Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 735, January 26, 1878 — John Shaqi
Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 735, January 26, 1878Various
History
Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 735, January 26, 1878
Various
Periodicals
In his absence the savages were encouraged to attack the ship in their
war-canoes; but were repulsed by a sharp musketry-fire opened upon
them by the remainder of the crew, who losing heart by the protracted
absence of the captain, quitted his fatal harbour, and sailed for the
Thames, which they reached in safety.
Meanwhile the unfortunate captain, after landing on one of the
Canaries, presented a petition to the Spanish governor to the effect
that he might be permitted to purchase food; but that officer, inflamed
by national animosity, cruelly threw him into a dark and damp dungeon,
and kept him there without pen, ink, or paper, on the accusation that
he was a spy. Being thus utterly without means of making his case
known, he contrived another way of communicating with the external
world. One account has it that he concealed a pencilled note in a loaf
of bread which fell into the hands of the British consul; another
states that he wrote with a piece of charcoal on a ship-biscuit and
sent it to the captain of a British man-of-war that was lying off
the island, and who with much difficulty, and after being imprisoned
himself, effected the release of Glass. The latter, on being joined
by his wife and daughter, who had come in search of him, set sail for
England in 1765, on board the merchant brig _Earl of Sandwich_, Captain
Cochrane.
Glass doubtless supposed his troubles were now over; but the knowledge
that much of his property and a great amount of specie, one hundred
thousand pounds, belonging to others, was on board, induced four of
the crew to form a conspiracy to murder every one else and seize the
ship. These mutineers were respectively George Gidley, the cook, a
native of the west of England; Peter M’Kulie, an Irishman; Andrew
Zekerman, a Hollander; and Richard H. Quintin, a Londoner. On three
different nights they are stated to have made the attempt, but were
baffled by the vigilance of Captain Glass, rather than that of his
countryman, Captain Cochrane; but at eleven o’clock at night on the
30th of November 1765, it chanced, as shewn at their trial, that these
four miscreants had together the watch on deck, when the _Sandwich_ was
already in sight of the coast of Ireland; and when Captain Cochrane,
after taking a survey aloft, was about to return to the cabin, Peter
M’Kulie brained him with ‘an iron bar’ (probably a marline-spike), and
threw him overboard.
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