Intended to be the concluding trilogy of a series of autobiographical books (beginning with Voices of the Old Sea and Jackdaw Cake) but instead was transmuted into a deeply searing examination of the extermination of indigenous tribes by North American fundamentalist missionaries. It is all the more powerful, in that it is the distillation of a lifetime of accidental observation on the ground by one of the greatest travel writers in the English language setting off to record, with admiration the superior culture achieved by many of these peoples.