Though an officer, Robert engaged in trade and made some money.  “The Company’s pay is hardly subsistence,” he says, “and here we have not, as on t’other side of India the spoils of plundered provinces to grow fat on.  I keep my health very well and if I want the satisfaction, I am also free from many Anxietys, people are subject to who are more in the glare of life.”  He was in a retired place, where there were few people and perennial summer, with “no variety of seasons nor of anything else.”  Time passes insensibly, he says; “in India years are like months in Europe ...  I write, read, walk and go in company the same round nearly throughout the year.  Here we have little company; yet everyone wants to go to out settlements where they are quite alone.  I cannot account for it.  Mal Bay is your out settlement.  Do you like that as well as Quebec?”

Robert Nairne was something of a philosopher.  “Have you ever so much philosophy,” he writes to the seigneur of Murray Bay in 1767, “as to think everything that happens is for the best?  I am so far of that mind that content and discontent I think arises [sic] rather from the cast of our own thoughts than from outward accidents and that there is nearly an equal distribution of the means of happiness to all men, and that they are the happiest that improve their means the most.”  He felt the weariness of exile, the Scot’s longing for his own land.  “Certainly to a person of a right tone of mind if there are enjoyments in life, it must be in our own country amongst our friends and relations.  With such conditions the bare necessaries of life are better than riches without them....  Death is but a limited absence and you and I are much in that state with regard to our friends at home.”

It was not long before Robert Nairne’s letters ceased altogether.  In 1776, John Nairne received at Murray Bay the sad news that, in November or December, 1774, his brother had been killed in a petty expedition against some local tribesmen.  A native chieftain had murdered, cooked and eaten a rival who was friendly to the East India Company and Robert Nairne with some natives, and only three Europeans, went up country, through woods and bogs, to seize the offender.  When there was fighting his natives fled, and he was shot through the body.  It was a pity, says John Nairne’s correspondent, Hepburn, to lose his life “in so silly a manner.”  He would soon have been governor of Bencoolen and was in a way to make “a great figure in life.”  Of his fortune of L6,000 John Nairne received a part.  Twenty-five years after his brother’s death Nairne was to get at Murray Bay similar news of the loss of his own son in distant India.  It has levied a heavy tribute of Britain’s best blood.