About the time of the accession of George III. to the throne, few domestic events made a greater sensation in the papers and periodicals of the day than the adventures and fate of a sea-captain named George Glass, especially in connection with a mutiny on board the brig _Earl of Sandwich_. This remarkable man, who was one of the fifteen children of John Glass, noted as the originator of the Scottish sect known as the Glassites, was born at Dundee in 1725. After graduating in the medical profession, he made several voyages, as surgeon of a merchant-ship (belonging to London), to the Brazils and the coast of Guinea; and in 1764, he published, by Dodsley, an interesting work in one volume quarto, entitled _The History of the Discovery and Conquest of the Canary Islands, translated from a Spanish manuscript_. He obtained command of a Guinea trader, and made several successful voyages, till the war with Spain broke out in January, 1762. Having saved a good round sum, he equipped a privateer, and took command of her as captain, to cruise against the French and Spaniards; but he had not been three days at sea, when his crew mutinied, and sent him that which is called in sea-phraseology a round-robin (a corruption of an old French military term, the _ruban rond_, or round ribbon), in which they wrote their names in a circle; hence none could know who was the leader. Arming himself with his cutlass and pistols, Glass came on deck, and offered to fight, hand to hand, any man who conceived himself to be wronged in any way. But the crew, knowing his personal strength, his skill and resolution, declined the challenge. He succeeded in pacifying them by fair words; and the capture of a valuable French merchantman a few days after put them all in excellent humour. This gleam of good fortune was soon after clouded by an encounter with an enemy's frigate, which, though twice the size of his privateer, Glass resolved to engage; and for two hours they fought broadside to broadside, till another French vessel bore down on him, and he was compelled to strike his colours, after half his crew had been killed and he had received a musket-shot in the shoulder. He remained for some time a French prisoner of war in the Antilles, where he was treated with excessive severity; but upon being exchanged, he resolved to embark the remainder of his fortune in another privateer and "have it out," as he said, with the French and Dons. But he was again taken in action, and lost everything he had in the world.