Charles Darwin's Notebooks from the Voyage of the Beagle

Gordon Chancellor is currently Business Manager at the UK Data Archive, University of Essex. He was formerly based at the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, and before that, managed several regional museums in the UK. He graduated in geology from the University of Wales in 1976, and completed his PhD in palaeontology at the University of Aberdeen, with periods of research at the Universities of Uppsala and Texas at Austin. He carried out post-doctoral research at the University of Oxford in the early 1980s, and began work on the initial transcriptions of the notebooks. He has published works on Cretaceous palaeontology as well as several scholarly papers on Darwin and the Beagle, and is now writing introductions to Darwin's geological publications as Associate Editor of Darwin Online. John van Wyhe is an historian of science. He is the founder and Director of Darwin Online (http://darwin-online.org.uk/) - the largest edition of Darwin's publications and manuscripts ever published, and a Bye-Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge (Darwin's own college). He recently led the restoration of Darwin's rooms at Christ's College. Dr van Wyhe's research has challenged the long-held view that Darwin held back or kept his theory secret for 20 years (Darwin's delay). His books include Charles Darwin's Shorter Publications, 1829–1883, with a foreword by Janet Browne and Jim Secord (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Darwin in Cambridge (Cambridge, Christ's College, 2009) and Darwin (Andre Deutsch, 2008, and National Geographic, 2009).

'Not until now has it been possible to read in book form the immediate notes that Darwin himself had written in the little field notebooks that he carried with him … which takes us all the way to what a young man born two hundred years ago once saw when he was for some years very far from home.' Richard Darwin Keynes, editor of Charles Darwin's Beagle Diary (Cambridge University Press) and great-grandson of Darwin

• Foreword by Richard Darwin Keynes; Introduction; Acknowledgements; List of illustrations; The Notebooks: Cape de Verds, Rio, Buenos Ayres, Falkland, B. Blanca, St. Fe, Banda Oriental, Port Desire, Valparaiso, Santiago, Galapagos, Coquimbo, Copiapò, Despoblado, Sydney; Expedition equipment; Chronological register; Bibliography; Index.