Books: The Long Mile

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THOMAS GAGE'S TRAVELS IN THE NEW WORLD (379 pp.)—Edifed and with an Introduction by J. Eric S. Thompson—University of Oklahoma ($5).

There was a crooked man and he walked a crooked mile.

In terms of the old nursery jingle no more crooked man walked a longer mile than Thomas Gage, an English Dominican friar turned Protestant clergyman, and no man more thoroughly squandered the possibility of a heroic memory as missionary, adventurer and writer. Thomas Gage is forgotten today so that his name is not even listed in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, yet his narrative of his travels in the New World deserves a place with the classics of exploration.

His book, a 17th century antipapist bestseller — The English - American his Travail by Sea end Land: or, A New Survey of the West-India's—can be read for its wonderful period style and detail, but also as a curious psychological document of a man both brave and devious, mean and daring. As edited by Archaeologist-Author J. Eric S. Thompson, it makes a great story.

Priestly Tourists. Gage was born into the bloody-minded time which brewed England's Civil War. The Gage family were militants of Roman Catholicism, and Thomas probably had to change his name as well as his country to get a Catholic education. He studied in Spain and at St. Omer's in French Flanders, a school set up for English Catholics on the run, and became a priest. After 16 years, most of them spent as a Dominican missionary in Mexico and Guatemala, Gage returned to England in 1637 and renounced Catholicism. He became a Protestant clergyman, and his book was written mostly to establish his respectability in Protestant eyes. It is thus fascinating both for direct clarity of observation and for a propagandist's hindsights.

During his travels, he was a sort of premature Cook's tourist in his friar's habit who noted the price of everything, even to the fees he got for every Mass he said. Author Gage's intention was to shock his English Puritan public with the riches and avariciousness of the Roman church in the New World; today's reader might feel that he is being conducted by an accountant among the wonders of a clash of faiths and civilizations.

Noble Pirates. It was a time when men thought of the New World as "just over against Tartary." It was a time when the great city of Mexico already had a cathedral, private palaces and a university, while a handful of New England Puritans huddled in log cabins. Gage traveled through 3,000 miles of splendidly savage country, to fight its climate and its idols. All the rich detail of the great travel book is in Gage's apologia—Drake's marauding soldiers dying of chiggers; Indians blowing trumpets against a plague of locusts; earthquakes, crocodiles, the fabulous pineapple and the "dangerous fluxes," noted to this day from drinking the waters of Mexico.