This image is the cover for the book Mission Boy

Mission Boy

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.

Gilbert Byron

Gilbert Byron (1903-1991) grew up on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, a waterman’s son like his young hero, Noah Marlin, whose growing-up years are recounted in the regional classics The Lord’s Oysters and Done Crabbin’: Noah Leaves the River. A schoolteacher for twenty-eight years, Byron began writing full time in 1957 and was the author of eleven books, focusing on the history and heritage of the Chesapeake Bay maritime culture. Byron lived for many years in a waterfront cabin he built himself near St. Michaels, Maryland.

Secant Publishing