Empire of Blue Water Captain Morgan's Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, And the Catastrophe That Ended the Outlaws' Bloody Reign

EMPIRE OF BLUE WATER 1 "I Offer a New World" In the winter of 1654, a newly commissioned frigate named the Fagons was dispatched from the ancient city of Portsmouth on a secret mission. Its journey was short; it sailed around the southeast corner of England into the quiet harbor of Deal. There at the dock waited the ship's only cargo: a forty-four-year-old Anglican rector named Thomas Gage. It was rare in the Royal Navy of the time that a warship would be sent to pick up a single man, and a mere country pastor at that. But Gage was a unique figure in English life: A long-dreamt-of empire was about to be launched in part because of a book he'd written fifteen years before; the nation was preparing to send thousands of men to attack its archnemesis inspired by things that Thomas Gage, and he alone, claimed to have seen across the ocean. This mysterious manno portrait survives to this daywas, as befits his role in this story, surrounded in life by controversy and black dread. He had ready access to the most powerful man in the country, Oliver Cromwell; indeed, the Fagons had been hastened around the corner of England "by order of the Protector" himself, and the Venetian ambassador wrote in a letter that Gage "had many secret conferences" with Cromwell in the months leading up to the ship's arrival. Before and after the mystery man arrived, England's leader had been found studying maps of far-off places, and a globe of the world had appeared, without explanation, on his desk. All because of the humble rector. Gage's past was crowded with ghosts; men had perished with his name on their lips. The pastor came from a line of Englishmen who some considered saboteurs and infidels, while others swore they were the souls of Christian fortitude. Whether heroes or villains, the family had long since disowned Thomas; one sibling said he strove to erase every last memory of the man from his mind, while another wrote to a friend about "our graceless brother," whose actions "our whole family doth blush to behold." Thomas's father had cut off his inheritance years before, warned him never to return to England, even called him a lethal enemy, and Gage claimed that his older brother, a military hero, had made good on his father's threat and actually tried to have him murdered. All this resulted from Thomas Gage's years of religious intrigue: On his word, three men had recently been hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn prison, a procedure whose savagery is not suggested by the surgical description of it. The Fagons' crew would not have welcomed Gage aboard the ship regardless of his past; priests on a ship were a bad omen, as it was believed that the great storm maker Satan sent tempests across the oceans to drown them. The black-suited pastor, the man who hanged his own friends, as the sole passenger? It couldn't be good luck. As for the pastor, one can only imagine his thoughts as the frigate appeared on the horizon, sunlight sparkling off the surface of its twenty-two new brass guns. His writing life was behind him, and he wouldn't live to record his thoughts on this, the most momentous voyage of his life. But surely he was flooded with memories; the ship was to take him back across the ocean to a place of his youth, a place that had disappointed him terribly and was yet now giving him a second chance at glory. As always when trying to dip into Gage's inner life, one must consider his appetite for power; the black sheep of an illustrious family, he hungered to make his name, and this would be his last shot. In the book that had launched this voyage, he'd written insouciantly to the leader of England, &Talty, Stephan is the author of 'Empire of Blue Water Captain Morgan's Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, And the Catastrophe That Ended the Outlaws' Bloody Reign', published 2007 under ISBN 9780307236609 and ISBN 0307236609.