The Long Mile

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.

But no matter how good a reporter he proved himself, Gage could never resolve his propagandist's dilemma. When Spaniards got rich, they were rapacious, but when Sir Francis Drake did a little piracy, it was a "noble and gallant gentleman." So it went with one of Gage's great expose stories of Mexico. As he tells it, a "mighty and rich gentleman of Mexico" named Don Pedro Mejia joined with a viceroy to monopolize all the Indian maize and wheat in the country. The Indians and the poor appealed to the church, and Mexico's archbishop put the extortioner under a ban of excommunication. This failed to move the rich skinflint, so the church suspended all divine service. This meant total war, and the viceroy moved to arrest the archbishop. Gage's picture of the archbishop--mitered, robed, with the Host in his hand defying the King's officers--is a great scene despite Gage's intention; he only meant to draw a moral for his Puritan readers against the "proud prelate."

Split Idol. Gage's last major adventure as a missionary was a bold and dramatic episode. With an Indian guide, armed companions and his "blackamoor" bodyguard, he walked into a deserted cave where ancient Indian deities were still worshiped. Coming upon a grim idol and ignoring its scowl, he ordered the idol removed. In church next Sunday, he preached on the text: "Thou shalt not have strange gods before me." At a suitable moment the friar produced the idol and had it chopped to pieces with an ax and burnt. Later the idolaters had Gage cudgeled, stabbed and put in such fear of his life that the local authorities sent a train of armed men to arrest the attackers. Shortly thereafter Gage returned to England--and to religious conflict no less bitter.

Four of his six brothers were in the Catholic clergy, his other kin deeply anti-Puritan. Gage himself, while avoiding prosecution as a priest, got help, refuge and money from his family and Catholic sympathizers. At length he preached a sermon of recantation in St. Paul's just six days after King Charles I raised his standard at Nottingham and began war against his Puritan Parliament. Thereafter, Gage sent to torture and the scaffold an old schoolmate from St. Omer's, a Jesuit priest. There is also some evidence that he actually informed on one of his own brothers, a priest who was executed. Another brother, a colonel in King Charles's army, out of shame offered him a thousand pounds to leave the country; it was not enough.

Perhaps the strangest episode in his strange life came just before Gage decided to recant. Although he pleads throughout his narrative against "Popish superstitions"--including prayers to the saints--he nevertheless made a pilgrimage to Loreto to test his strength as heretic. He had already half decided to renounce Rome and become a Protestant. If, he reasoned, he prayed in bad faith before the image of Our Lady of Loreto, surely it would blush or sweat. But the image made not a sign.

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