Customer Reviews
An incredible adventure and a most enjoyable read - By: Dennis Littrell, 28 May 2008 
One of the amazing things about the voyage of the Beagle is that Darwin survived it! On the voyage south along the eastern coast of South America & then later on the western coast he would frequently take to the land & meet the Beagle at its next port of calll further south or north. He would travel the land hiring gauchos or other guides & horses & mules so that he could study the geology & the flora & fauna. The hardships & dangers he encountered & survived would in some ways put Indiana Jones to shame. In Patagonia amidst the constant gaucho & Indian wars, rife with wanton bloodshed & a kind of genocidal determinism, Darwin rode on horseback & slept on the ground & ate mostly animal flesh of alll kinds, including mare's flesh. In Tierra del Fuego the cold & barren lands were enormously forbidding, the inhabitants savage & the dangers very real. One senses in the young Charles Darwin a determination to be the kind of naturalist who leaves no stone unturned, no ridge unclimbed & no species uncollected.
What most surprised me was how well & vibrantly he described the many people he met. Here he speaks of the governor of St. Fe: his "favourite occupation is hunting Indians: a short time since he slaughtered forty-eight, & sold the children at the rate of three or four pounds apiece" (from the entry of Oct 3 & 4, 1832). And here is his description of Queen Pomarre of Tahiti: "The queen is a large awkward woman, without any beauty, grace or dignity. She has only one royal attribute: a perfect immovability of expression under alll circumstances" (entry of November 25, 1835). Darwin was quite taken with the Tahitians lauding their sobriety (thanks to the temperance movement of the missionaries) while at the same time bringing a flask of spirits on his travels there. He seemed unaware of any inconsistency.
I was also surprised by Darwin's vigor. I had thought that he was prone to being sickly, & indeed at times, he reports that he was confined to his quarters & that he suffered from seasickness & even homesickness; but when one considers alll the miles he travelled on foot, on horseback, & alll the mountain peaks he obtained, & the deserts he crossed, the many insects bites he endured, & the hard, cold & wet ground on which he often slept, one has to applaud his strength of body & character. Another surprise was the amount of time he devoted to geology & speculations about the how the land came to be the way he found it. When he spoke of how the land had risen & the mountains formed I had the sense of how thrilled he would have been to have had the modern understanding of plate tectonics.
At a couple of points in the narrative, Darwin speaks of how the most luxurious vegetation does not support the greatest number of animals, or the largest. He compares the plains of Africa & Patagonia with the Brazilian rainforest & speculates on why this should be. At no point does he use the term "grasslands," & so I think we can conclude that he didn't have the knowledge we have today about how fertile grasslands can be, nor did he realize that most of the nutrients in the rain forest are contained within the living plants & organisms above ground leaving the soil relatively poor compared to grassland soil. In the entry for September 15, 1832, he writes: "In grassy plains unoccupied by the larger ruminating quadrupeds, it seems necessary to remove the superfluous vegetation by fire, so as to render the new year's growth serviceable."
Another bit of modern knowledge that would have pleased him to know is that the marine iguanas of the Galapagos Islands cannot just jump into the very cold water that exists there but must warm themselves first, & even then can only stand the water for a limited period of time (an hour or two, I believe). Darwin kept tossing one of the lizards into the water only to watch it return inexplicably again & again to the land.
I was looking for hints that Darwin was already thinking about natural selection, but the text contains nothing that I could find that is directly specific although at one point he refers to the origin of species as that "mystery of mysteries."
The book was written (and obviously rewritten & polished many times over) after Darwin returned to England after comparing notes with other naturalists. The advantage of this approach is the scientific rigor with which he is able to describe & evaluate his experiences. As a professional scientist, Darwin wanted to get alll the scientific names right & avoid errors. One would expect through this approach that some immediacy would be lost, but if anything I suspect his journal gained in vividness & was made alll the more intriguing for the precision of expression. It is, after alll these years, still a most engaging & readable account of a most remarkable adventure--one of the best I've ever read, & I am surprised that it took me so many years to get to it!
The Voyage of the Beagle is also a book that will stay in print for many decades if not centuries to come, partly because it is so well written, & partly because Darwin is Darwin, but also because he was so precise in his descriptions of the animals & the people & the lands that he visited. By reading this we & future generations can learn of the changes that have taken place.
In short I was thoroughly dazzled at Darwin's enormously wide range of knowledge. But I shouldn't have been. In just reading this journal, one can easily see that young Mr. Darwin was already a superb naturalist & a brilliant thinker & observer.
Poor audio reading of a great book! - By: J. Thiry, 08 May 2008 
Let me stress that my criticism is about the audio version (Unabridged Classics) of the book, not about the book itself (I wish Amazon would stop lumping reviews of audio books with the paper versions!). The voice in this recording is not only soporific; it is effete & effeminate to a degree. It would probably sound right in an Oscar Wilde or P.G. Wodehouse play, but it is fully out of character both with Darwin & his subject, ie exploration & scientific field work. In the future I will only buy abridged audio versions. Because they require some investment in reworking the original, abridged versions stand a better chance of turning out good than cover-to-cover readings, which can be produced just by "outsourcing" the book to anyone willing to read it aloud in front of a microphone.
Darwin and the Beagle Journey! - By: David I. Howells, 31 Jul 2007 
Charles Darwin's travels around the world as a 'gentleman' naturalist on HMS Beagle between 1831 & 1836 impressed upon him a sense of the natural world's beauty which he captures in a superlative descriptive narrative. He takes you on a journey along the coasts & interiors of South America & through the Pacific to the South Sea Islands. It displays Darwin's highly intuitive mind at work as he conceptualises the complex relations between our earth's life forms & its environment that leads him to his hypothesis of natural selection.
Whilst I enjoyed Darwin's descriptive narrative immensely I feel quite disappointed overalll. I did not particularly like the journal layout of the book & the lack of detail about the actual sailing journey...though this was to be expected. In addition I read this as a layman naturalist & wish my entry level knowledge could have done the book better justice. Overalll though a satisfying read.
a book of a trip, a journal of people and places (and anumals and plants) - By: emio, 24 Feb 2007 a book of a trip, a journal of people & places (and animals & plants)
This book is great.
I bought this book because I remembered the old TV series of the eighties. I expected a book with the aventures of the journey, but it is much more. It is more than the obervations of zoology & geology, it is mainly about the people, about the cultures that Darwin finds in South America & how he, as a modern European perceived the new independent South-American & native indians, their culture, their customs. With great objectivity, more than what would have today an ordinary tourist, Darwin depicts the way people live, the political & social issues, their superstitions, their food, their missery. And little by little Darwin gives his personal thoughts on everything from social to science issues.
Darwin's writing is clear & modern, full of wisdom & very personal. This edition of the ModernLibrary is very nice, the text has a decent size, the paper is fine & the cover too. Enjoy.
You can't tell me he wasn't having fun - By: B. Chandler, 27 Nov 2003 Remember this says "Journal" & that is what it is. It is his first parson adventures on & off the Beagle. He even includes stories about the people on the ship, the ship's life, & maintenance. He is always going ashore & venturing beyond the ship charter to go where no Englishman has gone before. He makes friends with tyrants & the down trodden. Once, to get an animal to come to him, he lay on his back & waved his arms & legs in the air. Whatever you do, do not turn your back on him. He is always knocking something on the head & taking it back for study. It is fun trying to match the old names for places with the new.
