The Voyage of the Short Serpent

A group left Europe to start a colony in Greenland, which they called New Thule. But as the years wore on, communication between New Thule and the people back home stopped. Fearing that the people of New Thule have gone native, an evangelical mission travels to the colony in a ship, which carries its crew to a horror that they did not conceive.

---

Many years ago, a group left Europe to start a colony in Greenland, which they called New Thule. But as the years wore on, communication between New Thule and the people back home became less and less frequent, until finally it stopped altogether. Fearing that the people of New Thule have gone native - or, worse yet, gone pagan - an evangelical mission travels to the colony in a newly-built ship, The Short Serpent, which carries its crew toward a horror that no one could have conceived. The children of New Thule have taken on a primitive life, wandering the ice in search of seal meat, mounds of peat, and warm bodies with which to copulate. In an elegant, compulsive, and increasingly unhinged style, du Boucheron describes how the crew of The Short Serpent slowly succumb to the filth and depravity of New Thule. "The Voyage of the Short Serpent" is a masterpiece about mutable human morality in inhuman conditions - a story about truth, obsession, and the myth of utopia.