The people cannot read and have no literary amusement.  Their idle days they spend in drunkenness and debauchery and he wishes something done for them.  Ten years later Nairne is returning to the charge.  There are five Protestant families in the neighbourhood.  They cannot even be baptized except by the cure.  They cannot get any Protestant instruction; so the Protestant children are reared Roman Catholics.  Nairne wished to have a Protestant clergyman established at Murray Bay; he could make that place his headquarters and carry on missionary work in the neighbouring parishes.  But the five Protestant families at Murray Bay soon became three, for Nairne says, in 1801, that his and Colonel Fraser’s families and one other man, an Englishman, are the only remaining Protestants.  He and Fraser, he adds, are growing old and, in any case, it was doubtful whether the Englishman would attend service.

Yet Nairne still begged for a Protestant missionary.  He desired most of all a free school.  The teacher should be, he says, French but able also to preach in English; there was now no school at Murray Bay; a free school and a church system which would release the people from paying tithes could work wonders and, probably, most of the people would soon become Protestants.  Knowing the tenacity with which the French Canadians have clung to their faith, it seems hardly likely that Nairne’s dreams would have been realized.  At any rate nothing was done.  At that time there were hardly more than a dozen Anglican clergymen in all Canada and the Bishop of Quebec had no one to spare to look after the few scattered sheep at Murray Bay.  On the other hand the rival Church did not forget her own.  Long before the British conquest occasional services had been held at Malbaie and these were continued, with some regularity, until a resident priest came in 1797.  The visiting priests worked hard.  They were, Nairne says, “industrious in private to confess the people, especially the women, which branch of their duty is deemed most sacred and necessary.”  Against this tremendous power of the confessional, Protestantism had nothing that could be called an opposing influence.  When a Protestant died he might not, of course, be buried in the Roman Catholic burial ground.  For these outcast dead Nairne set aside a plot near his own house, where, still, under a little clump of trees, their bones lie, neglected and forgotten.  Not more than half a dozen Protestants were ever buried there and this shows that even the Protestant pioneers were few in number; hardly one of their children remained outside the Roman Church.