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eBook Category: Technology/Science/People
eBook Description: This is the story of the man without whom the name Charles Darwin might be unknown to us today. That man was Captain Robert FitzRoy, who invited the 22-year-old Darwin to be his companion on board the Beagle. This is the remarkable story of how a misguided decision by Robert FitzRoy, captain of HMS Beagle, precipitated his employment of a young naturalist named Charles Darwin, and how the clash between FitzRoy's fundamentalist views and Darwin's discoveries led to FitzRoy's descent into the abyss. One of the great ironies of history is that the famous journey--wherein Charles Darwin consolidated the earth-rattling 'origin of the species' discoveries--was conceived by another man: Robert FitzRoy. It was FitzRoy who chose Darwin for the journey--not because of Darwin's scientific expertise, but because he seemed a suitable companion to help FitzRoy fight back the mental illness that had plagued his family for generations. Darwin did not give FitzRoy solace; indeed, the clash between the two men's opposing views, together with the ramifications of Darwin's revelations, provided FitzRoy with the final unendurable torment that forced him to end his own life.

eBook Publisher: Harper Collins, Inc./HarperCollins e-books, Published: 2007
Fictionwise Release Date: May 2007

Available eBook Formats [Secure eReader (recommended)/Mobipocket/Microsoft Reader/Adobe Reader 7 - What's this?]: SECURE MOBIPOCKET FORMAT (888 KB], SECURE MICROSOFT READER FORMAT (840 KB] - Requires Microsoft Reader 2.1.1 for PCs, or Microsoft Reader 2.2.2 on Pocket PC 2002 handheld devices. Some older Pocket PCs can be upgraded. Learn More., SECURE EREADER (RECOMMENDED) FORMAT (651 KB], SECURE ADOBE READER 7 FORMAT (2.6 MB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [709 KB]
Secure Adobe Reader 7: Printing enabled, Read-aloud enabled
Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
eReader (recommended) ISBN: 9780061439
MobiPocket Reader ISBN: 9780061439810
Adobe Acrobat Reader ISBN: 9780061439803
Microsoft Reader ISBN: 9780061439827

"A well-written and lively tale, filled with insightful analysis and telling details."--Seattle Times

Port Famine, Strait of Magellan, August 2, 1828. It is mid-winter at the bottom of the world. Snow drives at gale forceacross the small vessel at anchor. Daylight comes as a few gloomyhours of crepuscular dimness, and the afternoon is already growingdark. Four years later in this same anchorage, in this samevessel even, a young man of unusually sunny temperament--thetwenty-four-year-old Charles Darwin--will write in his journal:"I never saw a more cheerless prospect; the dusky woods, piebaldwith snow, were only indistinctly to be seen through anatmosphere composed of two thirds rain & one of fog; the rest,as an Irishman would say, was very cold unpleasant air."

Alone in his cabin beneath the poop, the vessel's commander, aman still in his twenties, is in the last stage of despair. For him timehas lost its swift flow; it has flattened into an unending, intolerablestasis. He sees no relief. He has been in these desolate waters fortwo years: years more stretch ahead. Home--England, a place asdistant as Earth from this cold Pluto--is beyond imagining,beyond regaining.

He raises to his head a small pocket pistol. He is certain ofthis now, eager for it, and his finger at last tugs with resolve onthe trigger.

But there is still too much time: in the long second that stretches between the release of the hammer, the spark of flint,the flash of powder, and the explosion that sends the ball on itspath, his hand wavers, crucially.

He was Captain Pringle Stokes;the vessel, HMS Beagle. It lay atanchor in Port Famine with a larger ship, HMS Adventure. Thetwo ships, under the overall command of Captain Phillip ParkerKing, had been dispatched by the British Admiralty in May 1826to survey the southern coasts of South America, from Montevideoon the Atlantic to Chiloé Island in the Pacific. They were particularlyinstructed to map what they could of the still largelyunknown seacoast of Tierra del Fuego, the desolate, tortuouslylabyrinthine southernmost tip of the drowned Andes.

The first passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific had beendiscovered by the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, in1520. He was looking, as was Columbus, as were they all, forthat still elusive western route to the spice islands of the Indies.Columbus died in 1506, never knowing he had not found them.It was the Spaniard Vasco Núñez de Balboa who, on September26, 1513, scaled a hilltop on the isthmus of Darien, in what isnow Panama, and first saw the South Sea stretching away in limitlessdistance beyond Columbus's mistaken Orient. This informationexpanded the known circumference of the world bymore than a third. Seven years later, Magellan, seeking access tothat South Sea, found a wide, navigable passage between thebottom of the Americas and, below that to the south, a bleakTerra Incognita. His chronicler, Antonio Pigafetta, who sailedwith him, recorded the discovery with an exultant pride:

We found by a miracle, a strait which we call the strait of theEleven Thousand Virgins; this strait is a hundred and tenleagues long which are four hundred and forty miles, andalmost as wide as less than half a league, and it issues intoanother sea which is called the Peaceful Sea; it is surrounded by very great and high mountains covered with snow. I think thereis not in the world a more beautiful country, or a better straitthan this one.

Magellan's strait is actually 310 miles long from Atlantic toPacific; but in the weeks they took to pass through it, Magellanand the four ships in his small fleet probably sailed five timesthat distance. To port, to the...