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The discovery of a document in the Archive of the Indies, Seville, Spain in the late 1990s by Matthew Western launches him across the Atlantic world on a quest for its meaning. The search really began in the sixteenth century when an artifact is found by Dominican friars during the conquest of Peru. Then it was lost for almost five centuries in a shipwreck off the coast of Panama until Western runs across a description of the shipwreck in the archives in Spain. Western sets off to see if he can solve the riddle of why the Dominicans were sending this specific relic back to the King. He travels across Spain, England, the Caribbean, Panama, the U. S., and finally Peru in his search. He falls in love in this quest with a fellow academic traveler, an anthropologist named Clair Snowden who only gradually yields to Matthew. At the end Matthew and Clair rediscover what the Dominicans in the sixteenth century found, that followers of Jesus Christ may indeed have come to the Americas centuries before the Spaniards. What happened? That s for the second book in this trilogy!

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Lawrence A. Clayton is a professor of history at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. He teaches the history of the Christian church and Latin American history and has traveled and researched in much of this book´s setting, from Peru to Spain to the streets of New York City. His latest book is a biography of Bartolomé de las Casas (1485-1566).

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