The Voyage of the Beagle

The Voyage of the Beagle, which relates Darwin's five-year voyage from England to South America, Tahiti, Australia, he considers what advice he has for someone contemplating undertaking similar adventures. He begins with a warning: “If a person suffer much from sea-sickness, let him weigh it heavily in the balance. I speak from experience it is no trifling evil, cured in a week.” This characteristically quiet admission lets us readers know that Darwin has suffered a good deal during the time he spent on the ocean, something upon which the earlier parts of the book do not touch. But when he think about the pages he have read, he realize that the man whom we tend to envisage as the Victorian sage-like man that Boehm carved in marble. White-bearded, sitting home safe in his chair in his youth experienced great adventures, braving bone-chilling cold, terrible heat and humidity, destructive earthquakes, and ocean storms. Something of a pre-Victorian Indiana Jones, he traveled through war zones, avoided hostile tribes, and made his way across terrifyingly narrow narrow mountain trails precipices with 500-foot drops.