In 1747, while canoeing with his Algonquin friend from Connecticut to attend college in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, Ian reads the letters of his Scottish cousin Gavin Crookshank and learns how he, though a Lowlander and a Covenanter, became entangled in the 1745 Jacobite rebellion from serving as a conscript on the battleship Lion to being recruited as an English spy and finally, participating in the definitive battle of Culloden.