Mission Boy: A Novel of Spanish Jesuits in Chesapeake Bay

By: Gilbert Byron

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Synopsis: Mission Boy tells a little known, true story of early American history. Nearly forty years before the English founded their first permanent colony in the New World, at Jamestown, a small group of Jesuit missionaries sailed north from Havana, Cuba to land in virtually the same location. Guided by a Native American convert to Christianity whom they called Don Luis, the Jesuits hoped to bring Christianity to the Algonquin Indians and to claim a new territory for King Phillip II of Spain. Their mission did not go according to plan. The Indian guide they depended on slipped back into the forests. Within half a year, only one of their number remained alive. And he had to wait more than another year for rescue, in a vast, beautiful, but treacherous land. In a manuscript written nearly 50 years ago, but not published until 2015, venerated Chesapeake Bay poet and novelist Gilbert Byron tells the tale of this lost and long-forgotten Jesuit mission.