Poet, buccaneer, and physician.
Born about 1557, he was the son of Sir Thomas Lodge, grocer, and Lord Mayor of London in 1563. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School and Trinity College, Oxford. The poet engaged in more than one freebooting expedition to Spanish waters between 1584 and 1590, and he tells us that he accompanied Captain Clarke in an attack on the Azores and the Canaries. "Having," he tells his friend Lord Hunsdon, "with Captain Clarke made a voyage to the Islands of Terceras and the Canaries, to beguile the time with labour, I writ this book, rough, as hatched in the storms of the ocean, and feathered in the surges of many perilous seas." On August 26th, 1591, Lodge sailed from Plymouth with Sir Thomas Cavendish in the
Desire, a galleon of 140 tons. The freebooters sailed to Brazil and attacked the town of Santa, while the people were at Mass. They remained there from December 15th until January 22nd, 1592. Some of the Englishmen, of whom Lodge was one, took up their quarters in the College of the Jesuits, and this literary buccaneer spent his time amongst the books in the library of the Fathers.
Leaving Brazil, the small fleet sailed south to the Straits of Magellan. While storm-bound amongst the icy cliffs of Patagonia, Lodge wrote his Arcadian romance "Margarite of America."
From the point of view of plunder, this expedition was a dismal failure, and the
Desire returned and reached the coast of Ireland on June 11th, 1593. The crew had been reduced to sixteen, and of these only five were even in tolerable health.
At the age of 40, Lodge deserted literature and studied medicine, taking his degree of Doctor of Physics at Avignon in 1600. His last original work was a "Treatise on the Plague," published in 1603. After practising medicine with great success for many years, Thomas Lodge died, it is said, of the plague, in the year 1625, at the age of 68.
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