This mysterious man-no portrait survives to this day-was, as befits his role in this story, surrounded in life by controversy and black dread. 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. 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. There at the dock waited the ship’s only cargo: a forty-four-year-old Anglican rector named Thomas Gage. Its journey was short it sailed around the southeast corner of England into the quiet harbor of Deal. In the winter of 1654, a newly commissioned frigate named the Fagons was dispatched from the ancient city of Portsmouth on a secret mission.
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