Thomas Gage

Thomas Gage d. 1656, English traveler. He went (1612) to Spain to study and became a Dominican. He lived and traveled among the Native populations of Central America from 1625 to 1637, when he returned to Europe. Renouncing Roman Catholicism, he went to England in 1641 and became an Anglican clergyman. In 1654 he went as chaplain with an expedition to the West Indies and died in Jamaica. His chief work is English-American: His Travail by Sea and Land; or, A New Survey of the West Indies (1648), an account of the wealth and defenseless condition of the Spanish possessions in America.

Bibliography: See his Travels in the New World (ed. by E. J. Thompson, 1985); study by N. Newton (1969).

Gage, Thomas (1721–87) British general, appointed British commander in America in 1763, after service in Flanders, at CULLODEN, and in the FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR. His responsibilities shifted from frontier defence to quelling unrest in such towns as New York and Boston. He was appointed governor of Massachusetts in 1774 to enforce the Coercive Acts, but he bungled Lexington and Concord, and resigned after BUNKER HILL.

Gage, Thomas (c.1596–1656), English priest, became a Roman Catholic missionary for Spain and traveled through Mexico, Guatemala, and other parts of Central America (1625–37). His book The English‐American: His Travail by Sea and Land (1684) stimulated English exploration because of its account of the wealth and defenseless condition of Spanish possessions. After repatriating himself and becoming an Anglican chaplain, he accompanied the expedition that seized Jamaica, where he died.