The mysteries of sex : women who posed as men and men who impersonated women / by C.J.S. Thompson.

  • Charles Thompson
Date:
1938
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The mysteries of sex : women who posed as men and men who impersonated women / by C.J.S. Thompson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    third night, skirting the villages and keeping to the roads. She at length reached Vitoria, having eaten nothing but the herbs she found by the wayside. At Vitoria she sought refuge with a doctor named Don Francisade Cerralta, a professor who had married a first cousin of her mother’s. He treated her with kindness and gave her clothes, and during the three months she stayed with him he taught her Latin. When she made up her mind to leave him she bor¬ rowed some money from the doctor, obtained a lift in a carrier’s cart, and went to Valladolid, where she soon obtained employment as a page. While there she heard that her father had come in search of her, but she did not see him, so quickly packing up her things and with but eight doubloons in her pocket she set out for Bilbao. Later she went on to Estelle where she got work as a page again, but soon left for Pasage, where she boarded a ship sailing for Seville. There she enlisted as a boy on a galleon that formed part of the armada which had been fitted out for Punta de Araya, and sailed for America. Landing at Panama she left the ship and took service with Captain Juan de Ibarra, Controller of the Treasury, and remained with him for three months. Then Catalina’s restless spirit asserted itself again $ she met with a merchant of Trujillo called Juan de Urquiza, and sailed with him in a frigate bound for Paita. There for a while she took charge of a shop for him, but in a brawl in which she was engaged she killed a man and afterwards fled to Lima. Now, having determined that fighting was her forte, she enlisted as a private in one of the six companies recruited for service in Chile, to form an army of 1600 men. Arrived at Concepcion she came across her brother, whom she had never seen, as he had gone to America before she was born. When he heard she