The connection is not clear between the inchoate Murdaugh-Minor plot of 1863, and the actual Beall-Burley-Cole attempt of 1864. But the advent in Canada, as a Confederate emissary, of Jacob Thompson, President Buchanan’s Secretary of the Navy, probably explains the revival of the scheme. At any rate Thompson reports to Secretary Benjamin that he sent Capt. Charles H. Cole around the lakes as a lower deck passenger to study the various harbors and to learn all he could about the _Michigan_, in order to devise some plan for her capture. Cole had belonged to Forrest’s command, had been taken prisoner, and had been released on taking an oath of allegiance to the United States. Maj. Robert Stiles, of Richmond, who had the misfortune to be confined in the same casemate with Cole at Fort Lafayette at a later date, regards him as an unmitigated villain and says it was believed that he had belonged to both the Union and Confederate armies and had deserted from both, and Judge Lucas, whom he once visited, entertains an almost equally unfavorable opinion of the man who now established himself in Sandusky and, professing to be engaged in the oil business, proceeded to cultivate acquaintance with military and naval officers, his tactics being based chiefly on the hypothesis that they suffered from a perennial and unconquerable thirst. He was accompanied by a woman whom he sometimes introduced as his wife, but who was regarded by some of the _Michigan’s_ officers as a person of doubtful character. Cole did succeed in establishing terms of intimacy with some army and navy officers, and in a newspaper article of 1882, purporting to be based on his revelations, it was asserted that he got two Confederates enlisted on board the _Michigan_ and ten in the troops guarding the prison; but the article contains such absurdities as an account of a visit to the _Michigan_ by Jacob Thompson disguised in petticoats, and is otherwise so palpably fictitious as to render it practically worthless. There are Sandusky traditions that he won over some of the vessel’s engineering force, with the result of disabling her temporarily, but these stories are scouted by the one surviving officer of the ship, Capt. James Hunter, of Erie, then an acting ensign, and they do not find the slightest support in the official documents of the time. The naval officer with whom Cole was most intimate was transferred to the Atlantic coast before anything happened, on account of his habits, and Capt. Hunter, whom Cole had tried to induce to leave the service, remembers his indignation with the conspirator because the latter criticised this transfer and otherwise presumed upon his acquaintance. Hunter suspected him of being a counterfeiter.