The Voyage of the "Beagle": Charles Darwin's Journal of Researches

by Charles Darwin, Janet Browne, Michael Neve

Format:	Paperback 448 pages

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Synopsis

When HMS Beagle sailed out of Devonport on 27 December 1831, Charles Darwin was twenty-two and setting off on the voyage of a lifetime. His journal, here reprinted in a shortened form, shows a naturalist making patient observations concerning geology, natural history, people, places and events. Volcanoes in the Galapagos, the Gossamer spider of Patagonia and the Australasian coral reefs - all are to be found in these extraordinary writings. The insights made here were to set in motion the intellectual currents that led to the most controversial book of the "Victorian age: The Origin of Species".

Book details

Published
29/06/1989

Publisher
Penguin Classics

ISBN
9780140432688

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UK Kirkus review

'Classic' is almost too trite a word for this wonderful story in Darwin's own words of his famous career-setting journey of a lifetime. Darwin was 22 years old in 1831 when he accmpanied Captain Robert FitzRoy on a mapping-collecting trip to South America. Darwin returned five years later, having marvelled at the wonders of the natural world and taken copious notes about it which led to books and papers and scientific celebrity. It would be several more decades (1859) before Darwin published the famous theory of natural selection to explain evolution but the seeds were all here in this trip - the finches of the Galapagos, the arguments with Captain FitzRoy, the first glimpse of the astonishing diversity of the tropical rain forest, the geological wonders that spoke to Darwin about the Earth's changes. It is highly readable, a book to give any modern adventurer a hint of the thrill of discovery, a book to dip into and to come back to time and again. (Kirkus UK)