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 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 now, venerated Chesapeake Bay poet and novelist Gilbert Byron tells their tale. At long last, his story finds its readersin Mission Boy.