Evolution's Captain: The Tragic Fate of Robert Fitzroy, the man who sailed Charles Darwin around the world Book

When HMS Beagle's first captain committed suicide in the bleak waters of Tierra del Fuego in 1828, he was replaced by a young naval officer of a new mould. Robert FitzRoy was the most brilliant and scientific sea captain of his age. He used the Beagle, a survey vessel, as a laboratory for the new field of the natural sciences. But his plan to bring four 'savages' home to England to civilize them as Christian gentlefolk backfired when scandal loomed over their sexual misbehaviour at the Walthamstow Infant School. FitzRoy needed to get them out of England fast, and thus was born the second, and most famous voyage of the Beagle.

FitzRoy feared the loneliness of another long voyage - with madness in his own family, he was haunted by the fate of his predecessor - so for company he took with him a young amateur naturalist, Charles Darwin. Like FitzRoy, Darwin believed, at the beginning of the voyage, in the absolute word of the bible. The two men spent five years circling the globe together, but by the end of the voyage, they had reached startlingly different conclusions about the origins of the natural world.

In naval terms, the voyage was a stunning scientific success. But FitzRoy, a passionate Christian, was horrified by Darwin's heretical theories. As these began to influence the profoundest levels of religious and scientific thinking in the nineteenth century, FitzRoy's knowledge that he had provided the young naturalist with the vehicle for all his ideas spun him into tragedy.

This true story - biography, sea drama, and a subtle study of one of the defining moments in the history of science - reads like the finest historical fiction.

Author Biography: Peter Nichols spent ten years at sea working as a professional yacht captain, living and cruising aboard his own small wooden sailboat. He is the author of the highly praised account of his solo journey across the Atlantic, Sea Change (1998), the William Hill prize shortlisted Voyage for Madmen (2001) an account of the first Golden Globe, (the single-handed, non-stop round-the-world race) of 1968 and his novel Lodestar (2002). He lives in Paris with his wife.