The prologue comprises a brief exchange between man and woman, implied to be Claire Fraser, 60, a doctor and accidental time traveler from the 20th century, and her husband Jamie Fraser, 54, an 18th-century Scotsman and former Jacobite turned American rebel against the British. After many adventures, Claire and Jamie now live together in the 18th century on their North Carolina homestead, Fraser’s Ridge. Claire expresses the limits of the human body and spirit. Jamie insists that, “there’s that in a man that is never destroyed” (1).

In Wilmington, North Carolina, July 1776, William Ransom, the Ninth Earl of Ellesmere and a 19-year-old soldier in the British Army, sees the corpse of the pirate Stephen Bonnet, tied to post in the harbor. Nearby, Brianna “Bree” MacKenzie, Claire and Jamie’s daughter, also sees the corpse with her husband Roger MacKenzie and their son Jem. William tells Jem that he has never killed a man. William is unaware that Jamie Fraser is his biological father with the Lady Geneva Dunsany, and that Bree is his half-sister. William’s legal father is the deceased Earl Ludovic Ransom. The MacKenzies depart as one of William’s companions remarks on the secret siblings’ physical resemblance.