Evolution's Captain

"Evolution's Captain" is the story of a visionary but now forgotten English naval officer and the chain of 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 with the vehicle for his sacrilegious ideas propelled him irrevocably toward suicide.