Empire of Blue Water Read Online Free Page A
Author: Stephan Talty
Tags: General, Mexico, History, Latin America, Pirates, Caribbean Area, Pirates - Caribbean Area - History - 17th century, Morgan; Henry, 17th Century, Caribbean Area - History - To 1810, Caribbean & West Indies
friars for service in the Philippines. The Spanish had centuries before battled the Moors for control of Iberia and won; in their minds the Crusades were still a going concern, and they were sending friars and priests to the New World as soldiers of Christ. Gage signed up for the mission and sailed for the New World in 1625.
The promised land of the Americas turned out to be far different from what he expected. Instead of fighting for God’s kingdom, he’d found the friars drunk and living like pashas. As he’d traveled through the empire, he’d seen up close how its religious men lived; here he writes about the disparity between how another order, the Franciscans, were supposed to dress and what they actually wore:
The rules of the order of the Franciscans demanded that they wear sackcloth and shirts of coarse wool, and that they go bare legged, shod with wood or hemp; but these friars wore beneath their habits (which they sometimes tucked up to the waist, the better to display such splendor), shoes of fine Cordovan leather, fine silk stockings, drawers with three inches of lace at the knee, Holland shirts and doublets quilted with silk. They were fond of gambling, and acquainted with gamblers’ oaths.
Everywhere he found the religious orders were feasting off the Indians, getting fat and rich; he called them
lupi rapaces,
“ravenous wolves.” One young prior in particular, whom he met nearly straight off the boat, drove him wild. While his books of theology collected dust on a high shelf, this “gallant and amorous young spark” had a Spanish lute within easy reach, which he took down and strummed to a song about one of the local lovelies, “adding scandal to scandal, looseness to liberty.” Gage was among the first witnesses to the corrosive effects of the New World’s great riches on the Spanish and their divine kingdom. The truth was that the living faith of their forefathers had hardened into corruption, hypocrisy, and bureaucratic form.
Gage had spent twelve years in the New World, paid attention to everything he saw, and acquired a modest fortune from his dealings with the natives. On his voyage back to Europe, a Spanish mulatto pirate in league with the Dutch quickly unburdened him of the 7,000 pieces of eight ($350,000 in today’s dollars) he’d so painstakingly filched, leaving Gage in despair. He’d returned to England in 1637 barely able to remember his English grammar; the relative upon whose door he knocked did not know him at first and said he sounded like “an Indian or a Welshman.” Gage’s father had been true to his word and left him unmentioned in his will; he was poor and Catholic in a war-torn country where the tide was turning toward Cromwell and the Protestants. Gage turned with it. In 1642 he was received into the Anglican faith.
And he’d become a Protestant warrior: He testified against his old Catholic comrades and helped the state convict them of high treason. The men faced an awful death: “that you be drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution where you shall be hanged by the neck and being alive cut down, your privy members shall be cut off and your bowels taken out and burned before you, your head severed from your body and your body divided into four quarters to be disposed of at the King’s pleasure.” (It was a method of punishment invented in 1241, to punish one William Maurice, a pirate.) In a display of true Christian fortitude, one of the men he testified against prayed for Gage’s soul until the moment of his execution. The next year Gage gave evidence against two more priests and helped send them to their deaths.
But the reason that Gage was now sailing to America as part of an English invasion force was a book he wrote about his travel in the New World,
The English-American, or a New Survey of the West Indies,
first published in 1648 and then issued again in 1655 on Cromwell’s
The promised land of the Americas turned out to be far different from what he expected. Instead of fighting for God’s kingdom, he’d found the friars drunk and living like pashas. As he’d traveled through the empire, he’d seen up close how its religious men lived; here he writes about the disparity between how another order, the Franciscans, were supposed to dress and what they actually wore:
The rules of the order of the Franciscans demanded that they wear sackcloth and shirts of coarse wool, and that they go bare legged, shod with wood or hemp; but these friars wore beneath their habits (which they sometimes tucked up to the waist, the better to display such splendor), shoes of fine Cordovan leather, fine silk stockings, drawers with three inches of lace at the knee, Holland shirts and doublets quilted with silk. They were fond of gambling, and acquainted with gamblers’ oaths.
Everywhere he found the religious orders were feasting off the Indians, getting fat and rich; he called them
lupi rapaces,
“ravenous wolves.” One young prior in particular, whom he met nearly straight off the boat, drove him wild. While his books of theology collected dust on a high shelf, this “gallant and amorous young spark” had a Spanish lute within easy reach, which he took down and strummed to a song about one of the local lovelies, “adding scandal to scandal, looseness to liberty.” Gage was among the first witnesses to the corrosive effects of the New World’s great riches on the Spanish and their divine kingdom. The truth was that the living faith of their forefathers had hardened into corruption, hypocrisy, and bureaucratic form.
Gage had spent twelve years in the New World, paid attention to everything he saw, and acquired a modest fortune from his dealings with the natives. On his voyage back to Europe, a Spanish mulatto pirate in league with the Dutch quickly unburdened him of the 7,000 pieces of eight ($350,000 in today’s dollars) he’d so painstakingly filched, leaving Gage in despair. He’d returned to England in 1637 barely able to remember his English grammar; the relative upon whose door he knocked did not know him at first and said he sounded like “an Indian or a Welshman.” Gage’s father had been true to his word and left him unmentioned in his will; he was poor and Catholic in a war-torn country where the tide was turning toward Cromwell and the Protestants. Gage turned with it. In 1642 he was received into the Anglican faith.
And he’d become a Protestant warrior: He testified against his old Catholic comrades and helped the state convict them of high treason. The men faced an awful death: “that you be drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution where you shall be hanged by the neck and being alive cut down, your privy members shall be cut off and your bowels taken out and burned before you, your head severed from your body and your body divided into four quarters to be disposed of at the King’s pleasure.” (It was a method of punishment invented in 1241, to punish one William Maurice, a pirate.) In a display of true Christian fortitude, one of the men he testified against prayed for Gage’s soul until the moment of his execution. The next year Gage gave evidence against two more priests and helped send them to their deaths.
But the reason that Gage was now sailing to America as part of an English invasion force was a book he wrote about his travel in the New World,
The English-American, or a New Survey of the West Indies,
first published in 1648 and then issued again in 1655 on Cromwell’s
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