventurers or reduced emigrants volunteering through necessity, or exiled through insolvency or want.  They were men of good character, and were carefully selected for their military qualities....  Besides this military band, others among the Mackays, the Dunbars, the Baillies, and the Cuthberts applied for large tracts of land in Georgia which they occupied with their own servants.  Many of them went over in person and settled in the province.”