When the abandoned hull was driven upon the Irish strand, searchers discovered among the wreckage a piece of needlework wrought by the hand of Miss Glass. A portion of the embroidery bore the date of her nativity, falling but a single day before the butchery chronicled by Borrow. The fugitives had already purchased fire-arms, hired post-horses, and bent their course toward England, having sought to consign the vessel itself to the deep. Yet they had left behind the very canvas that had occupied the child’s fingers in her final hours. This slender token was to forge an indissoluble chain between the dead and their destroyers.
According to Borrow’s chronicle, Captain Glass had embarked upon an ambitious mercantile enterprise upon the African coast. The son of a Scottish minister, Glass had previously won the confidence of certain merchants, who entrusted him with a vessel for the Guinea trade. Discovering a haven of singular promise, he resolved to secure the sole right of its exploitation. Upon his return to England, he laid his discovery before His Majesty’s government and obtained an exclusive grant of commerce in that port for twenty years. Two or three gentlemen of fortune joined in his venture; they fitted out a ship and set sail once more for the African shore.
The undertaking, however, was presently brought to extremity by famine. Glass and three seamen embarked in an open boat to make the Canary Islands, hoping to purchase provisions. There, the captain presented a memorial to the governor craving leave to trade for victuals. The Spanish governor straightway caused him to be seized as a spy and cast into a dungeon, where, Borrow records, he was sustained upon naught but bread and water, being denied all use of pen, ink, and paper. Intelligence of his captivity was eventually carried to England by a passing vessel; whereupon the British ministry made representation to the Court of Spain, and the Catholic King ordered the captain’s enlargement.
His wife and their daughter, a child of some twelve years, arrived in the Canaries from London at the very juncture of his release. All three then took passage for England aboard a merchantman commanded by Captain Cockeran. Yet aboard this vessel, the boatswain, Peter M’Kinlie, the cook, George Gidley, along with Richard St. Quintin and Andrew Zekerman, entered into a conspiracy to slaughter all others aboard and seize upon the treasure: one hundred thousand pounds in Spanish milled dollars, an estate partly belonging to Glass and his partners.
Their design was not instantly brought to effect. On three several nights their attempts miscarried, the officers remaining ever upon their guard. The conspirators were at length appointed to the watch on the night of the 13th of November, the ship having then entered the British Channel. Towards midnight, Captain Cockeran came upon the quarter-deck to satisfy himself that all was well. As he turned to go below, M’Kinlie seized him; Gidley felled him with an iron bar, shattering his skull, and they heaved his body into the sea. Two seamen who ran forward upon hearing his dying groans were instantly butchered and cast overboard in like manner.
Captain Glass, aroused by the tumult, came up in turn. Conceiving that a mutiny had broken out, he hastened below to fetch his sword. M’Kinlie divined his purpose, crept down the companion-ladder, and lurked in the gloom. As Glass mounted the steps with drawn steel, the boatswain pinioned his arms from behind and raised a cry for his confederates. Glass was a man of uncommon vigour; he had well-nigh shaken off his assailant and wounded Zekerman in the arm, when the others fell upon him. Overpowered and disarmed, he was pierced with manifold wounds, and his bleeding body was hurled into the waves.
Mrs. Glass and her daughter now rushed upon deck. Casting themselves upon their knees, they besought the mutineers to spare their lives. Zekerman bade them prepare for death. They locked one another in a last embrace; the murderers tore them asunder and flung them headlong into the sea. Two souls alone were spared for the hour: a lad who attended upon Captain Glass, and a ship’s apprentice.
The four miscreants steered the vessel toward the coast of Ireland. By the 3rd of December, they lay some ten leagues off the harbour of Ross. They hoisted out the longboat and laden her, the narrative states, with two tons of silver coin. Then, having scuttled the ship by knocking out the ballast-ports, they abandoned the two boys aboard the sinking hull. The captain’s servant, unable to swim, went down with the ship. The apprentice reached the longboat by swimming, but Zekerman struck him a heavy blow to the chest, and the youth sank beneath the surface. Reaching the mouth of the River Ross, the murderers deemed it perilous to ascend the stream with so great a weight of treasure. They buried two hundred and fifty bags of dollars in the sands, bearing away only what their persons could carry. Their ill-gotten wealth could not be contained in their pockets; they were forced to leave to the tide what they had hoped to enjoy in freedom. Halting to refresh themselves in the hamlet of Fishertown, an Irishman privily purloined from them a bag containing twelve hundred dollars whilst they sat at meat.
On the morrow, the fugitives proceeded to Ross, where they disposed of twelve hundred dollars. Each purchased a pair of pistols and hired horses for themselves and two postilions. Setting their faces toward Dublin, they put up at the Black Bull in Thomas Street. Though their pockets were filled with coin, their deportment at Fishertown and Ross had aroused grave misgivings. Two townsmen dispatched an express to the authorities at Dublin Castle, setting forth a description of the travellers and their grounds for suspecting them of piracy.
The derelict hull drifted ashore on the very day the fugitives rode out of Ross. The needlework retrieved from the wreck proved instrumental in confounding them, Borrow affirms, though without delineating each step of its identification. A portion of this stitchery was found to have been wrought on the anniversary of Miss Glass’s birth, which was subsequently proved to have preceded the massacre by a single day. Warrants were straightway delivered to the Lord Mayor and the Sheriffs. M’Kinlie and Zekerman were seized in their beds that very night. Examined apart, both made full confession and disclosed to the magistrates that their confederates had taken a post-chaise for Cork, hoping there to embark for England. Gidley and St. Quintin were apprehended the following day at an inn upon the Cork road, and likewise confessed their guilt.
The High Sheriff of Ross recovered the effects from the wreck together with the bags concealed in the sand, lodging the whole in the Treasury at Dublin for the rightful owners. Arraigned before the bar, the four prisoners pleaded guilty to the indictment. They were condemned to die, their bodies to be hung in chains near Dublin; and the sentence of the law was duly executed upon them on the 19th of December, 1765.