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.

Like his young fictional hero, Noah Marlin, Gilbert Byron (1903-1991) was a Chesapeake Bay waterman's son. He taught school for many years in Maryland and Delaware, but with the acceptance of The Lord's Oysters, he left teaching to devote full time to writing. He lived for many years in a waterfront cabin he built himself near St. Michael's, Maryland. During his lifetime, Byron published 14 books, over 70 short stories, and hundreds of newspaper articles, earning him the titles of "Chesapeake Thoreau" and "The Voice of the Chesapeake." This is likely the largest collection of writing about the bay areas ever produced by one person.