Odyssey: Young Charles Darwin, The Beagle, and The Voyage that Changed the World Hardcover – February 1, 2022 by Tom Chaffin

Description

Author: Chaffin Tom

Package Dimensions: 22x229x531

Number Of Pages: 336

Release Date: 01-02-2022

Details: Product Description
An illuminating and lively narrative of Charles
Darwin’s formative years and his adventurous voyage aboard the H.M.S. Beagle.

The voyage of the Beagle has been by far the most important event in my life and has determined my whole career.—Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin—alongside Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein—ranks among the world’s most famous scientists. In popular imagination, he peers at us from behind a bushy white Old Testament beard. This image of Darwin the Sage, however, crowds out the vital younger man whose curiosities, risk-taking, and travels aboard HMS
Beagle would shape his later theories and served as the foundation of his scientific breakthroughs.
Though storied, the
Beagle’s voyage is frequently misunderstood, its mission and geographical breadth unacknowledged. The voyage’s activities associated with South America—particularly its stop in the Galapagos archipelago, off Ecuador’s coast—eclipse the fact that the
Beagle, sailing in Atlantic, Pacific and Indian ocean waters, also circumnavigated the globe.
Mere happenstance placed Darwin aboard the
Beagle—an invitation to sail as a conversation companion on natural-history topics for the ship’s depression-prone captain. Darwin was only twenty-two years old, an unproven, unknown, aspiring geologist when the ship embarked on what stretched into its five-year voyage. Moreover, conducting marine surveys of distance ports and coasts, the
Beagle’s purposes were only inadvertently scientific. And with no formal shipboard duties or rank, Darwin, after arranging to meet the
Beagle at another port, often left the ship to conduct overland excursions.
Those outings, lasting weeks, even months, took him across mountains, pampas, rainforests, and deserts. An expert horseman and marksman, he won the admiration of gauchos he encountered along the way. Yet another rarely acknowledged aspect of Darwin’s
Beagle travels, he also visited, often lingered in, cities—including Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Santiago, Lima, Sydney, and Cape Town; and left colorful, often sharply opinionated, descriptions of them and his interactions with their residents. In the end, Darwin spent three-fifths of his five-year “voyage” on land—three years and three months on
terra firma versus a total 533 days on water.
Acclaimed historian Tom Chaffin reveals young Darwin in all his complexities—the brashness that came from his privileged background, the Faustian bargain he made with Argentina’s notorious
caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas, his abhorrence of slavery, and his ambition to carve himself a place amongst his era’s celebrated travelers and intellectual giants. Drawing on a rich array of sources— in a telling of an epic story that surpasses in breadth and intimacy the naturalist’s own
Voyage of the Beagle—Chaffin brings Darwin’s odyssey to vivid life.
Review
“This retelling of Charles Darwin’s momentous journey on
HMS Beagle offers a fresh and lively narrative in the round. We learn of Darwin’s appreciation of literature, his many land expeditions, his friends and colleagues on the ship, and the individuals who helped him gather a magnificent collection of natural history specimens and memories to last the rest of his life. Tom Chaffin links these transformative experiences to Odysseus’s celebrated wanderings and reveals the ways in which the young Darwin developed into a remarkable thinker.” (Janet Browne, author of Charles Darwin: Voyaging and Charles Darwin: The Power of Place. )

“One might think that, by now, the ‘Darwin industry’ had exhausted its material and, as has been suggested, studied “every laundry list… with paralyzing diligence for some extra insight into the character of the great man”. It turns out that there remains space for fresh perspectives on the life of one of the most important scientists in history. Chaffin’s narrative of Darwin’s
Beagle travels makes the reader feel like w