Hms Beagle

From the Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winning historian, the colorful, dramatic story of Charles Darwin's journey on HMS Beagle that inspired the evolutionary theories in his path-breaking books On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man

Before he wrote the book that revolutionized the way people understood evolution, a young Charles Darwin found himself, by chance, on a strange sea voyage. This is the story of the HMS Beagle, which traveled from Great Britain to survey South America's coastline, but also became part of its Captain Fitzroy's flawed social experiment. It's a tale of bold exploration, tragic miscalculation, the death of a civilization, and the birth of Darwinism.