Thomas Gage's Travels in the New World (American Exploration and Travel Series)

As a Dominican friar, Thomas Gage lived and traveled in Mexico and Guatemala from 1625 to 1637. Eventually he made his way against incredible obstacles through Central America to Panama and thence to his native England. Gage's account of his life in seventeenth-century Mexico and Central America makes superb reading and his for the most part accurate. It is also the only firsthand description of early Spanish America by a non-Spaniard or one who was not a citizen of the Holy Roman Empire.