The real leader of the enterprise, John Yates Beall, was the opposite of Cole in every respect, being a young man of strong religious convictions and of serious character throughout. He was a graduate of the University of Virginia, belonged to an old family in the Shenandoah Valley, and owned one of the best farms there. Having been wounded in October, 1861, while serving as a private under Stonewall Jackson, he had spent some time with a brother in Dubuque County, Ia., and on the discovery that he was a Confederate had fled to Canada, thence returning South, and, under a commission as an acting master in the Confederate navy, embarking in those Chesapeake Bay privateering enterprises to which reference has been made and in which Burley was associated with him. His biographer claims for him the original suggestion of the Lake Erie undertaking, but he is here without support from the official records. Beall’s operations in Eastern Virginia caused the Federal authorities so much annoyance that a considerable effort was made to end them, with the result that he was captured on board a schooner he had just taken in November, 1863. He and his companions were detained at Fort McHenry in irons for over a month, with the idea that they should be regarded as pirates, but Gen. Butler finally ordered them to be placed on the footing of prisoners of war, and in May, Beall was exchanged. Returning to Richmond, he participated in the fighting around Mechanicsville as a volunteer, but a little later left the army, discouraged, his biographer says, both by the neglect of his superiors and by the condition of his health. He proceeded by way of Baltimore and New York to Canada, where on applying to Jacob Thompson for the command of a privateer on Lake Huron, he was told of a plan to capture the _Michigan_ and release the Johnson’s Island prisoners, and at once volunteered his services. His diary says that he also went to Sandusky and had a consultation there with Cole, returning thence to Windsor, opposite Detroit, where Thompson made his headquarters, to collect his men.