Evolution's Captain

The story of a visionary but now forgotten English naval officer and the events without which the name Charles Darwin would be unknown to us today.

Captain Robert FitzRoy’s first voyage aboard the HMS Beagle had concluded with the kidnapping of four “savages” from Tierra del Fuego. But when his plan to bring them back to England to civilize them as Christian gentlefolk backfired, the second and most famous voyage of the Beagle was born. In naval terms, this second voyage—with twenty-two-year-old Charles Darwin in tow—was a stunning scientific success. But FitzRoy, a fanatical Christian was horrified by the heretical theories Darwin began to develop. As these ideas came to influence the most profound levels of religious and scientific thinking in the nineteenth century, FitzRoy’s knowledge that he had provided Darwin the vehicle for his sacrilegious ideas propelled him irrevocably toward suicide.

Praise for Evolution’s Captain

“A powerful story played out against a beguiling landscape. . . . Nichols has a finely tuned sense of history.” —New York Times Book Review

“A fascinating account. . . . A finely researched, engaging book.” —Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“It’ll prove hard not to share [Nichols’s] fascination with how FitzRoy’s naval career inadvertently set off a scientific controversy still flaring to this day.” —Publishers Weekly