Darwin's Armada: Four Voyages to the Southern Oceans and Their Battle for the Theory of Evolution

by Ian McCalman

Darwin's Armada tells the stories of Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Joseph Hooker and Alfred Wallace, four young and romantic amateur naturalists from Britain who voyaged to the southern hemisphere in search of adventure and scientific fame. The book traces their diverse social origins and educations - from the wealthy gentry to the working-class poor and from the spires of Cambridge to the socialist debating halls of London and Wales - and charts their dangerous, demanding and intellectually exciting travels in wooden ships to remote southern lands and oceans of South America, Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, South East Asia and Antarctica.

Encounters with these unique southern landscapes and habitats reshaped their thinking and led them, returning to Britain, to befriend fellow voyager Charles Darwin and crucially to influence his publication of the Origin of the Species in 1859. For the next forty years this 'well salted' little group became passionate campaigners in the savage war of ideas that Darwin's heretical theory of evolution by natural selection generated within Victorian Britain and elsewhere.

Thanks in large part to his Armada efforts, the sickly and reclusive Darwin managed by the time of his death to transform the face of science and of religious and social thought. Yet, paradoxically, Darwin’s theory remains and controversial and urgent today as it was two centuries ago.

• Hardback
• 421 pages
• ISBN: 9781847372666