He secured less than half an hundred men at Stornoway--the trysting place--and the promises he had made of higher wages were a bone of contention through the whole voyage.
Perhaps the most effective agent obtained by Lord Selkirk was a returned trader of the Montreal merchants named Colin Robertson.

He had seen the whole western fur country, and the fact that he had a grievance made him very willing to join Lord Selkirk in his enterprise.
One of the Nor'-Westers in Saskatchewan a few years before the beginning of Lord Selkirk's Colony, was "Bras Croche," or crooked-arm McDonald.

He was of gentle Scottish birth, but his own acquaintances declared that he was of a "quarrelsome and pugnacious disposition." In his district Colin Robertson was a "Bourgeois" in charge of a station.

A quarrel between the two men resulted in Colin Robertson losing his position, and as we shall see he became one of the most active and serviceable men in the history of the Colony.

Colin Robertson went among his countrymen in the Island of Lewis and elsewhere.
And now as the time draws nigh for gathering together at a common port, the Stromness (Orkney), the Glasgow, the Sligo and the Lewis contingents to face the stormy sea and seek a new untried home, a fierce storm breaks out upon the land.