The English-American : a new survey of the West Indies, 1648 / Thomas Gage ; edited with an introduction by A.P. Newton.

  • Gage, Thomas, 1603?-1656.
Date:
1928
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The English-American : a new survey of the West Indies, 1648 / Thomas Gage ; edited with an introduction by A.P. Newton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    30/484
    implies that he was moved by concern at some points of religion and desired to fly from “ that place of daily idolatry ” into England and be at reft. “ I weighed the affliction and reproach which might ensue to me,” he says, “ after so much honour, pleasure and wealth which I had enjoyed for about twelve years in that country, but in another balance of better considera¬ tion I weighed the trouble of a wounded conscience and the spiritual joy and comfort that I might enjoy at home with the people of God, and so resolutely concluded ... to choose rather to suffer affliction . . . than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season, efteeming the reproach of Chrift greater riches than the treasures in Egypt.” It is to be feared that these were afterthoughts intended to be palatable to his Puritan readers, and that they were ante-dated to convince his patrons of his sincerity. In 1637 he did not yet contemplate the abandonment of the Catholic faith in which he had been reared, but in all probability he was moved rather by discontent with the hard work and monotony of the missionary life for which he no longer felt a vocation. After some months of danger and adventure which he describes for us in detail, he arrived at laft at San Lucar near Seville on 28 November 1637, and a month later he set foot again on English soil for the firft time in twenty years. He could speak but a few words of his native tongue, and he had little left of the money that he had made in America. He therefore addressed himself to his relations, the Gages and the Copleys, to find what portion his father had left him at his death four years before. But he was disappointed, for he learnt that his claims to a share in the inheritance had been wholly ignored and that his father had done as he threatened when he refused to be a Jesuit, and had wholly thruft him from his memory.1 For a year or more Gage lived with one 1 English American, p. 383.