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 Gidly, 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 country man, Captain Cochrane; but at eleven o'clock at night on the 30th of September, 1765, it chanced, as shown 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.