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) 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.

The voyage marked an evolution in Darwin himself. The more facts he gathered—and he was, throughout his life, an inveterate list maker—the more ideas came into his head. Many of these would have seemed heretical to the embryo clergyman he had been when he sailed, not doubting the literal truth of the biblical picture of Creation. For most of the voyage Darwin thought of himself as primarily a geologist. However, in its latter stages he turned increasingly to biology and zoology. As the Beagle finally headed for home, he was already making notes on how species changed, though it would be many years before he felt confident enough to reveal his ideas about evolution publicly and face the storm of hostility he knew they would provoke. Integral to his thinking was the interrelationship between living organisms and their environment, making him a pioneer of what we today call ecology. ¹ Preston’s] books are always entertaining . . . This book fits that mould; it’s an adventure story . . . The author has chosen the perfect topic. It’s nearly impossible to write a dull book about Darwin . . . The real attraction of this book lies in the way it turns the development of evolutionary theory into a personal story.”— Gerald DeGroot, Times (UK) A colorful chronicle of high-stakes negotiations and a study in human frailties, missteps, and ideological blunders.”— Washington PostThirty-five years before, in 1796, having observed that milkmaids who had contracted cowpox appeared immune from smallpox, Edward Jenner had created a vaccine using cowpox. Though people were initially skeptical, by the 1830s vaccination was well established in England. And random digressions into which European first sighted which piece of land, the horror they brought with them, then the next guy, the evil of enslaving people either figuratively by requiring 12 hours of hard labor and then 6 hours of church or literally, and then what happened next, and none of it seems to be important to the story of the Beagle. Or Darwin’s evolution. A very British lens also, it could have used more sensitivity to the people of the world that will read this.

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 Darwin never left Britain again after his return in 1836, though his mind journeyed far and wide to develop the theories that were first revealed, after great delay and with trepidation about their reception, in 1859 with the publication of his epochal book On the Origin of Species.

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Because of its twin scientific and philosophical consequences for humanity, the voyage of HMS Beagle was to become one of the most important ever undertaken, arguably surpassing the expeditions of Leif Erikson, Ibn Battuta, Zheng He, Ferdinand Magellan, Christopher Columbus, and James Cook, and even the first moon landing. Yet when the Beagle departed England, little suggested the intellectual revolution to follow. Charles Darwin was a conventional young man, but as the voyage progressed, he began to develop unconventional ideas. The theories that grew from his research on the voyage would redefine perceptions of humanity and its relationship to other species, showing it had evolved from earlier life forms and was not the divinely created and ordained apex of an unchanging hierarchy. Darwin’s thinking would consign the first chapter of Genesis, and with it Adam and Eve, to a mythological limbo, though he would never become a declared atheist himself. A] meticulously researched compelling narrative . . . Diana Preston’s vibrant reconstruction of Darwin’s extraordinary journey, world-changing work and the consequences he experienced makes it all accessible and new in her telling.”— Janet Somerville, Toronto Star