Born of the Sea

A storm, a birth, and a secret that will outlive them all. In the autumn of 1590, a ship battles a black Atlantic storm, and in its hold, a child is born as his mother's life ebbs away. John Alden is only hours old when the sea claims his first loss, and it will not be his last. Raised motherless, then losing his stepmother Elizabeth to dangers she never lived to explain, young John is apprenticed to a Southampton cooper's bench, believing his family's grief to be ordinary tragedy. But among his mother's belongings, he finds letters, cautious, unfinished, afraid, hinting at a conspiracy in a Cadiz warehouse that no one in his family has ever named aloud. Something was taken. Someone was silenced. And the men responsible have never been called to account. Born of the Sea opens the story of a boy who will spend his life chasing the truth his family buried at sea, and of an enemy who has been waiting, patiently, for him to stop asking questions. Book One of nine in the A Stranger at Sea saga, a historical fiction series inspired by the real John Alden of the Mayflower.