A New Survey of the West-Indies: Being A Journal of Three thousand and Three hundred Miles within the Main Land of America

Fourth Edition, [8], 477, [19] p., sig.B4, B-Ii6, some pages misnumbered, copper engraved folding map, woodcut ornamental initials, contemporary polished calf, rebacked, later endpapers, 8vo, London, M. Clark, for J. Nicolson, 1699.

In this work, Thomas Gage, a British Dominican friar, wrote a vivid account of conditions in Mexico and Guatemala during the 1620s and 1630s – the first authentic eyewitness description of South America by a non-Spaniard who had actually lived in the New World. He later became the chaplain to English forces stationed in Jamaica. Raised Catholic, he converted to Protestantism on his return to Europe.

Gage’s book was an immediate success and became a bestseller. He gave his Protestant readers in England exactly what they wanted to read. The Black Legend, an anti-Spanish sentiment which for many decades systematically disparaged the character, reputation, and achievements of the Spanish people, was in full force. Gage described in detail how the Spanish oppressed the wretched Indians, while the Spaniards themselves were often portrayed as lazy, lecherous, degenerate, and deceitful.

Gage, expressing strong anti papist sentiments, pointed out it was morally justifiable and the duty of the righteous English to drive the evil-living Spaniards out of the New World. “His account of the wealth and defenceless condition of the Spanish possessions in South America excited the cupidity of the English, and it is said that Gage himself laid before Cromwell the first regular plan for mastering the Spanish territories in the New World… He was appointed chaplain to General Venables’s expedition, which sailed under Venables and Penn for Hispaniola… The fleet failed at Hispaniola, but took Jamaica, where Gage died in 1656″ (DNB).

First published in 1648 under the title The English-American his Travail by Sea and Land, this fourth edition is enlarged and includes a fine early map of the region by Francis Lamb, titled ‘A New Mapp of the Empire of Mexico Describing the Continent to the Isthmus of Panama together with all the Islands in the North Sea’. It contains a title vignette showing the indigenous people at work with presumably Spanish colonists overseeing the work. The map focuses on Mexico and central america, but also covers the Atlantic coast of Virginia, Carolina and Florida.

[Wing (2nd ed.), G115; ESTC:R17710; European Americana 699/84; Palau 46481n; Sabin 26301]