The Evolution of Charles Darwin: The Epic Voyage of the Beagle That Forever Changed Our View of Life on Earth

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While most of this book takes place on the HMS Beagle, this is in fact a full birth to death biography of Charles Darwin with an exhaustive accounting of the entire voyage of the Beagle. Henslow believed Darwin was the ideal candidate: any thing you please may be done—You will have ample opportunities …—In short I suppose there never was a finer chance for a man of zeal and spirit. Anticipating that Darwin might harbor doubts about being adequately qualified, Henslow reassured him that "I consider you to be the best qualified person I know of who is likely to undertake such a situation—I state this not on the supposition of your being a finished Naturalist, but as amply qualified for collecting, observing, and noting any thing worthy to be noted in Natural History … you are the very man they are in search of." A harrowing expedition to Antarctica, recounted by Departures senior features editor Sancton, who has reported from every continent on the planet.

During his years at Cambridge, Darwin’s enthusiasm had become beetle hunting, then a popular pursuit, to which his second cousin and lifelong friend William Darwin Fox, also an undergraduate at Christ’s College, introduced him. One day, peeling a strip of bark from a tree trunk, he uncovered two rare specimens and seized one in each hand. But then he spotted a third. Unable to contemplate letting it go, he popped the beetle he was clutching in his right hand into his mouth, upon which it secreted an acrid fluid, burning his tongue so badly he had to spit it out. Before long Darwin was so keen that he hired an assistant—a laborer—to scrape moss off old trees and gather debris from barges in which reeds were transported into the city from the fens. As a result Darwin acquired some rare species. In 1829 he sent a beetle to Stephens’s Illustrations of British Insects and was thrilled when the magazine published a drawing of it above the magic words, ‘captured by C. Darwin, Esq.’ —the first time his name had appeared in print. It is, however, perhaps symptomatic of where his strongest enthusiasms lay at Cambridge that Darwin, who was to become an inveterate list maker, kept few records of his beetle collecting but a meticulous, detailed inventory of the kinds and numbers of game he shot and when and where he shot them. The Evolution of Charles Darwin: The Epic Voyage of the Beagle That Forever Changed Our View of Life on Earthby Diana Prestonis published on 17 November, 2022.When twenty-two-year-old aspiring geologist Charles Darwin boarded HMS Beagle in 1831 with his microscopes and specimen bottles--invited by ship's captain Robert FitzRoy who wanted a travel companion at least as much as a ship's naturalist--he hardly thought he was embarking on what would become perhaps the most important and epoch-changing voyage in scientific history. Nonetheless, over the course of the five-year journey around the globe in often hard and hazardous conditions, Darwin would make observations and gather samples that would form the basis of his revolutionary theories about the origin of species and natural selection. In this well-written and absorbing book, Diana Preston provides a chronological narrative of these crucial eight days.”— Airmail Ms. Preston’s conference narrative abjures authorial hindsight judgments, placing the spotlight instead on the characters’ natural blind spots and biases. She also devotes a full third of the book to the summit’s historical context and personalities, the latter of which are nicely developed.”— Wall Street Journal Such a hobby needed money and—as he would into adulthood—Charles used his sisters as a conduit to obtain it from their formidable father, of whom he seems to have been a little afraid. Darwin recalled his father was easily angered and somewhat unjust to him in his youth. Dr. Darwin was physically imposing— the largest man I ever saw—broad-shouldered, six foot two, and weighing well over twenty-four stone (296 pounds). Though by other accounts inclined to be distant and given to intimidating brooding silences, he seems to have had his son’s interests at heart and the transmitted requests for money usually succeeded.

A brisk and accessible account of how Charles Darwin developed his theory of natural selection . . . A rewarding look at the development of an earth-shattering idea.”— Publishers Weekly Robert FitzRoy, on whom Darwin’s hopes depended, was, at twenty-six, four years his senior and from an aristocratic family. Through his father, General Lord Charles FitzRoy, he was descended from the first Duke of Grafton, one of King Charles II’s illegitimate sons by his flamboyant, grasping mistress Barbara Villiers. FitzRoy’s mother, Lady Frances Stewart, his father’s second wife, was the eldest daughter of the Marquis of Londonderry. She had died when FitzRoy was only five, leaving him motherless even younger than Darwin. Soon afterward Lord Charles, who was a Tory member of Parliament for Bury St. Edmunds, moved his family to Wakefield Lodge, a Palladian hunting lodge near the village of Pottersbury in Northamptonshire. There Robert grew up with a half brother eight years his senior, a brother five years older, and a sister, Fanny, two years older. Lively and nuanced . . . Shrewd on the main personalities . . . Preston goes beyond the horse-trading of three old men, with vivid scene-setting of the tsarist palaces where the conference took place.”— Times (UK)Charles Darwin and Robert FitzRoy met for the first time in Beaufort’s offices in the Admiralty on September 5, 1831. Darwin found the handsome, fine-featured, aquiline-nosed captain courtesy itself. No one could have been more open and kind, he wrote the same day to his sister Susan. Though FitzRoy did not immediately say the vacancy had been filled, he was at first politely discouraging, pointing out every likely difficulty, danger, and discomfort of the coming voyage and warning Darwin that should he need more time to complete his South American survey he would not return across the Pacific to determine longitudes as currently planned.