THE VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE

This is a fascinating account of the voyage of HMS Beagle, one of the most important expeditions ever undertaken, with a sharp and insightful focus on the intellectual transformation that Charles Darwin went through in the nearly five-years he spent travelling to South America across the Pacific via Polynesia, New Zealand and Australia.

Twenty-four year old Darwin is less interested in becoming a vicar than in studying nature in all its puzzling variety. Slightly by accident he is chosen by Fitzroy, the navy's youngest and most brilliant captain, to survey South America, Patagonia, up the Chile coast and off to the Galapagos islands to study its flora and fauna and chart God's work.

They take with them the surviving Patagonian natives whom Fitzroy had brought back to London on his previous trip, so that they may implant their newly adopted civilised Christian values back amongst their naked and deplorable Fuegian people. But none of this goes according to plan: Fitzroy's Fuegians soon strip back to savagery, and Darwin's search for the secrets of creation pieces together, in a series of epic journeys around and across the continent, a pattern of vast geological processes, a trail of endless species that have long died out, and a host of other clues that everything in the world is subject to steady ecological change, vast in duration and indifferent to Christian morality.

Darwin spends the next 30 years uncomfortably building up his theory of natural selection; Fitzroy is increasingly furious with him for disowning God's purpose. This enthralling five year voyage is where humanity discovers its origins and confronts its probable future.

From Diana Preston, one of the very best historical non-fiction writers of our time, this is a comprehensive exploration of what Darwin himself described as 'by far the most important event in my life [which]...determined my whole career.'

Diana Preston is a prize-winning historian and the author of A Higher Form of Killing, Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy, Before the Fallout: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology), The Boxer Rebellion, Paradise in Chains, and A Pirate of Exquisite Mind, among other works of acclaimed narrative history. She and her husband live in London.