The excitement of the adventure is shaded with the death of shipmates and long waits for mail from home.Īll in all, this is a fine read. He will discover fossils and collect crates of specimens to ship back to England from every port, recording his discoveries in meticulously kept journals. After some convincing his father agrees to support the venture and at twenty-two, Charles leaves on the historic voyage.ĭuring the next five years Darwin will ride with gauchos in Argentina, survive storms off Tierra del Fuego, experience an earthquake, and witness a volcanic eruption. The opportunity to ship onto the Beagle comes at a time when he cannot make up his mind about a career. What captivates Charley Darwin is the outdoors and collecting specimens of all sorts of things, especially beetles. The author gives us a very real boy who gets bullied, feels homesick, and hates studying Greek and Latin. What may most attract young readers to the book is the focus on Darwin’s personal life. It is also a wonderful, clearly written introduction to his theories of evolution and natural selection and to social life in 19th-century England. The book is very much a record of Charles Darwin’s youth from the time he is a nine-year-old going off to boarding school to his work as an established scientist twenty years later.
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