Word: gage
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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...
...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...
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...
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...